Radiotopia

From PRX

From PRX's Radiotopia, this is Radio Diaries.

I'm Joe Richmond.

From ancient myths of sea monsters lurking below

to Jules Verne's 20,000 leagues under the sea,

the ocean has long been a source of both fear and fascination. Back in the 1960s, that fascination led people to try and go deeper than ever before.

To a surprising extent, the sea has remained a mystery.

We know less at the ocean of our feet where we came from than we do the sky above our head. That's President John F. Kennedy speaking in 1963.

It was the age of exploration.

While NASA was getting front-page headlines in its quest to put a man on the moon,

the Navy was quietly conducting a series of tests

to see if humans might be able to live and work on the deep sea floor, with

the goal of someday even building colonies under the sea.

They trained a group of men to be aquanauts, including the well-known astronaut Scott Carpenter.

After a successful experiment in the Caribbean, in 1965, the aquanauts set out to live in an

undersea habitat off the California coast for more than a month.

Today on the show, producer Sarah Kate Kramer brings us the story of C-Lab.

This is Commander M. Scott Carpenter, who is America's only astronaut Aquanaut.

With other divers, he's beginning an experiment that will test man's ability to live and work in the sea. Called sea lab, it is conducted

off the California coast. My name is Chris Stover. My father was Scott Carpenter, a Project Mercury

astronaut, and he was fascinated by the sea.

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