American Experience (1988–…): Season 31, Episode 5 - Sealab - full transcript
The U.S. Navy's SEALAB, a pressurized underwater habitat complete with science labs and living quarters for divers, helps advance deep sea diving and rescue.
♪♪
♪♪
In the spring of 1964,
Scott Carpenter was preparing
for a new mission.
The second American
to orbit the earth,
he had become one of the most
famous men of his day.
Now, he would be embarking on
another equally dangerous
undertaking.
Go!
♪♪
This time, Carpenter would not
be an astronaut
but an aquanaut,
venturing into the deepest parts
of the ocean,
a vast and forbidding domain
every bit as daunting
as outer space.
♪♪
Divers who attempted to chart
its depths faced barriers
that had thwarted mankind
for centuries...
Near total blackness,
bone-jarring cold,
intense pressure
that could disorient the mind
and crush the body.
♪♪
Carpenter and his fellow
pioneers would attempt
to break through
those barriers...
Going deeper
and staying longer underwater
than anyone had done before,
seeing if it was possible
for humans to live
on the bottom of the ocean.
At first, their daring exploits
captured the nation's attention,
but tragedy would consign
their ground-breaking work
to the shadows
and obscure the accomplishments
of the men of SEALAB.
♪♪
On the first of October, 1959,
the U.S.S. Archerfish
glided to a stop
322 feet beneath the waves
off the Florida coast.
603... 603...
♪♪
Two Navy divers were about
to test whether it was possible
to escape from a submarine
at this depth...
Something no one
had ever tried before.
The men took a single lung
full of compressed air
and stepped out of a hatch
into the water.
They were immediately
lifted upwards
by their inflated vests...
Traveling at six feet
per second.
As they rose and the water
pressure decreased,
the air in their lungs
kept expanding,
forcing them to exhale
a continuous stream of bubbles.
♪♪
53 seconds after leaving
the Archerfish,
the men burst onto the surface
and took their first lungful
of air.
The daring test was known
as a "blow and go,"
and at its center
was a pioneering researcher
named Dr. George Bond.
♪♪
George Bond was the kind of guy
that when he walked into a room,
big tall guy
with a deep, resonant voice,
and a kind of visionary air
about him, people liked him.
Even his... even people
who didn't agree with him,
couldn't help
but kind of like him.
And it made him the kind of
leader people wanted to follow.
If he said, "Tomorrow we're
going to go to the moon,"
all of us would have said,
"Let's go."
He was just that type of guy.
George Bond was out there
in the thick of things himself.
He was a personal guinea pig.
He'd try things out before
he'd expose others to the risks.
He was a broad-shouldered
former doctor from Appalachia,
whose backwoods brogue
and southern courtliness
masked a driving determination
to save lives
and change the world.
Bond had grown up
around the small town
of Bat Cave, North Carolina,
and returned there
at the age of 31,
as the region's only doctor.
Within a few years, he had
been named Doctor of the Year
and was profiled in a film
by the American Medical
Association,
honored for his tireless work
serving 5,000 people
scattered across 500 square
miles of rugged backcountry.
Bond was drafted
into the Medical Corps
near the end of the Korean War.
In March of 1957,
he was assigned
to the Medical Research
Laboratory
at the U.S. Naval
Submarine Base
in New London, Connecticut.
Ho ho ho, ho ho ho!
The lab was a center
for studying the effects
of diving on the human body,
and training submarine crews
in escape techniques
like the "blow and go."
Bond fell in love with what
he called "the diving game."
♪♪
Shortly after arriving
in New London,
he submitted a research proposal
to the Navy,
outlining his vision for
man's future below the surface.
He was dreaming about people
living on the ocean floor
and farming
and building houses
and civilizations
and actually feeding
the population of the world
from, you know,
those activities.
It was more of a vision than
a sort of scientific paper.
Bond was thinking of military,
industrial,
scientific possibilities,
the whole world that might
open up if only man
could live in the ocean.
Covering 70%
of the earth's surface,
the ocean remained an alluring
but forbidding realm
that had fascinated humans
for centuries.
Breath-hold divers
had long sought pearls
on a single lungful of air
but could only stay
below the surface
for minutes at a time.
By the 1920s, treasure seekers,
salvage operators,
and Navy divers began to descend
in so-called hardhats,
breathing air pumped
through hoses from the surface.
The clumsy rigs allowed them
to roam the sea floor,
but their umbilical lines
could easily become fouled
on obstructions.
Eventually, pressurized vessels
extended man's reach
into the depths.
The first modern submarines were
developed during the Civil War.
By World War I, they had emerged
as a terrifying new weapon.
Then, in the 1930s,
the American naturalist and
marine biologist William Beebe
lowered his pressurized
iron bell,
known as a bathysphere, almost
half a mile below the waves,
glimpsing for the first time
the strange life forms
inhabiting the inky blackness.
Twenty-five years later
a reinforced bathyscaphe
called Trieste descended
an astonishing 35,000 feet...
Almost seven miles... to the
deepest part of the ocean.
By the time George Bond
arrived in New London,
nuclear power had made it
possible for submarines
to remain submerged for weeks,
cruising hundreds of feet down.
But humans remained confined
to airtight capsules,
unable to swim freely
at such depths.
In the 1940s,
a new system known as scuba
allowed divers to breathe
compressed air
from tanks worn on their backs.
But the further down
a diver went,
the more dangerous
the undersea world became.
♪♪
The pressure at sea level
is known as one atmosphere.
As a diver descends,
atmospheric pressure doubles
every 33 feet,
compressing the air
that he breathes.
The further down the diver goes,
the more the air molecules
in his lungs...
Comprised of 80% nitrogen
and 20% oxygen...
Become concentrated.
Under this increasing pressure,
the molecules are absorbed
into the bloodstream
and body tissues.
But too much oxygen becomes
toxic and causes convulsions,
and too much nitrogen creates
a woozy fog that can be deadly.
The compressed air
also causes problems
as the diver returns
to the surface.
As pressure decreases,
he must allow time
for the expanding molecules
to be slowly released
from the blood and tissues,
a process known as
decompression.
Ascending too fast
releases the gas as bubbles,
causing the crippling
and potentially deadly cramps
called the bends.
Once you've been diving
at a certain depth for a while,
you're kind of like a soda can,
and you do not want
to pop the can
and have the bubbles burst out.
You have to gradually return
to surface pressure,
gradually enough so that
the gases don't just,
boom, explode
in your circulatory system.
George Bond was sure
that despite the human body's
weaknesses and vulnerabilities,
he could somehow adapt
his divers to the pressure
of the ocean depths.
How deep can a diver go, really,
and how long can a diver
stay down?
Bond was amazed that nobody knew
the answers to those questions
and now he's sitting in charge
of a medical research lab
and thinks that maybe
it's about time
we start to run
some experiments.
♪♪
In November of 1962, George Bond
and his team cobbled together
the parts to retrofit a chamber
that simulated deep sea
pressures.
Bond found a trusted deputy
in Walter Mazzone,
an officer who ran
the School of Submarine Medicine
at the New London base.
A gruff, fast-talking, veteran
of harrowing submarine warfare
during World War Il,
Mazzone went on to earn degrees
in biology and
pharmaceutical chemistry.
Now, he and Bond set to work on
the next phase of experiments
they called "Genesis."
The tests were carried out
at the Navy's experimental
diving unit in Washington,
which is equipped to simulate
the effects
of underwater living.
Captain George Bond
and Commander Walter Mazzone
recruited Raymond Lavois,
Saunders Manning,
and Robert Barth
for medical tests.
George Bond was telling me,
"If we do this
and get away with it,
we can go twice as deep
as we've ever been or beyond."
Barth was a garrulous
and profane Navy man,
but also a skilled diver
with a desire to push the limits
of his field.
You go diving
and the book tells you
you're going to go to 140 feet
you can only stay there
five, ten, 15 minutes.
Bond said, "Never mind, let's go
to that depth and stay there,"
and that's what Genesis
was all about.
Inside the Genesis capsule,
Bond and Mazzone cranked up the
pressure until it was four times
what it was outside...
The equivalent of 100 feet
underwater.
