Remembering Sealab

An anonymous reader writes "'Some people remember Sealab as being a classified program, but it was trying not to be,' says Ben Hellwarth, author of the new book Sealab: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor, which aims to 'bring some long overdue attention to the marine version of the space program.' In the 1960s, the media largely ignored the efforts of America's aquanauts, who revolutionized deep-sea diving and paved the way for the underwater construction work being done today on offshore oil platforms. It didn't help that the public didn't understand the challenges of saturation diving; in a comical exchange a telephone operator initially refuses to connect a call between President Johnson and Aquanaut Scott Carpenter, (who sounded like a cartoon character, thanks to the helium atmosphere in his pressurized living quarters). But in spite of being remembered as a failure, the final incarnation of Sealab did provide cover for a very successful Cold War spy program."

Comments

Helium atmosphere?

[93 Escort Wagon]

I guess that explains Hesh's voice.

Fignuts

[Anonymous Coward]

Fignuts

Stimutacs

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like a koala bear crapped a rainbow in my brain!

The ocean frontier - not

[Animats]

There was the idea in the 1960s that the ocean was as important a frontier as space. There was talk of undersea cities. Today, zilch. There are pretty renderings of underwater hotels on the web, but none of them actually got built. The one "underwater hotel" in the world is a recycled two room research habitat.

Drilling wells in the ocean floor is a big business, but that's about as far as it's gone.

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[Volante3192]

Space, sadly, doesn't even have oil exploration going for it.

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Arguably, deep-ish ocean has most of the same things going against it that space does, but with the additional(advantage or disadvantage depends on your opinion) that there is a much 'smoother' gradient between terrestrial work and deep-ocean work than there is between land and space.

With a mixture of robots and things on strings, you can exploit much of the economically interesting stuff below the water surface without any long term human habitation. Where that isn't possible(certain construction projects related to drilling, some salvage work, having a fleet of nuclear submarines ready to get their second-strike on with extreme prejudice...) you do, indeed, find people. Generally very expensive ones; but available if you are suitably motivated.

The cost of entry starts at nearly zero, pick up a fishing line at your nearest sporting goods shop, and just keeps going up, more or less smoothly(but very, very fast at the high end) for how deep you want to go and how long you want to go there. That's the kicker: For any cool undersea scheme, you can probably cook up a scheme with 90% of the benefits at much lower cost just by not going as deep or by not staying there as long. It doesn't help that many of the technologies you would need to live successfully underwater could be applied more easily and more pleasantly to existing untapped options.

Want to live on seafood and algae, in a hamster-habitube, in a hostile environment where you can't drink the water? No problem, we have loads of coastal desert where you can desalinate to your heart's content, and won't even have to breath trimix all the time!

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I don't think a lot of people are clamoring to live on the ocean floor. On a continental shelf would be bad enough. It's not an easy life, expensive and pretty risky. There are remotely operated vehicles and other machines to do the drilling for oil and related work.

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[nospam007]

"...but none of them actually got built. The one "underwater hotel" in the world is a recycled two room research habitat. "

Phew, glad that the guys in the link below don't know that. (Top 5 underwater hotels)
http://blog.hotelclub.com/top-five-underwater-hotels/

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[ColdWetDog]

You know, I really hate rational people sometimes....

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[petermgreen]

Going through the list there
Jules Undersea Lodge: a converted two bedroom research facility. Located in a lake 21 feet down. Dive entry.
Utter Inn: a box just below the surface with surface entry not much different from the lower sections of a boat except there is water between the upper and lower sections. Only one room.
Hydropolis: looks like it was intended to be a proper hotel though only barely underwater and surface entry but the article you linked claims it as "under construction" but wikipedia links to another article that claims it is "nothing more than a pile of blueprints". Looks like it got nixed in the wake of the credit crunch.
Poseidon Undersea Resorts: this does actually sound like an undersea hotel but from their website it is not at all clear whether it was ever finished or not. Trying to get a "booking request form" out of their website gives the message "Thank you for your interest in Poseidon Resorts. We welcome you to contact us after September 15, 2009.". This suggests the website hasn't been updated in years.
Istanbul: I can't find any evidence of this underwater hotel actually exiting either.

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys laugh now, but of all places to find pockets of oil and natural gas in space, Mars is our closest workable candidate.

Really ? I think you'll find Uranus is a more prodigious source of natural gas.

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[93 Escort Wagon]

Istanbul: I can't find any evidence of this underwater hotel actually exiting either.

Not Constantinople?

