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

[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

[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.

I remember THIS Sealab

[Terranex]

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

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

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)

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.

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.