They also tinkered
with the gas mixture,
trying to avoid the problem
of too much oxygen or nitrogen.
The scientists created for this
experiment a special atmosphere.
They were breathing a mixture
of six parts oxygen,
14 parts nitrogen,
and 80 parts helium,
a revolutionary kind of air.
Now one thing that had been
found out was that helium
made an excellent replacement
for nitrogen.
You could take out
a lot of the nitrogen,
put in helium and not get
the narcotic effect.
Now, as you might imagine,
there is a side effect.
Will somebody check
the refrigerator
and see if it's cool?
Ah...
Mike, he wants you to check
that refrigerator.
Huh?
He wants you
to check the refrigerator,
wants to know whether
it's cool or not.
Oh...
It is not cool!
In addition to its effect
on the human voice,
helium was a devilish gas
to contain.
Its small atomic structure
meant that it could escape
from the tiniest cracks
in the chamber,
endlessly vexing Walt Mazzone,
who spent days
trying to plug the leaks.
♪♪
Bond's next challenge
was to figure out
whether divers that spent weeks
under pressure
would have to spend
even more time decompressing.
His theory was
once a diver's body
absorbed the maximum amount
of gas possible...
Like a sponge saturated
with water...
He could stay in that state
indefinitely,
and his decompression time
would remain the same.
All he would need was a habitat
on the ocean floor.
And if it were kept
at the same pressure
as the surrounding water,
and the gas mixture was right,
he could come and go
as he pleased.
Bond's concept became known as
saturation diving.
The theory was that
you could actually live and work
on the ocean floor
in a saturated state.
After 24 hours you've totally
absorbed all the gas
you can possibly absorb
in your system,
so the decompression
is going to be the same as it is
at 24 hours or 24 days.
♪♪
On August 26, 1963,
in a final test,
Bob Barth and his team
entered the Genesis chamber
and lived inside
for almost two weeks
at the same pressure found
at 200 feet.
Bond made saturation diving
a conceivable concept.
Now that's sort of like
the diving equivalent
of breaking the sound barrier.
As the Genesis tests
came to a close,
Bond had answered
every question but one...
Would his techniques
actually work
in the dangerous environment
on the bottom of the sea?
♪♪
In the spring of 1963,
Americans were looking skyward
with increasing uneasiness.
The previous fall,
the nation had teetered
on the brink of
nuclear annihilation
during the Cuban Missile Crisis,
and Cold War tensions
could not have been higher.
Should these offensive
military preparations continue,
further action
will be justified.
And while the latest
missile test garnered
the biggest headlines,
in reality,
much of the conflict
with the Soviet Union
was unfolding in the dark
and silent depths of the ocean.
Ever since the end
of World War Il,
the Navy had embarked
on a crash program
to match the Soviets' capability
in nuclear-powered submarines
armed with ballistic missiles.
Then, on April 10, 1963,
one of America's newest
atomic submarines,
the U.S.S. Thresher,
developed mechanical problems
and sank in over 8,000 feet
of water,
its hull crushed
by the immense pressure.
The accident sent shock waves
through the Navy.
It announced a sweeping
"Subsafe" program,
and new research on rescue
vehicles for sunken submarines.
Suddenly, George Bond's
pioneering work
with deep sea divers became
a higher priority for the Navy
even though his budget
remained meager.
With approval to begin
underwater testing in hand,
Bond and Walt Mazzone
scavenged Navy junk yards.
In the fall of 1963, at a base
in Panama City, Florida,
they came across two discarded
minesweeping floats...
60-foot-long hollow cylinders
tall enough for a person
to stand upright.
With a small budget,
they're able to weld together
and construct
a sort of cigar-shaped house,
which they call SEALAB I.
Bond and his crew outfitted
their strange-looking
contraption
with a makeshift array
of equipment:
a hot-plate, electric heaters
and the intercom system
came from Sears
because they were cheaper
than the Navy stockpiles.
The best conduit for fresh water
turned out to be
an ordinary garden hose.
Despite the low budget,
there's a lot riding
on this first test at sea
because if they run into
any real big problems,
Dr. Bond might not be allowed
to go any further
with this concept.
So it's very important
that they're able
to replicate at sea the concept
that they developed in the lab.
After seven months
of scrounging, welding,
and improvised engineering,
SEALAB was mounted
on its Navy support ship,
a bulky freight barge,
and taken to a coral reef
next to an old Navy research
platform,
25 miles southwest of Bermuda.
The barge would provide a base
for the diving team,
and supply the gas mixtures that
would be pumped down to SEALAB.
SEALAB I, this is SEALAB
control.
Presiding over this
complex enterprise
was George Bond...
Known affectionately
as "Papa Topside."
The divers would be shuttled
back and forth
to the sunken habitat
using a pressurized submersible
decompression chamber,
also known as a diving bell.
Once the mission was over,
the bell was raised
onto the barge and it served
as a cramped chamber
where the aquanauts had
to endure 55 hours
of decompression.
In spite of the do-it-yourself
nature of the SEALAB project,
one man who was no stranger
to risk
asked to be part of the team.
After his pioneering time
in outer space,
Malcolm Scott Carpenter
was looking for a new challenge
and he had sought out
George Bond.
Scott Carpenter...
he's the real deal.
His interest is in exploration,
in wanting to know
and to understand,
whatever it takes.
Bond chose four others
to live in SEALAB I,
and his loyal test subject,
Bob Barth, was one of them.
The goal was to see if the team
could live under pressure
for 21 days,
breathing the same helium and
oxygen mixture used in Genesis,
this time at a depth
of almost 200 feet.
In a way it could be said
we were guinea pigs,
but you're a trained individual,
you have practice
doing what you're doing
and you know what's expected
of you.
Carpenter was scheduled to lead
the first team
of what were called aquanauts,
but he was sidelined
when he broke his arm
in a motorbike accident
just a few days
before the program got underway.
♪♪
On July 19, 1964,
SEALAB was lowered
onto the floor of the ocean
and the aquanauts rode down
in the diving bell.
♪♪
Bond and Mazzone
waited anxiously as the men
took a lungful of air
and swam over to the lab.
The sound of squeaky voices
on the intercom
signaled that they had arrived.
♪♪
192 feet down on the floor
of the Atlantic Ocean,
the United States Navy
conducts an experiment
to test man's ability to live
and work underwater.
A 40-foot pressurized
helium and oxygen-filled
undersea laboratory
is home for four Navy divers.
Activity in the SEALAB
is monitored
by closed circuit television
linked to the surface.
Compared to the cramped confines
of the Genesis pressure chamber,
SEALAB I was almost spacious.
The aquanauts were still
breathing mostly helium,
and because it absorbs heat
much faster than regular air,
the lab had to be kept
in the mid-80s
in order to keep them warm.
And while the small percentage
of concentrated oxygen
in the atmosphere
was enough to keep the men alive
there wasn't enough
to strike a match.
The pressure inside kept
the surrounding water at bay,
allowing the divers
to enter and exit the lab
through an open hatch
in the floor.
Once they left behind
the steamy confines of SEALAB,
the aquanauts discovered
a marine paradise.
♪♪
"It was like living inside
a giant aquarium,"
Bob Barth remembered.
♪♪
The aquanauts spent
much of their time in the water,
testing out
new rebreathing systems
that recycled gases like helium
and filtered out
the dangerous carbon dioxide
exhaled with every breath.
Mostly they were dealing
with systems and methods.
"Can we keep the gas mixture
healthy?
"Is the gear they are using
in the water
suitable for this kind of dive?"
All these variables
are in the mix
and the real trick is
to have this go well enough
that the Navy might let them
try it again.
After ten days,
a hurricane bearing down
on Bermuda forced Bond
to cut short the mission.
With 15-foot waves
roiling the surface,
the aquanauts survived
a dangerous transfer
to the support ship
and after more than two days
of decompression,
they emerged safe and sound.
George Bond's vision
of man living under the sea
at last seemed within reach.
♪♪
SEALAB I is perceived
as a success,
which is great for Bond,
but also leaves open
a lot of questions.
These guys were in Bermuda,
the water was warm.
The visibility was good.
That's not the way it is
in most of the ocean.