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[flyingsquid]

You've got to be joking. It wouldn't matter even if there were oceans of high grade crude oil on the moon. Look at the Saturn V- the entire thing is one big fuel canister, with an engine on the bottom, and a little crew capsule on top. They burned that entire canister's worth of fuel just to get that tiny little Apollo module to the Moon and back. Moving a mining operation into space, and then moving fuel out of a gravity well- even a shallow one like the Moon- is going to burn far more than you could ever transport; it's a losing proposition. To move fuel economically you need something like an oil tanker or a train- a vehicle that moves vast quantities of fuel, while burning only a little bit of fuel itself. And to do that, you'd need something like a highly efficient fusion engine, or some kind of fantastic Star Trek technology. And if you had that technology, why would you need to get fuel from space?

The same goes for pretty much any resource except maybe gold. It takes a huge amount of resources to go to space and back. The only way it's profitable is if the resources you bring back are more expensive than the resources you expend building and launching the rocket. Until that changes- until there's some radical change in launch technology that makes space travel cheaper — not by a factor of two or three, but orders of magnitude cheaper — the idea of resource extraction in space isn't even science fiction, it's fantasy.

That's the real reason that undersea colonies and space colonies didn't happen. It's definitely technologically possible, but it's just not economically possible.

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[turing_m]

That's nothing compared with the hate that the irrational can have for imaginary people. But most people in the real world simply don't like dealing with such complex issues.

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[Rich0]

One REALLY big difference between undersea and space is air pressure. If you want people to be living near 1atm of pressure then in space you have to deal with at most 1atm of pressure on your hull. Underwater you're dealing with more than 1atm of pressure before you reach depths on par with a big swimming pool. That means you need a lot less structural strength in your spacecraft.

All the messing around with gas mixtures undersea is about trying to work at higher pressures to cut down on that disadvantage, but it gets really messy - people are designed to live at 1atm on 20% O2. In space that is fairly easy to provide, and deep underwater it is almost impossible.

Now, in space you have lots of other issues to deal with I'll grant you, and the cost of moving around is pretty high too (well, maneuver in space is cheaper per mile than underwater, except that stuff is thousands of miles apart so you do a LOT more of it and once you're close to a gravity well you build up kinetic/potential energy and changing your energy state is much harder). Underwater you can just use buoyancy to do half the work.

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[Anonymous Coward]

The main reason all of those "big ideas" suddenly went away in the 70's was because President Johnson's "Great Society" programs exploded in cost and we could no longer afford to spend money on research like we previously had. In the intervening decades the expense of social programs has multiplied many times to the point we can't afford any kind of space program even unless we borrow money to pay for it. The future is indeed grim. Just imagine what we could have accomplished by now if we hadn't decided to go the socialism route. We've spent at least $16 TRILLION dollars on social programs and the percentage of people in poverty has barely changed. Imagine what we could have done in space, the ocean, research, etc. with that kind of money.

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[JoeMerchant]

Do you remember how efficiently crude oil was harvested and refined 100 years ago? I wouldn't be surprised if the early wells achieved 10% extraction of the available raw material.

All we need to get lunar petroleum back to Earth is a space elevator pipeline, (relatively) easy to build on the moon, and if you pump it fast enough, it will get slung out the other end with more energy than you are pumping into it. Then we just have to catch it as it free falls toward Earth and give it a safe re-entry, again, Space Elevators seem like the way to go, and you can run some pretty nice generating turbines capturing the kinetic energy of the falling petroleum.

Anyone who believes the above is serious needs to check their humor sensors... on the other hand, using space elevators to lower raw materials from orbit just might be a good way to power mass up to orbit...

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[JoeMerchant]

I think that undersea conditions are actually more challenging than Space, at least LEO Space. You've got a terrible corrosion problem underwater, typically saturation level humidity, and the pressure differential to a "shirtsleeve" environment is higher as soon as you get below 60' (at 30' depth, you can saturation dive indefinitely with no special gasses and no decompression needed...), and then there's the mixed gas / decompression thing if you want to run your environment at a higher pressure to make a larger hull practical.

A blowout in the space-station can be plugged with duct tape (from the inside)... a blowout in an undersea habitat at 100' depth is considerably harder to deal with.

It is a shorter trip to "the undersea world," but the challenges pile up very quickly as you go down.

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[Anonymous Coward]

I did a list some time ago, just to inventory how many actual underwater destinations there are and came away with about a dozen. There's more than you're aware of, and they are already built. The Ithaa is an all glass panoramic undersea restaurant (1atm, in just 15 feet of water) the Huvafen Fushi undersea spa is another 1atm facility, concrete hull, big picture windows, perhaps 20 feet underwater. The Red Sea Star is a more ambitious undersea restaurant, 30 feet deep, concrete hull, wraparound segmented window panels, lots of interior space. There's also the Aquarius, America's undersea research lab, Marinelab (in the same cove as the Jules) and Baylab, still active in Chesapeake bay. If you also count general public access undersea observatories there's one in Australia, one in Eilat, Israel and more than one in China.

