Sealab: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor - Hardcover

Hellwarth, Ben

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743247450 ISBN 13: 9780743247450

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2012

Synopsis

Sealab is the underwater Right Stuff: the compelling story of how a US 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 US 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 US history.

About this title

About the Author

Ben Hellwarth grew up in Los Angeles and began reporting, writing, and editing for papers in the Bay Area after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley. He won a number of notable journalism awards in the 1990s as a staff writer for the Santa Barbara News-Press, then part of The New York Times Regional Newspaper Group. He divides his time between southern California and western Pennsylvania. Sealab is his first book.  Visit him at www.benhellwarth.com.

Reviews

In the 1950s, naval medical doctor George Bond evangelized a vision of submarine habitats that was realized in the 1960s in three successive projects called Sealab. A deadly accident with Sealab III, however, terminated a program that journalist Hellwarth reconstructs. Sealab’s genesis lay in Bond’s research into the physiology of diving, though Hellwarth underscores that Bond’s imagination ranged far beyond devising safe procedures. To Bond, “inner space” was as significant a frontier of exploration as outer space, an idea supported by the addition of Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter to his team. Dozens of others completed the Sealab rosters, many of whom Hellwarth interviewed. With details of their submersible activities, Hellwarth strives to animate a narrative about the Sealabs—stationary, pressurized vessels that were lowered by crane to the seafloor and ran in place until something went wrong. Such perilous incidents supply Hellwarth’s dramatic peaks, while, overall, his assemblage of living memory about Sealab constitutes important historical preservation of its place, possibly as cover for deep-sea espionage activities, in the annals of the U.S. Navy. --Gilbert Taylor

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743247450
• ISBN 13: 9780743247450
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400