And the big question is
what if we want to go deeper?
The next step
was to leave behind
the balmy waters of Bermuda
and test the SEALAB program
in a far more inhospitable
domain...
One that would push
the aquanauts
to the very edge
of human endurance.
♪♪
It's pretty amazing
our own ocean
with its maximum depth
of about seven miles
has been largely unseen,
largely unexplored.
Actually 95% of the ocean
territory remains unknown.
In the middle
of the 20th century,
the perception of the ocean
was generally that
it was so big, so vast,
so resilient
that there's not much
that humans could do
to harm the ocean.
It was basically thought
to be too big to fail.
But the ocean is where most
of life on earth actually lives.
The ocean drives climate,
weather, regulates temperature.
It is our life support system.
SEALAB was a critical part
of understanding
this part of the universe.
Following the success
of SEALAB I,
the Navy gave George Bond's team
almost $2 million...
Ten times more than they had
invested in his first habitat.
SEALAB Il was designed and built
by the Navy's submarine
architects.
Bond recruited
three teams of aquanauts...
28 divers in all...
Including Scott Carpenter,
Bob Barth, and scientists
from the Scripps Institution
of Oceanography.
Each team would take turns on
the bottom for 15 days straight,
at more than 200 feet.
I think in the immediate future,
exploration first of the ocean
will bring us
far greater rewards
than the exploration of space
because, if for no other reason,
of the distances involved.
The richest part
of the sea floor
is roughly a million times
closer than the moon.
♪♪
♪♪
When Bob Barth stepped out
of the diving bell
in August of 1965, the warm,
crystalline waters of Bermuda
were a distant memory.
He was floating
in almost total blackness,
just above the floor
of the Pacific Ocean,
off the coast of San Diego.
The water was a bone-chilling
45 degrees,
sapping his energy
and urging him toward
the lights of SEALAB Il,
lying at a slight angle
on the rim of
Scripps Submarine Canyon.
Over the edge,
the depth plunged to 600 feet.
It's dark and dingy and cold.
And Bond wanted
to get a little deeper
and live a little rougher.
On a good day,
you could probably see
about five or six feet.
On a bad day, you couldn't see
your hand in front of your face.
If you've got any bit
of claustrophobia at all,
you're not going to make it.
And the cold aggravates
the situation even worse
because then you start
losing mobility,
you start losing
thinking ability.
The combination of cold and dark
is pretty traumatic.
Part of the mission was to test
whether the saturated divers
could swim away from their base
and go as much as 300 feet
further down into the canyon
and before returning.
The men were ordered
to set up weather stations,
test new
electrically heated wetsuits,
and attempt to salvage
the sunken fuselage
of a fighter jet.
With no voice communication,
it was easy to get lost
in the limited visibility
of the sea floor.
Working in these conditions
was exhausting and dangerous.
The cold sapped
the divers' strength,
lines became tangled,
lights burned out
and took hours to replace.
Any malfunction that created
accidental buoyancy
and suddenly sent them upward
meant almost certain death
from the bends.
Scorpion fish,
whose sharp spines
could penetrate a wet suit
and cause excruciating pain,
lurked around the entrance
to the lab.
Halfway through his deployment,
Scott Carpenter was stung
and laid out for days.
There are no computers,
there are no warning systems.
There is really only
the diver's sixth sense
that something is not right
with his gas mixture
or maybe he's been out
a little too long
and he better get back
to the habitat right away,
because that is the only
safe place people can go.
You're now locked into
that hatch on that seafloor
and you have to get back there
if you run out of air
or if you have a problem.
You're no longer a scuba diver
who's free to go back
to the surface.
SEALAB Il, SEALAB Il,
this is Papa Topside.
Despite the hazards,
as time went on,
living on the bottom
of the ocean
began to feel almost routine.
The longer the SEALAB Il
aquanauts stayed submerged,
the more media attention
they generated.
Never one to miss a good chance
for publicity,
George Bond arranged
for Scott Carpenter
to receive a call
from President Lyndon Johnson.
Scott, I'm mighty proud
to hear from you.
You've convinced me
and all of the nation
that whether you're going up
or down you have the courage
and the skill to do a fine job.
When SEALAB Il was raised
to the surface
on October 11, 1965,
it had been manned continuously
for 45 days,
including Carpenter's
record stay of 30 days below.
The crew of SEALAB Il's
mothership
man the decompression chamber
after aquanaut Scott Carpenter
and his men
return to the surface.
Everybody appears
hail and hearty
after their life 200 feet
below the surface.
♪♪
At a later press conference,
all of the aquanauts are elated
over their accomplishments.
The Navy feels that men
have proven that man
can readily adapt himself to the
strange environment of the sea
with little or no ill effects.
Carpenter,
the second American
to orbit the Earth,
points out his living quarters
to his wife.
Now he's the only man
to hold records in the sky above
and in the sea below.
While George Bond and his team
continued
their innovative experiments,
another pioneer was determined
to introduce a mass audience
to the mysteries
of the undersea world.
The French explorer
and adventurer Jacques Cousteau
produced two
Academy Award-winning films
that revealed an unknown
universe under the waves.
The documentaries featured
a series of structures
that served as both
ocean habitats
and set pieces
for his cinematic endeavors.
In contrast to Bond's rigorously
scientific Navy program,
most of Cousteau's pods
were close enough to the surface
that the aquanauts
were breathing regular air.
Ever sensitive
to their appearance,
Cousteau had installed
a tanning booth.
Mozart and Vivaldi played
on the sound system.
You could sit around a table,
drinking fine French wine
while you were dining
underwater.
Cousteau became the public face
and inspired the public
to understand
that going up
in the sky is wonderful,
going into the ocean
is maybe equally wonderful,
and important too.
As elegant and eye-catching
as Cousteau's first ventures
may have been,
in George Bond's opinion,
the experiments didn't generate
"one iota of useful
physiological information."
But just a month
after SEALAB Il,
using some of George Bond's
pioneering saturation
techniques,
Cousteau managed to put
six divers onto the floor
of the Mediterranean, almost
330 feet below the surface.
If Bond and his team were going
to push the boundaries
of knowledge in SEALAB Ill,
they would have to take
their habitat deeper
than any had gone before.
♪♪
On Christmas Eve, 1968,
the crew of Apollo 8
became the first men
to orbit the moon...
I have a beautiful view
of the Earth here.
Beaming back a picture
of an "earthrise"...
That showed a small blue sphere
floating in the empty blackness
of space.
♪♪
It was clear that America had
pulled ahead in the space race,
as Cold War tensions
remained high.
The game of nuclear
brinksmanship continued
under the waves.
And the U.S. Navy kept searching
for new ways to gain
an advantage
against a stealthy
and dangerous foe.
Deep sea divers
were beginning to figure
in the spymaster's plan,
especially if they could operate
at radically increased depths
for extended periods of time.
All eyes were on the next phase
of SEALAB's pioneering test.
♪♪
Here at the San Francisco Bay
Naval Shipyard,
workers prepare SEALAB Ill,
a special habitat
for ocean floor dwelling,
to be used by the aquanauts
of the Navy's most ambitious
undersea experiment to date.
SEALAB Ill was a roomier,
remodeled version
of its predecessor,
in which five teams
of nine aquanauts each
were expected to spend
a total of almost two months
under the surface.
But as it was being readied,
Bond and the others
received word from the Navy
that their habitat would be sent
down to a daunting 600 feet.
The change in depth
was never explained,
but clearly SEALAB was becoming
an increasingly important part
of the secret Cold War
competition
for control of the oceans.
600 feet suddenly became
the goal,
which is a kind of quantum leap.
It's like now you're going
to try to go to the moon
instead of just orbit the Earth
and it seems to some people
like maybe they were skipping
some steps here.
On February 15, 1969,
300-ton SEALAB Ill was lowered
to the sea floor
off the coast
of San Clemente, California.
The teams of aquanauts
were standing by,
with Scott Carpenter acting
as an advisor to George Bond,
Walt Mazzone, and a group
of mission commanders.
♪♪
Almost immediately, Bond knew
they had a serious problem.
Once again, it revolved around
the helium gas...