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[wagnerrp]

You've got to be joking. A +5 Insightful for that? The Moon has no meaningful atmosphere. That means all those friction problems with magnetic launch systems no longer apply. You use a linear motor to get you up to whatever speed you need to be going, and then just coast the rest of the way. At our current utility costs, you would be looking at a couple $/kg to put something into Lunar transfer orbit, and maybe a few dozen $/kg for enough fuel for a LEO insertion burn, although that could be cut down significantly with aerobraking.

At our current technology, there really isn't much of worth on the Moon for use on Earth. There is huge worth as a materials source for anything you might want to do in space.

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[DeathToBill]

Hang on... moon... space elevator... YES! Let's move the moon to a geostationary orbit and use it as the other anchor for a space elevator!

What could possibly go wrong?

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[flyingfsck]

The Moon is much closer than Mars and since all planets are made of the same schtuff, it should also have water, oil and gas just like all the other planets.

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If, and only if, you are content to breathe either some sort of liquid(maybe they've finally gotten those fluorocarbons worked out?) or some gas mix at whatever the pressure imposed by your depth is. Unfortunately, it appears that virtually all potential atmospheres are some flavor of toxic, narcotic, or both at any more than modest pressure.

Also, "Dysbaric Osteonecrosis" is about as fun as it sounds, possibly less so.

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[GameboyRMH]

I've done calculations to show that picking up giant diamonds from the surface of Mars with a very optimistically priced robot wouldn't be profitable. The only possible resource that could be profitable to bring back from space would be He3 from the moon, for use in fusion power.

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[JoeMerchant]

Well, I _can_ see some motivations for living in a habitat located on a 60' deep tropical coral reef.

A) The cool factor of having fish right outside your window, oh, sorry, ummmm... access to do long term observations of marine fauna in their natural habitat, for research, yeah.

B) relative protection from surface storms, although you'll need more than 60' depth for that in hurricane conditions.

C) ready access to fresh seafood...

D) no morning/evening commute to work: sorry man, I'm saturated, can't come up today.

E) stable (non-moving) habitat to work in (relative to a ship.)

F) in the 1960s, I'm sure they were also thinking natural Nuclear bomb shelter too.

Yeah, very expensive just for those things, and important to our cash driven society is that you can't really generate anything of value more efficiently by living underwater to do it. Still, I think a 6000 square foot structure, with decent 8'+ ceilings, ample natural light in every room (bigger windows than terrestrial structures due to less light at depth), moon pool entry at about 25' depth (internal pressure ~+12.5psi), hella powerful A/C system to keep the humidity at bay, ROV spearfishing system, and some kind of self-sufficient ocean generated energy system would make a decent working platform for 3-4 people to study, well, ocean generated energy systems for one thing. I could also see studying underwater building materials (3d printing with underwater concrete?) and any number of other things related to sustainable ocean dwelling.

Thing is, it looks like a playtime project, so nobody will fund it, even if it would generate useful spinoff tech, and waste less resources than any number of less visible pork projects.

Oh, and a random thought: how much water (ice) would it take to effectively shield a Earth-Mars shuttle from radiation? And, could we collect asteroids/comets to put together an ice-ball big enough to put a nice transit lounge habitat (not too dissimilar from the undersea habitat mentioned above, except that the fish will be frozen) into an Earth-Mars figure 8 orbit? Think solar-powered ion engines instead of chemical reactions...

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[tgd]

That's not really true, only some of these thing is open in the bottom, others have airlooks.

BTW, you have that exactly backwards. If you have an opening at the bottom of a submersible, you eliminate ANY issue with water pressure on the structure. (Because the water coming in the opening will pressurize the air to the same pressure -- the hull then has no pressure differential between inside and outside.) Of course, the oxygen in the air you breathe becomes toxic, and the nitrogen does bad things to you. (woo hoo! Narcosis!)

If you want to maintain 1atm inside, your structure now has to handle the differential between inside and outside, and be rigid enough to not compress. At 30 feet depth, you need to handle a 14psi differential (which is greater than the pressure differential you get from an atomic blast! That's why even at 30 ft, you need fairly thick steel to handle the pressure.

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[WastedMeat]

You missed his point about the opening. It equalizes the internal air pressure to the water pressure at the bottom of the structure. There is still a relatively small pressure differential due to the varying water pressure along the height of the structure. The ceiling would have to tolerate expansive forces. Since the water pressure is linear with the depth though, the effect would be a property of the structure itself, not dependent on the depth at which the structure was placed.

Re:The ocean frontier - not

[AdamThor]

BTW, you have that exactly backwards.

hmmm I'm not sure he does? Consider:

At 30 feet depth, you need to handle a 14psi differential
This is your own statement, and (without checking your actual #) it's true, because water is so heavy (massive). But change your depth 30 ft in the atmosphere and there is relatively little pressure difference. You can go up and down in an elevator all day and you won't explode. This is because air is so light (lacking mass).

