posted 12-29-2011 01:08 PM            

Sealab: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor
by Ben Hellwarth

SEALAB is the underwater Right Stuff: the story of how a U.S. Navy program sought to develop the marine equivalent of the space station — and forever changed man’s relationship to the sea.

While NASA was trying to put a man on the moon, the U.S. Navy launched a series of daring experiments to prove that divers could live and work from a sea-floor base. When the first underwater “habitat” called Sealab was tested in the early 1960s, conventional dives had strict depth limits and lasted for only minutes, not the hours and even days that the visionaries behind Sealab wanted to achieve — for purposes of exploration, scientific research, and to recover submarines and aircraft that had sunk along the continental shelf. The unlikely father of Sealab, George Bond, was a colorful former country doctor who joined the Navy later in life and became obsessed with these unanswered questions: How long can a diver stay underwater? How deep can a diver go?

Sealab never received the attention it deserved, yet the program inspired explorers like Jacques Cousteau, broke age-old depth barriers, and revolutionized deep-sea diving by demonstrating that living on the seabed was not science fiction. Today divers on commercial oil rigs and Navy divers engaged in classified missions rely on methods pioneered during Sealab.

Sealab is a true story of heroism and discovery: men unafraid to test the limits of physical endurance to conquer a hostile undersea frontier. It is also a story of frustration and a government unwilling to take the same risks underwater that it did in space.

Ben Hellwarth, a veteran journalist, interviewed many surviving participants from the three Sealab experiments and conducted extensive documentary research to write the first comprehensive account of one of the most important and least known experiments in U.S. history. His compelling narrative covers the story from its scrappy origins in Dr. Bond’s Navy laboratory, through harrowing close calls, historic triumphs, and the mysterious tragedy that brought about the end of Sealab.

• Hardcover: 400 pages
  
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (January 10, 2012)
  
• ISBN-10: 0743247450
  
• ISBN-13: 978-0743247450

posted 12-29-2011 05:48 PM               

Francis, did I ever tell you about my experiences in diving the ...?

posted 02-29-2012 06:26 PM               

It reminds me of the time when I was 293 feet down on a newly found wreck...

posted 03-30-2012 03:42 AM               

It is available from the Man in the Sea Museum in Panama City Beach, FL.

Bob Barth was one of the four divers on Sealab I. Scott Carpenter was a diver on Sealab II.