It was bubbling out of
multiple gaps in SEALAB Ill.
The Navy team that had overseen
the habitat's construction
had never pressure-tested
the lab with helium.
If divers couldn't fix
the leaks,
their supply of the precious gas
would run out,
and SEALAB Ill would have to be
abandoned.
The naval officers in charge
huddled with Bond
and weighed their options.
They decided to send down
the first team of aquanauts
to try and enter the habitat
and fix the leaks from inside.
Okay, I'd like to get all
members of Team 1 over here.
Almost 24 hours after
SEALAB Ill was submerged,
Bob Barth, Richard Blackburn,
Berry Cannon, and John Reaves
were pressurized to 600 feet,
and began their descent
in the diving bell.
But it acted more like a
refrigerator than an elevator.
The bell had absolutely no heat
in it whatsoever.
So it was cold air blowing on
you with an arctic wind chill.
♪♪
The electric heater was broken.
The neoprene wet suits provided
little protection,
and the helium
in the atmosphere,
and inside their lungs
and tissues,
sapped the heat
from their bodies.
♪♪
It took more than an hour
to reach the bottom.
When they arrived at 600 feet,
the men were colder
than they had ever been
in their lives.
Colder than hell.
You're breathing helium
and your body is permeated
with helium.
It's a lot colder a lot faster
and a lot colder, period.
I mean our teeth
were chattering.
But we thought we'd be able
to get into the, the habitat
and, and we expected it
to be warm
and we'd be able to recuperate.
Barth and Cannon
swam toward the bubbling SEALAB.
Barth tried to open
the entry hatch,
but it wouldn't budge.
After 15 minutes
of fruitless labor,
they were ordered topside
and had to endure
another freezing ascent
in the bell.
♪♪
While still-pressurized
and confined to their chamber
onboard the support ship,
the aquanauts did their best
to warm up.
George Bond tried to determine
how long their bodies
needed to recover
before they could go back down.
They were worried about us
being cold.
I said, "We'll be all right,
we'll be all right."
I told them we need
to get back down there.
I made the choice
to get back down and get done
what we were trying to
or we would lose the habitat.
Bond and the officers in charge
of the program decided
to send Barth and his team down
four hours later.
Scott Carpenter argued
for more recovery time,
but was overruled.
The minute we closed the hatch,
the temperature
did the same thing.
We'd all been through this
for like 24 hours
so it was much worse.
But we were so numb by that time
we didn't know
it was much worse.
♪♪
The bell reached the bottom
around 4:00 a.m.
on February 17.
Barth and Cannon dropped through
the open hatch,
slipping once again
into the icy darkness.
They've got about 30 yards
to swim down,
get from the bell
to the entrance to the habitat.
The leaking appears
to have been coming from
where the power cables
hooked into the lab.
Berry Cannon veers off
a little bit
to have a little look
at what the problem might be
before he went inside the lab
to try to solve it.
Barth struggled once again with
the hatch, but it was no use.
Then, he suddenly turned around
and realized his partner,
Berry Cannon, was in trouble.
John Reaves and I heard
this scream in the water.
And we looked at each other and
said, "What the heck was that?"
Cannon was convulsing,
his jaws clamped shut,
his gas regulator floating free.
Barth grabbed what was called
a buddy breather...
An emergency supply of gas
from Cannon's tanks...
And tried repeatedly to force it
into his mouth.
He can't get the regulator
back in Berry Cannon's mouth.
And Barth is feeling like
he himself might just pass out.
His next best move is to get
himself back to the bell
where he might get help
or at least save himself.
♪♪
I tried to get him in the bell
and bring him back
to the surface.
But by that time,
I was kind of beat, beat up.
People topside had seen
what was going on
through their closed circuit TV
and said,
"Get a diver in the water."
When I got there, Berry's
mouthpiece was floating up here.
And Bob had already tried to use
his buddy breather,
so I took the mouthpiece
and shoved it in his...
tried to shove it in his mouth.
And his teeth were locked solid.
It wouldn't go into his mouth
at all.
♪♪
Blackburn manages to sort of
wrangle Berry Cannon
under one arm
and kicking
and swimming furiously.
He makes it back up to the bell.
We kept up trying to revive him.
Bond and Mazzone and the topside
crew are hearing,
"Faster, faster,"
like, "Get us up."
As the exhausted aquanauts were
brought back to the surface,
George Bond heard the message
he was dreading.
"Berry Cannon is dead."
♪♪
A civilian U.S. aquanaut
taking part in the nation's
most ambitious
underwater living experiment
to date
died today in water
600 feet deep
off the Southern California
coast.
The victim was one of four
divers trying to find a leak
in the underwater capsule
when he was stricken.
♪♪
Devastated.
I mean... when, when people
found out that Berry
had, had died...
hardly a dry eye.
Anybody associated
with that program,
you know it was just...
it was just terrible.
We, we all...
we all knew the risks,
but when it's...
when it actually happens
and you're faced with it,
it's, it's very sobering.
♪♪
Immediately, the Navy suspended
the SEALAB program
and launched an investigation
into Cannon's death.
His fellow aquanauts still had
almost a full week
of decompression to endure
before they emerged
from the chamber
on the support ship.
It was pretty well deserted.
There was only the skeleton crew
that was there
to keep us alive, basically,
and, and decompressing us
and get us out safely.
And everybody else
had gone home.
By the time the aquanauts
were released
from their decompression,
Berry Cannon's funeral
had already taken place.
♪♪
A Navy board of investigation
asked tough questions
of Bond and the rest
of the SEALAB team.
Richard Blackburn
sharply criticized
some of the decisions
that were made.
"We were all pushed to the point
where mistakes were inevitable,"
he testified.
"It is a horrible thing
for a man to have to die
to slow this outfit down."
The San Diego Union
reported that Bond
was "emotionally shaken
several times while recalling
the details of the tragedy."
The investigation lasted
almost a month,
and it concluded
that CO2 poisoning
was the most likely cause
of Cannon's death.
But the entire program
became another casualty.
By the end of 1970, the Navy
had shut SEALAB down completely.
George Bond's dream
of man living under the sea
seemed to have run its course.
♪♪
To the American public, SEALAB
looked like an abject failure,
but the Navy's Cold War
architects saw, instead,
a new top-secret role
for the program.
The SEALAB program begins
to enter into the thinking
of America's Cold War
planning and strategy
with new Navy operations
in which they could
take advantage of their
new saturation diving know-how.
♪♪
Some of the SEALAB divers
became covert operatives
serving onboard
the U.S.S. Halibut,
an aging nuclear submarine,
that featured a portable
compression chamber...
A kind of mini SEALAB...
Attached to its deck.
Over the next few years,
the Halibut would become
their base for new kinds of
dangerous deep-water operations.
SEALAB personnel
were natural recruits.
Almost to a man, aquanauts
went into the black programs.
Late in 1972,
the Halibut snuck inside
Russian territorial waters
in the Sea of Okhotsk
and located a cable
on the bottom.
♪♪
Saturation divers attached
a recording device
that secretly intercepted
a gold mine
of Soviet
nuclear communications.
It was one of the Cold War
high points for the Navy,
made possible by
the pioneering work of SEALAB.
And the concept of saturation
diving spread around the world.
Deep sea oil exploration
took off.
Most of the guys that had worked
at the experimental diving unit
ended up working for
diving companies in the Gulf,
and the North Sea,
and all over the world.
From his retirement
in North Carolina,
George Bond looked on with
satisfaction as his prediction
that divers would one day
be working hundreds of feet
below the surface came true.
In the 1980s,
the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration,
NOAA,
created an undersea station
that was originally
to be named after Bond,
but was ultimately christened
Aquarius.
The habitat is still
in operation
near a coral reef a few miles
south of the Florida Keys.
SEALAB was,
for me,
transformative because as a...
as a diver, a scientist first,
I use the ocean as a laboratory.
Saturation diving gave me
a chance to get to know
the seascape, if you will,
the neighborhood.
Anybody who is a field scientist
in a desert or in the mountains
or anywhere, you know,
you keep learning things
as you spend time there.
It makes all the difference
in the world.
