Florida couple plan for life under the sea

10 News WTSP: Florida couple plan for life under the sea
Cocoa, Florida (Florida Today) -- Today, the Chamberlands live under the sunny, blue skies of west Cocoa. Soon, they hope to gaze up through aqua-gray tints of Atlantica, the world's first permanent undersea colony.

They're determined to do so by 2015, somewhere off East Central Florida, maybe even Brevard County. They've signed up 13 others to live with them in cylindrical steel modules, 200 feet down and tapping into the Gulf Stream for energy, oxygen and scientific discovery.

The Chamberlands envision quarters safe enough for children. Even their cat, Snickers, will go with them, transported in a submarine-like cylinder with a glass bubble port.

"Now we seem to be focused and preoccupied on space, but the ocean cultures are coming and they're coming fast," said Dennis Chamberland, a contract manager for NASA who's designed prototypes of advanced life support systems for the moon and Mars. "It's inevitable."

The 59-year-old is quick to point out that NASA isn't involved in his project, dubbed the Atlantica Expeditions. But for Chamberland, pioneering the first undersea colony would fulfill a lifelong crusade -- what he describes as the inborn "splinter" in his mind.

"I just never turned loose of it," he said of his childhood dream.

But the notion is far from child's play or fantasy. The Chamberlands say they're less than two years from a record-setting dry run of long-term undersea living.

Along with a fellow aquanaut, and their pet, they hope to submerge for 90 days in an undersea habitat called Leviathan on July 4, 2012. The stay would break the world record of 69 days, set in 1991 in the Jules' Undersea Lodge in Key Largo.

The Chamberlands already hold the record for the most accumulated days working as a married undersea aquanaut team, 31 days combined from eight missions.

While Snickers is a relative newcomer to the underwater world, Dennis and Claudia have been diving partners for two decades. Dennis Chamberland never goes in the water without her.

She is the CEO of their nonprofit, League of the New Worlds, founded 20 years ago to promote colonization of the ocean and space.

Far from water

A main image on "The Atlantic Expeditions" website is of a young boy gazing out over the aqua glow of a futuristic undersea city.

The seeds of Dennis Chamberland's boyhood obsession -- his "splinter" -- germinated about as far as away from the ocean as American child can grow up, on the great plains of Haskell, Okla., a town of 1,800 just south of Tulsa. The local library provided the only outlet for his yearning for ocean adventure.

He'd spend countless hours in his tree house, watching morning rays pierce the leaves, relishing the sanctuary and separation from the ground.

Chamberland said his can-do attitude came from his father, an aerospace engineering technician who built their home and had a sign on his desk that read: "If you can dream it, I can build it."

At age 12, Dennis would rush home to watch his hero, Mike Nelson, played by Lloyd Bridges, on "Sea Hunt." But at 14, he failed a swimming class at the YMCA.

Years later, as a student at Oklahoma State University, he taught himself to swim and eventually became a certified diver.

Early 'Survivor'

Chamberland also kept exploring the idea of undersea living and created the Omega Project while at college, including a weeklong mission in a mock sea lab.

"It was a really early version of 'Survivor,' " said Chamberland, who finished a dual major in physical sciences and psychology, then served as a U.S. Navy officer in the Pacific.

Six years after graduating, he returned to Oklahoma State to earn a master's in bioenvironmental engineering. That led to a job with the Navy as a civilian nuclear engineer and then for NASA in the mid-1980s.

Chamberland became a NASA aquanaut in 1994, directing several missions, including the first planting and harvesting of an agricultural crop on the ocean floor at MarineLab in Key Largo.

He also designed and built NASA's Scott Carpenter Space Analog Station, a 101/2-ton submersible lab in Key Largo named after the astronaut and aquanaut.

Launched in 1997 and 1998, about 20 aquanauts visited the station, including Hollywood director James Cameron, of "Titanic" and "Avatar" fame. Cameron is listed on Chamberland's website among 65 crew members signed up to visit during the so-called Atlantica Expeditions.

Dangers at sea

National Geographic Channel recently featured Chamberland's and other modern efforts to live undersea on its "Naked Science" series. But extended underwater stays date back more than a half century.

Robert Stenuit embarked on the world's first aquanaut mission in 1962 in the French Riviera. He lowered 200 feet in a three-foot-diameter, 11-foot-long aluminum cylinder. The planned two-day dive aborted after the first day because of technical problems.

The Navy's SEALAB project in the 1960s sunk experimental habitats off Bermuda and California, but canceled the program after a fatal accident in 1969.

The dangers and expense foiled other attempts. Jacques Cousteau's experiments in the 1960s with undersea living and research stations led him years later to repudiate ocean colonization as "unrealistic."

But Chamberland says previous efforts were doomed because they tried to adapt humans to living under high pressures, which can cause health problems.

In Chamberland's Atlantica, just like the International Space Station or a submarine, the habitat's atmosphere would be close to the same as on land.

Isolated life

Chris Combs, an adjunct oceanography professor at Florida Tech, lived three days in 1972 on one of the early versions of an undersea habitat, Hydrolab.

"It was one of the most interesting psychological experiments of my life," Combs said. "I wasn't ready to go up."

Built in 1966, the cylindrical Hydrolab could fit four people, for experiments conducted through the mid-1980s in the Bahamas and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Now it sits in the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum.

But Combs' biggest question is one the Chamberlands hear often.

"I can't imagine why anyone would want to be that isolated from the rest of the world," he said "The word 'permanent' is the most challenging word for me in the whole concept."

For Dennis Chamberland, the primary appeal is the scientific discovery.

He and the others want to settle as "intelligent stewards," allowing visiting scientists to study the Gulf Stream and marine life.

Oceans encompass the largest biological realm on Earth, 321 million cubic miles, compared with 59 million square miles of land.

"We know more as a species about what's going on the surface of Mars," Dennis Chamberland said. "We are literally poisoning the lifeblood of our planet, and we have no clue what we're doing out there."

Diving history

But his yearning to live undersea also hearkens back to that boyhood tree house in Oklahoma. In his book, Chamberland describes a similar tranquility of watching daybreak from Carpenter Station. He would peer out through schooling fish and rising bubbles, with the same wonder he once had looking through the leaves.

The Chamberlands plan to keep their vacation home in Tennessee, but eventually sell their house in West Cocoa.

Claudia Chamberland was an avid dive partner of her father, a retired NASA engineer who invented an underwater breathing apparatus in the 1930s. Together, they would explore the Bahamas and caves in springs throughout Florida.

Dennis and Claudia Chamberland met in 1990 and have passed on their passion for ocean adventure to their children, five sons and a daughter.

Their 2012 mission is "substantially funded," Dennis Chamberland said, but the permanent colony poses a greater challenge. It will cost tens of millions to build what they envision -- not just an outpost or lab, they stress, but a community.

Chamberland sees undersea living as a natural evolution.

"Humans just expand, and this is just one of those migrations -- of humans into the sea," he said.