Sealab

America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor

By: Ben Hellwarth

Narrated by: Christa Lewis

Sealab is the underwater Right Stuff: the compelling 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.

©2012 Ben Hellwarth (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Must hear!

Fantastic book! I learned about it while listening to “The Great Dive Podcast.” You can’t make stories like this up. This is a great book for divers and non-divers alike.

Cool story, but very irritating male-centrism

As with many writings about technical diving, the constant use of “man,” “he,” “him,” and “his” in nearly all statements about divers and humanity in general is irritating and unnecessary. Statements such as “for man to live on the sea floor, he…” and countless others. I thought this book must have been written in the 1980s or earlier, but nope! 2013! Wow.

As a female technical diver, this sort of thing is my pet peeve. I realize that many people wouldn’t notice or care. But our language reflects our privilege and our biases and affects our beliefs and behaviors. Using gender-inclusive language takes almost no effort and costs nothing. Plenty of people other than men have and will continue to be avid and accomplished divers in recreational and professional capacities, and the language of books like these should reflect that.

Otherwise, it’s a decently told story of the history of saturation diving. Not spectacular, but fine.

An excellent story of adventure and discovery.

It's a wonderful story. Audio book is very well presented, and I enjoyed it greatly

Informational but, it doesn’t develop the characters or engage the listener

Informational but, it doesn’t develop the characters or engage the listener. Also, there are disjointed chapters. This book doesn’t know what it wants to be.

More strife and death than science

This book is about the personalities, politics, religion, and death of people working on this project. That's not what I wanted to read. At all.

It's very light on science, engineering, and technology. It talks a little bit about medical stuff like the bends. It talks a little bit about breathable gas mixtures. But mostly its about strife and death.