SEALAB was absolutely
fundamental.
It built the concept of
being able to live underwater,
to actually experience
the blue part of the planet.
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
In the spring of 1964,
Scott Carpenter was preparing
for a new mission.
The second American
to orbit the earth,
he had become one of the most
famous men of his day.
Now, he would be embarking on
another equally dangerous
undertaking.
Go!
♪♪
This time, Carpenter would not
be an astronaut
but an aquanaut,
venturing into the deepest parts
of the ocean,
a vast and forbidding domain
every bit as daunting
as outer space.
♪♪
Divers who attempted to chart
its depths faced barriers
that had thwarted mankind
for centuries...
Near total blackness,
bone-jarring cold,
intense pressure
that could disorient the mind
and crush the body.
♪♪
Carpenter and his fellow
pioneers would attempt
to break through
those barriers...
Going deeper
and staying longer underwater
than anyone had done before,
seeing if it was possible
for humans to live
on the bottom of the ocean.
At first, their daring exploits
captured the nation's attention,
but tragedy would consign
their ground-breaking work
to the shadows
and obscure the accomplishments
of the men of SEALAB.
♪♪
On the first of October, 1959,
the U.S.S. Archerfish
glided to a stop
322 feet beneath the waves
off the Florida coast.
603... 603...
♪♪
Two Navy divers were about
to test whether it was possible
to escape from a submarine
at this depth...
Something no one
had ever tried before.
The men took a single lung
full of compressed air
and stepped out of a hatch
into the water.
They were immediately
lifted upwards
by their inflated vests...
Traveling at six feet
per second.
As they rose and the water
pressure decreased,
the air in their lungs
kept expanding,
forcing them to exhale
a continuous stream of bubbles.
♪♪
53 seconds after leaving
the Archerfish,
the men burst onto the surface
and took their first lungful
of air.
The daring test was known
as a "blow and go,"
and at its center
was a pioneering researcher
named Dr. George Bond.
♪♪
George Bond was the kind of guy
that when he walked into a room,
big tall guy
with a deep, resonant voice,
and a kind of visionary air
about him, people liked him.
Even his... even people
who didn't agree with him,
couldn't help
but kind of like him.
And it made him the kind of
leader people wanted to follow.
If he said, "Tomorrow we're
going to go to the moon,"
all of us would have said,
"Let's go."
He was just that type of guy.
George Bond was out there
in the thick of things himself.
He was a personal guinea pig.
He'd try things out before
he'd expose others to the risks.
He was a broad-shouldered
former doctor from Appalachia,
whose backwoods brogue
and southern courtliness
masked a driving determination
to save lives
and change the world.
Bond had grown up
around the small town
of Bat Cave, North Carolina,
and returned there
at the age of 31,
as the region's only doctor.
Within a few years, he had
been named Doctor of the Year
and was profiled in a film
by the American Medical
Association,
honored for his tireless work
serving 5,000 people
scattered across 500 square
miles of rugged backcountry.
Bond was drafted
into the Medical Corps
near the end of the Korean War.
In March of 1957,
he was assigned
to the Medical Research
Laboratory
at the U.S. Naval
Submarine Base
in New London, Connecticut.
Ho ho ho, ho ho ho!
The lab was a center
for studying the effects
of diving on the human body,
and training submarine crews
in escape techniques
like the "blow and go."
Bond fell in love with what
he called "the diving game."
♪♪
Shortly after arriving
in New London,
he submitted a research proposal
to the Navy,
outlining his vision for
man's future below the surface.
He was dreaming about people
living on the ocean floor
and farming
and building houses
and civilizations
and actually feeding
the population of the world
from, you know,
those activities.
It was more of a vision than
a sort of scientific paper.
Bond was thinking of military,
industrial,
scientific possibilities,
the whole world that might
open up if only man
could live in the ocean.
Covering 70%
of the earth's surface,
the ocean remained an alluring
but forbidding realm
that had fascinated humans
for centuries.
Breath-hold divers
had long sought pearls
on a single lungful of air
but could only stay
below the surface
for minutes at a time.
By the 1920s, treasure seekers,
salvage operators,
and Navy divers began to descend
in so-called hardhats,
breathing air pumped
through hoses from the surface.
The clumsy rigs allowed them
to roam the sea floor,
but their umbilical lines
could easily become fouled
on obstructions.
Eventually, pressurized vessels
extended man's reach
into the depths.
The first modern submarines were
developed during the Civil War.
By World War I, they had emerged
as a terrifying new weapon.
Then, in the 1930s,
the American naturalist and
marine biologist William Beebe
lowered his pressurized
iron bell,
known as a bathysphere, almost
half a mile below the waves,
glimpsing for the first time
the strange life forms
inhabiting the inky blackness.
Twenty-five years later
a reinforced bathyscaphe
called Trieste descended
an astonishing 35,000 feet...
Almost seven miles... to the
deepest part of the ocean.
By the time George Bond
arrived in New London,
nuclear power had made it
possible for submarines
to remain submerged for weeks,
cruising hundreds of feet down.
But humans remained confined
to airtight capsules,
unable to swim freely
at such depths.
In the 1940s,
a new system known as scuba
allowed divers to breathe
compressed air
from tanks worn on their backs.
But the further down
a diver went,
the more dangerous
the undersea world became.
♪♪
The pressure at sea level
is known as one atmosphere.
As a diver descends,
atmospheric pressure doubles
every 33 feet,
compressing the air
that he breathes.
The further down the diver goes,
the more the air molecules
in his lungs...
Comprised of 80% nitrogen
and 20% oxygen...
Become concentrated.
Under this increasing pressure,
the molecules are absorbed
into the bloodstream
and body tissues.
But too much oxygen becomes
toxic and causes convulsions,
and too much nitrogen creates
a woozy fog that can be deadly.
The compressed air
also causes problems
as the diver returns
to the surface.
As pressure decreases,
he must allow time
for the expanding molecules
to be slowly released
from the blood and tissues,
a process known as
decompression.
Ascending too fast
releases the gas as bubbles,
causing the crippling
and potentially deadly cramps
called the bends.
Once you've been diving
at a certain depth for a while,
you're kind of like a soda can,
and you do not want
to pop the can
and have the bubbles burst out.
You have to gradually return
to surface pressure,
gradually enough so that
the gases don't just,
boom, explode
in your circulatory system.
George Bond was sure
that despite the human body's
weaknesses and vulnerabilities,
he could somehow adapt
his divers to the pressure
of the ocean depths.
How deep can a diver go, really,
and how long can a diver
stay down?
Bond was amazed that nobody knew
the answers to those questions
and now he's sitting in charge
of a medical research lab
and thinks that maybe
it's about time
we start to run
some experiments.
♪♪
In November of 1962, George Bond
and his team cobbled together
the parts to retrofit a chamber
that simulated deep sea
pressures.
Bond found a trusted deputy
in Walter Mazzone,
an officer who ran
the School of Submarine Medicine
at the New London base.
A gruff, fast-talking, veteran
of harrowing submarine warfare
during World War Il,
Mazzone went on to earn degrees
in biology and
pharmaceutical chemistry.
Now, he and Bond set to work on
the next phase of experiments
they called "Genesis."
The tests were carried out
at the Navy's experimental
diving unit in Washington,
which is equipped to simulate
the effects
of underwater living.
Captain George Bond
and Commander Walter Mazzone
recruited Raymond Lavois,
Saunders Manning,
and Robert Barth
for medical tests.
George Bond was telling me,
"If we do this
and get away with it,
we can go twice as deep
as we've ever been or beyond."
Barth was a garrulous
and profane Navy man,
but also a skilled diver
with a desire to push the limits
of his field.
You go diving
and the book tells you
you're going to go to 140 feet
you can only stay there
five, ten, 15 minutes.
Bond said, "Never mind, let's go
to that depth and stay there,"
and that's what Genesis
was all about.
Inside the Genesis capsule,
Bond and Mazzone cranked up the
pressure until it was four times
what it was outside...
The equivalent of 100 feet
underwater.
They also tinkered
with the gas mixture,
trying to avoid the problem
of too much oxygen or nitrogen.
The scientists created for this
experiment a special atmosphere.