The GP's point - I think - is that if you have a 30 foot tall underwater structure filled with pressurized gas, the pressure created by the water will be (by your number) 14psi greater at the bottom part than at the top part. But because the gas pressure differential is much less variant by depth the gas pressure at the top is the same as at the bottom. So you actually have to worry about blowing out the top of your open-on-the-bottom underwater highrise. There goes the whole 0 psi differential idea, but in the opposite direction one might expect. Maybe an easier problem to deal with (if you keep your structure squat), but still something to make sure the engineers account for.

Unless I've got it all wrong?

I remember THIS Sealab

[Terranex]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRrQSGD2e14

Re:I remember THIS Sealab

[Stormwatch]

The original version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_5hXCpYsaE

Sekrit Canadian Locations

[pipingguy]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_Institute_of_Oceanography This is also the area where they keep the lone remaining Avro Arrow for further study, that Hydrofoil warship that we did and the telephone. It's all super-secret.

I haven't forgotten

[OzPeter]

I remember Sealab 2021 very well

Re:I haven't forgotten

[sunderland56]

Came here to say exactly that. I can't believe the US Government based a research project on a cartoon.

Re:I haven't forgotten

[artor3]

It's time to move on. The team is now making Archer, which is fantastic.

I heard he's divorcing Heidi Klumlab . . .

[wrencherd]

I'm not sure that the fact that the "aquanauts" had funny-sounding voices when they were in their undersea, "synthetic-gas environment" is a sufficient explanation for the public and the media ignoring the Sealab programs.

If the media and a cereal company could turn Kim Kardashian's cross-dressing step-dad into a symbol of American manhood, then Scott Carpenter's helium-induced impression of Felix the Cat could not really have been that big of a public relations problem.

Seems a little like you`re hawking a book, /.

[__aavqan3009]

Really?

SeaQuest

[Anonymous Coward]

This show actually made me very interested in underwater exploration when I was young. It was a little over the top at points, but overall I think it was a quality show.

Re:SeaQuest

[PPH]

Sea Hunt. Now get off my lawn, kid.

Fond Memories

[paleo2002]

My fondest memory of Sealab was when Hank got trapped under the orange soda machine . . .

Helium

[tbird81]

He sounds like Yakky Doodle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uaa9ZJ2KSoQ

Divers sometimes use helium to replace some of the nitrogen. If you're at pressure, then the amount of nitrogen that goes into your blood stream can cause nitrogen narcosis. If you lower the partial pressure of N2 (by using He) then this is less likely.

Helium also diffuses quicker than nitrogen. But this can mean that decompression is a bit more difficult.

It talks about it a bit here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimix_(breathing_gas)

Media ignored?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mainstream magazines certainly covered it. That's how I knew about it as a kid. Hit Google Books with 'sealab popular' and select Full Version, for what ran in PopSci at the time.

It wasn't anywhere near as big a deal as the Moon program, but it got very good coverage for a single science program. Off the top of my head I can't think of another back then that got as much other than the Moon race.

I think it's hyperbole to say 'largely ignored'. There was a pretty good proportionate recognition. A little better than it deserved, arguably.

So secret for so long

[AHuxley]

... and the tapping of communications cables.
Civilian or military, analogue, digital ... somebody is always interested.

The Most Annoying Problem...

[IonOtter]

...was Athlete's Foot.

The high-pressure, high-humidity atmosphere of the lab caused the fungi to spread like wildfire, to the point where it would spread to the entire body, and even cause a secondary bacterial infection with alarming ease.

Space has fuel sources: ethane, methane, hydrogen

[perpenso]

Space, sadly, doesn't even have oil exploration going for it.

However it could have something akin to natural gas exploration. Space has fuels such as ethane, methane, hydrogen, etc.

Archer is good

[YesIAmAScript]

But it doesn't have Harry Goz. And it still hasn't answered the real question at hand, which is would you put your brain in a robot body?

Sealab 2021 is not forgotten.

I remember when his mother saved him from drowing

[hedronist]

Alan Krasberg, one of the researchers connected with Sealab, was the son of one of my mother's best friends, Tammy Krasberg. Apparently one afternoon Alan was testing some rebreathing equipment in the family pool. Tammy, who was reading a magazine pool-side, realized she hadn't seen any activity from him for awhile, so she put down her magazine, dove in, hauled him to the surface and, at least according to the story my mother told, gave him CPR. He revived and his mother went back to her magazine.

I'm tempted to believe this since Tammy was one of the most unflappable people I have ever met.

Aquanauts?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aquanaut. Water sailor. Isn't that a little redundant?

Re:That's Where You Went?

[inasity_rules]

How could you possibly miss a Uranus joke? Seriously?