Meet America's first new subsea habitat in 40 years

Ever wished you could actually sleep with the fishes

and live to tell the tale? A new underwater home for humans has been installed at Tennessee Reef

a marine sanctuary off the coast of Florida. And it's kind of like a reverse aquarium

with people inside and fish outside. The habitat, named Vanguard, is the first open ocean undersea habitat built

tested, and deployed in America in almost four decades. Designed to house four people

for stays of up to five days or more, Vanguard could help usher in a new era

of ocean exploration, marine science, and environmental monitoring. It may even prove useful in helping astronauts

train for space missions. Aquanauts, the people who are living in the habitat

are gonna be in what's called saturation. It's not a new concept, but essentially allows your tissue

and blood to become saturated with the gas that you're breathing, the inert gas that you're breathing

They're breathing off of umbilicals, at least for our first sets of missions. And so that's a continuous gas supply

So now you're looking at dives that are six, seven, eight hours long. Vanguard is made up of five main components First there the living chamber with four bunk beds countertops for meal prep and a table for eating with an ocean view Next there the bathroom

which can also be used as a workspace when needed, just requires some coordination with

your colleagues. I could say the same thing about spaceflight too. If you think about the crew that

was just an art of us, the very tiny space that they had. It's a really good training scenario for

folks like spaceflight crews or folks that are going to be living in small environments. A support team topside routinely takes dirty water out of the facility to be disposed of properly

Beyond the dry living areas is the dive center, which features a moon pool where divers can enter and exit the water

and a staging area to put on and take off dive equipment. Fourth is the habitat's foundation, which connects the habitat to the ocean floor

And finally, a topside buoy identifies where the habitat is located to people on the surface

and provides a mooring point for boats bringing divers to and from the habitat

When we have divers that are out in the water, we have a boat that's topside that has a recompression

chamber to handle any kind of emergency scenarios. Vanguard is the first submersible living space deployed by DEEP In its new location Vanguard sits 56 feet below the surface which is near the upper limit of 60 feet for PADI open scuba divers like me

Vanguard can be understood as a stepping stone to Deep's more long-term vision

of building out the ocean equivalent of the International Space Station, a modular space for studying and living in places that are otherwise unfit for long-term human survival

Deep's larger habitat is called Sentinel, and it will have some notable differences from Vanguard

including a modular design and individual sleeping quarters. Do you have a vision of having multiple habitats around the world

So we do have a sustained subsea presence 24-7. But that's still years away

Right now, Deep is focused on doing more tests on Vanguard in its new location

before inviting researchers and scientists to come aboard and live inside. I'm very excited about being a part of that and being able to go back and live underwater

Without ocean habitats like this, researchers time at depth is limited by their air supply

and the time consuming process of safely decompressing after being under pressure For non out there that basically means the longer and deeper you dive beyond a certain point the more time you have to spend equalizing to normal pressure Even relatively short dives at extreme depths can require hours

of safety stops on the way back up to surface safely. It's kind of like interstellar where

every minute they spend in high gravity was costing them years back home. Habitats like

Vanguard could save divers a lot of time by allowing multiple dives in a row without surfacing

and giving researchers a place to study samples immediately after gathering them

Now you have this undersea laboratory setting where you can actually take those samples and process them nearly real time

So instead of taking that sample back to the surface and decompressing that sample

now we're actually seeing what is happening at depth and in that environment

It's also in a much shorter time frame, so now you're getting less of a chance of sample degradation as well

To see a full walkthrough of DEEP's larger Sentinel habitat, click here. And let me know down in the comments whether you would like to stay in one of these pressurized underwater apartments for a while

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