They were breathing a mixture
of six parts oxygen,
14 parts nitrogen,
and 80 parts helium,
a revolutionary kind of air.
Now one thing that had been
found out was that helium
made an excellent replacement
for nitrogen.
You could take out
a lot of the nitrogen,
put in helium and not get
the narcotic effect.
Now, as you might imagine,
there is a side effect.
Will somebody check
the refrigerator
and see if it's cool?
Ah...
Mike, he wants you to check
that refrigerator.
Huh?
He wants you
to check the refrigerator,
wants to know whether
it's cool or not.
Oh...
It is not cool!
In addition to its effect
on the human voice,
helium was a devilish gas
to contain.
Its small atomic structure
meant that it could escape
from the tiniest cracks
in the chamber,
endlessly vexing Walt Mazzone,
who spent days
trying to plug the leaks.
♪♪
Bond's next challenge
was to figure out
whether divers that spent weeks
under pressure
would have to spend
even more time decompressing.
His theory was
once a diver's body
absorbed the maximum amount
of gas possible...
Like a sponge saturated
with water...
He could stay in that state
indefinitely,
and his decompression time
would remain the same.
All he would need was a habitat
on the ocean floor.
And if it were kept
at the same pressure
as the surrounding water,
and the gas mixture was right,
he could come and go
as he pleased.
Bond's concept became known as
saturation diving.
The theory was that
you could actually live and work
on the ocean floor
in a saturated state.
After 24 hours you've totally
absorbed all the gas
you can possibly absorb
in your system,
so the decompression
is going to be the same as it is
at 24 hours or 24 days.
♪♪
On August 26, 1963,
in a final test,
Bob Barth and his team
entered the Genesis chamber
and lived inside
for almost two weeks
at the same pressure found
at 200 feet.
Bond made saturation diving
a conceivable concept.
Now that's sort of like
the diving equivalent
of breaking the sound barrier.
As the Genesis tests
came to a close,
Bond had answered
every question but one...
Would his techniques
actually work
in the dangerous environment
on the bottom of the sea?
♪♪
In the spring of 1963,
Americans were looking skyward
with increasing uneasiness.
The previous fall,
the nation had teetered
on the brink of
nuclear annihilation
during the Cuban Missile Crisis,
and Cold War tensions
could not have been higher.
Should these offensive
military preparations continue,
further action
will be justified.
And while the latest
missile test garnered
the biggest headlines,
in reality,
much of the conflict
with the Soviet Union
was unfolding in the dark
and silent depths of the ocean.
Ever since the end
of World War Il,
the Navy had embarked
on a crash program
to match the Soviets' capability
in nuclear-powered submarines
armed with ballistic missiles.
Then, on April 10, 1963,
one of America's newest
atomic submarines,
the U.S.S. Thresher,
developed mechanical problems
and sank in over 8,000 feet
of water,
its hull crushed
by the immense pressure.
The accident sent shock waves
through the Navy.
It announced a sweeping
"Subsafe" program,
and new research on rescue
vehicles for sunken submarines.
Suddenly, George Bond's
pioneering work
with deep sea divers became
a higher priority for the Navy
even though his budget
remained meager.
With approval to begin
underwater testing in hand,
Bond and Walt Mazzone
scavenged Navy junk yards.
In the fall of 1963, at a base
in Panama City, Florida,
they came across two discarded
minesweeping floats...
60-foot-long hollow cylinders
tall enough for a person
to stand upright.
With a small budget,
they're able to weld together
and construct
a sort of cigar-shaped house,
which they call SEALAB I.
Bond and his crew outfitted
their strange-looking
contraption
with a makeshift array
of equipment:
a hot-plate, electric heaters
and the intercom system
came from Sears
because they were cheaper
than the Navy stockpiles.
The best conduit for fresh water
turned out to be
an ordinary garden hose.
Despite the low budget,
there's a lot riding
on this first test at sea
because if they run into
any real big problems,
Dr. Bond might not be allowed
to go any further
with this concept.
So it's very important
that they're able
to replicate at sea the concept
that they developed in the lab.
After seven months
of scrounging, welding,
and improvised engineering,
SEALAB was mounted
on its Navy support ship,
a bulky freight barge,
and taken to a coral reef
next to an old Navy research
platform,
25 miles southwest of Bermuda.
The barge would provide a base
for the diving team,
and supply the gas mixtures that
would be pumped down to SEALAB.
SEALAB I, this is SEALAB
control.
Presiding over this
complex enterprise
was George Bond...
Known affectionately
as "Papa Topside."
The divers would be shuttled
back and forth
to the sunken habitat
using a pressurized submersible
decompression chamber,
also known as a diving bell.
Once the mission was over,
the bell was raised
onto the barge and it served
as a cramped chamber
where the aquanauts had
to endure 55 hours
of decompression.
In spite of the do-it-yourself
nature of the SEALAB project,
one man who was no stranger
to risk
asked to be part of the team.
After his pioneering time
in outer space,
Malcolm Scott Carpenter
was looking for a new challenge
and he had sought out
George Bond.
Scott Carpenter...
he's the real deal.
His interest is in exploration,
in wanting to know
and to understand,
whatever it takes.
Bond chose four others
to live in SEALAB I,
and his loyal test subject,
Bob Barth, was one of them.
The goal was to see if the team
could live under pressure
for 21 days,
breathing the same helium and
oxygen mixture used in Genesis,
this time at a depth
of almost 200 feet.
In a way it could be said
we were guinea pigs,
but you're a trained individual,
you have practice
doing what you're doing
and you know what's expected
of you.
Carpenter was scheduled to lead
the first team
of what were called aquanauts,
but he was sidelined
when he broke his arm
in a motorbike accident
just a few days
before the program got underway.
♪♪
On July 19, 1964,
SEALAB was lowered
onto the floor of the ocean
and the aquanauts rode down
in the diving bell.
♪♪
Bond and Mazzone
waited anxiously as the men
took a lungful of air
and swam over to the lab.
The sound of squeaky voices
on the intercom
signaled that they had arrived.
♪♪
192 feet down on the floor
of the Atlantic Ocean,
the United States Navy
conducts an experiment
to test man's ability to live
and work underwater.
A 40-foot pressurized
helium and oxygen-filled
undersea laboratory
is home for four Navy divers.
Activity in the SEALAB
is monitored
by closed circuit television
linked to the surface.
Compared to the cramped confines
of the Genesis pressure chamber,
SEALAB I was almost spacious.
The aquanauts were still
breathing mostly helium,
and because it absorbs heat
much faster than regular air,
the lab had to be kept
in the mid-80s
in order to keep them warm.
And while the small percentage
of concentrated oxygen
in the atmosphere
was enough to keep the men alive
there wasn't enough
to strike a match.
The pressure inside kept
the surrounding water at bay,
allowing the divers
to enter and exit the lab
through an open hatch
in the floor.
Once they left behind
the steamy confines of SEALAB,
the aquanauts discovered
a marine paradise.
♪♪
"It was like living inside
a giant aquarium,"
Bob Barth remembered.
♪♪
The aquanauts spent
much of their time in the water,
testing out
new rebreathing systems
that recycled gases like helium
and filtered out
the dangerous carbon dioxide
exhaled with every breath.
Mostly they were dealing
with systems and methods.
"Can we keep the gas mixture
healthy?
"Is the gear they are using
in the water
suitable for this kind of dive?"
All these variables
are in the mix
and the real trick is
to have this go well enough
that the Navy might let them
try it again.
After ten days,
a hurricane bearing down
on Bermuda forced Bond
to cut short the mission.
With 15-foot waves
roiling the surface,
the aquanauts survived
a dangerous transfer
to the support ship
and after more than two days
of decompression,
they emerged safe and sound.
George Bond's vision
of man living under the sea
at last seemed within reach.
♪♪
SEALAB I is perceived
as a success,
which is great for Bond,
but also leaves open
a lot of questions.
These guys were in Bermuda,
the water was warm.
The visibility was good.
That's not the way it is
in most of the ocean.
And the big question is
what if we want to go deeper?
The next step
was to leave behind
the balmy waters of Bermuda
and test the SEALAB program
in a far more inhospitable
domain...
One that would push
the aquanauts
to the very edge
of human endurance.
♪♪
It's pretty amazing
our own ocean
with its maximum depth
of about seven miles
has been largely unseen,
largely unexplored.
Actually 95% of the ocean
territory remains unknown.
In the middle
of the 20th century,
the perception of the ocean
was generally that
it was so big, so vast,
so resilient
that there's not much
that humans could do
to harm the ocean.
It was basically thought
to be too big to fail.
But the ocean is where most
of life on earth actually lives.
The ocean drives climate,
weather, regulates temperature.
It is our life support system.
SEALAB was a critical part
of understanding
this part of the universe.
Following the success
of SEALAB I,
the Navy gave George Bond's team
almost $2 million...
Ten times more than they had
invested in his first habitat.
SEALAB Il was designed and built
by the Navy's submarine
architects.
Bond recruited
three teams of aquanauts...
28 divers in all...
Including Scott Carpenter,
Bob Barth, and scientists
from the Scripps Institution
of Oceanography.
Each team would take turns on
the bottom for 15 days straight,
at more than 200 feet.
I think in the immediate future,
exploration first of the ocean
will bring us
far greater rewards
than the exploration of space
because, if for no other reason,
of the distances involved.
The richest part
of the sea floor
is roughly a million times
closer than the moon.
♪♪
♪♪
When Bob Barth stepped out
of the diving bell
in August of 1965, the warm,
crystalline waters of Bermuda
were a distant memory.
He was floating
in almost total blackness,
just above the floor
of the Pacific Ocean,
off the coast of San Diego.
The water was a bone-chilling
45 degrees,
sapping his energy
and urging him toward
the lights of SEALAB Il,
lying at a slight angle
on the rim of
Scripps Submarine Canyon.
Over the edge,
the depth plunged to 600 feet.
It's dark and dingy and cold.
And Bond wanted
to get a little deeper
and live a little rougher.
On a good day,
you could probably see
about five or six feet.
On a bad day, you couldn't see
your hand in front of your face.
If you've got any bit
of claustrophobia at all,
you're not going to make it.
And the cold aggravates
the situation even worse
because then you start
losing mobility,
you start losing
thinking ability.
The combination of cold and dark
is pretty traumatic.
Part of the mission was to test
whether the saturated divers
could swim away from their base
and go as much as 300 feet
further down into the canyon
and before returning.
The men were ordered
to set up weather stations,
test new
electrically heated wetsuits,
and attempt to salvage
the sunken fuselage
of a fighter jet.
With no voice communication,
it was easy to get lost
in the limited visibility
of the sea floor.
Working in these conditions
was exhausting and dangerous.
The cold sapped
the divers' strength,
lines became tangled,
lights burned out
and took hours to replace.
Any malfunction that created
accidental buoyancy
and suddenly sent them upward
meant almost certain death
from the bends.
Scorpion fish,
whose sharp spines
could penetrate a wet suit
and cause excruciating pain,
lurked around the entrance
to the lab.
Halfway through his deployment,
Scott Carpenter was stung
and laid out for days.
There are no computers,
there are no warning systems.
There is really only
the diver's sixth sense
that something is not right
with his gas mixture
or maybe he's been out
a little too long
and he better get back
to the habitat right away,
because that is the only
safe place people can go.
You're now locked into
that hatch on that seafloor
and you have to get back there
if you run out of air
or if you have a problem.
You're no longer a scuba diver
who's free to go back
to the surface.
SEALAB Il, SEALAB Il,
this is Papa Topside.
Despite the hazards,
as time went on,
living on the bottom
of the ocean
began to feel almost routine.
The longer the SEALAB Il
aquanauts stayed submerged,
the more media attention
they generated.
Never one to miss a good chance
for publicity,
George Bond arranged
for Scott Carpenter
to receive a call
from President Lyndon Johnson.
Scott, I'm mighty proud
to hear from you.
You've convinced me
and all of the nation
that whether you're going up
or down you have the courage
and the skill to do a fine job.
When SEALAB Il was raised
to the surface
on October 11, 1965,
it had been manned continuously
for 45 days,
including Carpenter's
record stay of 30 days below.
The crew of SEALAB Il's
mothership
man the decompression chamber
after aquanaut Scott Carpenter
and his men
return to the surface.
Everybody appears
hail and hearty
after their life 200 feet
below the surface.
♪♪
At a later press conference,
all of the aquanauts are elated
over their accomplishments.
The Navy feels that men
have proven that man
can readily adapt himself to the
strange environment of the sea
with little or no ill effects.
Carpenter,
the second American
to orbit the Earth,
points out his living quarters
to his wife.
Now he's the only man
to hold records in the sky above
and in the sea below.
While George Bond and his team
continued
their innovative experiments,
another pioneer was determined
to introduce a mass audience
to the mysteries
of the undersea world.
The French explorer
and adventurer Jacques Cousteau
produced two
Academy Award-winning films
that revealed an unknown
universe under the waves.
The documentaries featured
a series of structures
that served as both
ocean habitats
and set pieces
for his cinematic endeavors.
In contrast to Bond's rigorously
scientific Navy program,
most of Cousteau's pods
were close enough to the surface
that the aquanauts
were breathing regular air.
Ever sensitive
to their appearance,
Cousteau had installed
a tanning booth.
Mozart and Vivaldi played
on the sound system.
You could sit around a table,
drinking fine French wine
while you were dining
underwater.
Cousteau became the public face
and inspired the public
to understand
that going up
in the sky is wonderful,
going into the ocean
is maybe equally wonderful,
and important too.
As elegant and eye-catching
as Cousteau's first ventures
may have been,
in George Bond's opinion,
the experiments didn't generate
"one iota of useful
physiological information."
But just a month
after SEALAB Il,
using some of George Bond's
pioneering saturation
techniques,
Cousteau managed to put
six divers onto the floor
of the Mediterranean, almost
330 feet below the surface.
If Bond and his team were going
to push the boundaries
of knowledge in SEALAB Ill,
they would have to take
their habitat deeper
than any had gone before.
♪♪
On Christmas Eve, 1968,
the crew of Apollo 8
became the first men
to orbit the moon...
I have a beautiful view
of the Earth here.
Beaming back a picture
of an "earthrise"...
That showed a small blue sphere
floating in the empty blackness
of space.
♪♪
It was clear that America had
pulled ahead in the space race,
as Cold War tensions
remained high.
The game of nuclear
brinksmanship continued
under the waves.
And the U.S. Navy kept searching
for new ways to gain
an advantage
against a stealthy
and dangerous foe.
Deep sea divers
were beginning to figure
in the spymaster's plan,
especially if they could operate
at radically increased depths
for extended periods of time.
All eyes were on the next phase
of SEALAB's pioneering test.
♪♪
Here at the San Francisco Bay
Naval Shipyard,
workers prepare SEALAB Ill,
a special habitat
for ocean floor dwelling,
to be used by the aquanauts
of the Navy's most ambitious
undersea experiment to date.
SEALAB Ill was a roomier,
remodeled version
of its predecessor,
in which five teams
of nine aquanauts each
were expected to spend
a total of almost two months
under the surface.
But as it was being readied,
Bond and the others
received word from the Navy
that their habitat would be sent
down to a daunting 600 feet.
The change in depth
was never explained,
but clearly SEALAB was becoming
an increasingly important part
of the secret Cold War
competition
for control of the oceans.
600 feet suddenly became
the goal,
which is a kind of quantum leap.
It's like now you're going
to try to go to the moon
instead of just orbit the Earth
and it seems to some people
like maybe they were skipping
some steps here.
On February 15, 1969,
300-ton SEALAB Ill was lowered
to the sea floor
off the coast
of San Clemente, California.
The teams of aquanauts
were standing by,
with Scott Carpenter acting
as an advisor to George Bond,
Walt Mazzone, and a group
of mission commanders.
♪♪
Almost immediately, Bond knew
they had a serious problem.
Once again, it revolved around
the helium gas...
It was bubbling out of
multiple gaps in SEALAB Ill.
The Navy team that had overseen
the habitat's construction
had never pressure-tested
the lab with helium.
If divers couldn't fix
the leaks,
their supply of the precious gas
would run out,
and SEALAB Ill would have to be
abandoned.
The naval officers in charge
huddled with Bond
and weighed their options.
They decided to send down
the first team of aquanauts
to try and enter the habitat
and fix the leaks from inside.
Okay, I'd like to get all
members of Team 1 over here.
Almost 24 hours after
SEALAB Ill was submerged,
Bob Barth, Richard Blackburn,
Berry Cannon, and John Reaves
were pressurized to 600 feet,
and began their descent
in the diving bell.
But it acted more like a
refrigerator than an elevator.
The bell had absolutely no heat
in it whatsoever.
So it was cold air blowing on
you with an arctic wind chill.
♪♪
The electric heater was broken.
The neoprene wet suits provided
little protection,
and the helium
in the atmosphere,
and inside their lungs
and tissues,
sapped the heat
from their bodies.
♪♪
It took more than an hour
to reach the bottom.
When they arrived at 600 feet,
the men were colder
than they had ever been
in their lives.
Colder than hell.
You're breathing helium
and your body is permeated
with helium.
It's a lot colder a lot faster
and a lot colder, period.
I mean our teeth
were chattering.
But we thought we'd be able
to get into the, the habitat
and, and we expected it
to be warm
and we'd be able to recuperate.
Barth and Cannon
swam toward the bubbling SEALAB.
Barth tried to open
the entry hatch,
but it wouldn't budge.
After 15 minutes
of fruitless labor,
they were ordered topside
and had to endure
another freezing ascent
in the bell.
♪♪
While still-pressurized
and confined to their chamber
onboard the support ship,
the aquanauts did their best
to warm up.
George Bond tried to determine
how long their bodies
needed to recover
before they could go back down.
They were worried about us
being cold.
I said, "We'll be all right,
we'll be all right."
I told them we need
to get back down there.
I made the choice
to get back down and get done
what we were trying to
or we would lose the habitat.
Bond and the officers in charge
of the program decided
to send Barth and his team down
four hours later.
Scott Carpenter argued
for more recovery time,
but was overruled.
The minute we closed the hatch,
the temperature
did the same thing.
We'd all been through this
for like 24 hours
so it was much worse.
But we were so numb by that time
we didn't know
it was much worse.
♪♪
The bell reached the bottom
around 4:00 a.m.
on February 17.
Barth and Cannon dropped through
the open hatch,
slipping once again
into the icy darkness.
They've got about 30 yards
to swim down,
get from the bell
to the entrance to the habitat.
The leaking appears
to have been coming from
where the power cables
hooked into the lab.
Berry Cannon veers off
a little bit
to have a little look
at what the problem might be
before he went inside the lab
to try to solve it.
Barth struggled once again with
the hatch, but it was no use.
Then, he suddenly turned around
and realized his partner,
Berry Cannon, was in trouble.
John Reaves and I heard
this scream in the water.
And we looked at each other and
said, "What the heck was that?"
Cannon was convulsing,
his jaws clamped shut,
his gas regulator floating free.
Barth grabbed what was called
a buddy breather...
An emergency supply of gas
from Cannon's tanks...
And tried repeatedly to force it
into his mouth.
He can't get the regulator
back in Berry Cannon's mouth.
And Barth is feeling like
he himself might just pass out.
His next best move is to get
himself back to the bell
where he might get help
or at least save himself.
♪♪
I tried to get him in the bell
and bring him back
to the surface.
But by that time,
I was kind of beat, beat up.
People topside had seen
what was going on
through their closed circuit TV
and said,
"Get a diver in the water."
When I got there, Berry's
mouthpiece was floating up here.
And Bob had already tried to use
his buddy breather,
so I took the mouthpiece
and shoved it in his...
tried to shove it in his mouth.
And his teeth were locked solid.
It wouldn't go into his mouth
at all.
♪♪
Blackburn manages to sort of
wrangle Berry Cannon
under one arm
and kicking
and swimming furiously.
He makes it back up to the bell.
We kept up trying to revive him.
Bond and Mazzone and the topside
crew are hearing,
"Faster, faster,"
like, "Get us up."
As the exhausted aquanauts were
brought back to the surface,
George Bond heard the message
he was dreading.
"Berry Cannon is dead."
♪♪
A civilian U.S. aquanaut
taking part in the nation's
most ambitious
underwater living experiment
to date
died today in water
600 feet deep
off the Southern California
coast.
The victim was one of four
divers trying to find a leak
in the underwater capsule
when he was stricken.
♪♪
Devastated.
I mean... when, when people
found out that Berry
had, had died...
hardly a dry eye.
Anybody associated
with that program,
you know it was just...
it was just terrible.
We, we all...
we all knew the risks,
but when it's...
when it actually happens
and you're faced with it,
it's, it's very sobering.
♪♪
Immediately, the Navy suspended
the SEALAB program
and launched an investigation
into Cannon's death.
His fellow aquanauts still had
almost a full week
of decompression to endure
before they emerged
from the chamber
on the support ship.
It was pretty well deserted.
There was only the skeleton crew
that was there
to keep us alive, basically,
and, and decompressing us
and get us out safely.
And everybody else
had gone home.
By the time the aquanauts
were released
from their decompression,
Berry Cannon's funeral
had already taken place.
♪♪
A Navy board of investigation
asked tough questions
of Bond and the rest
of the SEALAB team.
Richard Blackburn
sharply criticized
some of the decisions
that were made.
"We were all pushed to the point
where mistakes were inevitable,"
he testified.
"It is a horrible thing
for a man to have to die
to slow this outfit down."
The San Diego Union
reported that Bond
was "emotionally shaken
several times while recalling
the details of the tragedy."
The investigation lasted
almost a month,
and it concluded
that CO2 poisoning
was the most likely cause
of Cannon's death.
But the entire program
became another casualty.
By the end of 1970, the Navy
had shut SEALAB down completely.
George Bond's dream
of man living under the sea
seemed to have run its course.
♪♪
To the American public, SEALAB
looked like an abject failure,
but the Navy's Cold War
architects saw, instead,
a new top-secret role
for the program.
The SEALAB program begins
to enter into the thinking
of America's Cold War
planning and strategy
with new Navy operations
in which they could
take advantage of their
new saturation diving know-how.
♪♪
Some of the SEALAB divers
became covert operatives
serving onboard
the U.S.S. Halibut,
an aging nuclear submarine,
that featured a portable
compression chamber...
A kind of mini SEALAB...
Attached to its deck.
Over the next few years,
the Halibut would become
their base for new kinds of
dangerous deep-water operations.
SEALAB personnel
were natural recruits.
Almost to a man, aquanauts
went into the black programs.
Late in 1972,
the Halibut snuck inside
Russian territorial waters
in the Sea of Okhotsk
and located a cable
on the bottom.
♪♪
Saturation divers attached
a recording device
that secretly intercepted
a gold mine
of Soviet
nuclear communications.
It was one of the Cold War
high points for the Navy,
made possible by
the pioneering work of SEALAB.
And the concept of saturation
diving spread around the world.
Deep sea oil exploration
took off.
Most of the guys that had worked
at the experimental diving unit
ended up working for
diving companies in the Gulf,
and the North Sea,
and all over the world.
From his retirement
in North Carolina,
George Bond looked on with
satisfaction as his prediction
that divers would one day
be working hundreds of feet
below the surface came true.
In the 1980s,
the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration,
NOAA,
created an undersea station
that was originally
to be named after Bond,
but was ultimately christened
Aquarius.
The habitat is still
in operation
near a coral reef a few miles
south of the Florida Keys.
SEALAB was,
for me,
transformative because as a...
as a diver, a scientist first,
I use the ocean as a laboratory.
Saturation diving gave me
a chance to get to know
the seascape, if you will,
the neighborhood.
Anybody who is a field scientist
in a desert or in the mountains
or anywhere, you know,
you keep learning things
as you spend time there.
It makes all the difference
in the world.
SEALAB was absolutely
fundamental.
It built the concept of
being able to live underwater,
to actually experience
the blue part of the planet.
♪♪
♪♪
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