Aquanaut

• 1. Introduction

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  Aquanaut Robert Sténuit spent 24 hours locked inside a one-man metal cylinder 200 feet underwater off Villefranche-sur-Mer on the French Riviera in September 1962. He is generally regarded as the first person to earn that title. His dive raises questions this account will follow: what physical state actually defines an aquanaut, and who else has attempted it? It also raises a darker one: how has this fate come to someone who never chose it at all?

• 2. Defining Saturation

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  The word aquanaut splices two ancient roots: the Latin aqua, meaning water, and the Greek nautes, meaning sailor, the same pattern that produced astronaut. Reaching that state means breathing at the surrounding water pressure until the mixture's inert gases fully dissolve into the body's tissues. This normally takes place in a seafloor habitat, sustained for 24 continuous hours or more without heading back to the surface.

  The SEALAB program produced one of the few groups of military aquanauts, even though strict usage usually reserves the term for scientists and academics. Commercial divers who go through the same saturation process are instead called saturation divers, a separate label entirely. An aquanaut also differs from a submariner, whose watertight vessel, like a submarine, keeps the ocean's pressure from ever reaching the body. That distinction would matter later, when the United States military and NASA turned the idea into a formal research program.

• 3. SEALAB and Tektite

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  Robert Sheats, author Robin Cook, and astronauts Scott Carpenter and Alan Shepard all wore the aquanaut title through United States military programs. Civilian aquanaut Berry L. Cannon died in 1969 from carbon dioxide poisoning during the Navy's SEALAB III project.

  Between 1969 and 1970, NASA ran two missions called Tektite I and Tektite II inside the Tektite underwater habitat. Scientists lived in the capsule for stretches as long as 20 days, breathing a nitrogen-oxygen mixture while researchers tracked fish ecology nearby. The missions also tested whether saturation diving from an underwater lab could work safely and cheaply. Tektite II went further, studying the psychological toll of prolonged confinement underwater. Those confinement studies sat alongside a growing roster of scientific aquanauts who would take the idea even further from shore.

• 4. Scientists Under Pressure

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  Sylvia Earle, Jonathan Helfgott, Joseph B. MacInnis, Dick Rutkowski, and Phil Nuytten all hold the scientific aquanaut title, one shared with roughly 700 others. Many of those hundreds are crew members from NASA's NEEMO missions, run out of the Aquarius underwater laboratory, and a number of them are astronauts. That entire roster trained under American programs, an ocean away from a Russian military effort built on the same idea.

• 5. Russian Depths

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  A unit of the Russian Navy has built its own aquanaut program, deploying divers to depths beyond 300 meters. The fleet includes an ocean vessel based in Vladivostok, purpose built for submarine rescue and other deep sea recovery work. That vessel carries a diving complex along with a deep sea diving craft that seats 120 people. Every one of those divers trained for the depths and volunteered for them, unlike the next person who would become an aquanaut.

• 6. Accidental Aquanaut

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  Harrison Odjegba Okene, a Nigerian ship's cook, survived 60 hours trapped inside the sunken tugboat Jascon-4 in 2013. The vessel had capsized on the 26th of May that year, after rough seas struck during a tension tow operation off the Nigerian coast. It had been holding steady an oil tanker at a Chevron platform in the Gulf of Guinea when it went down. It came to rest upside down on the seafloor at a depth of 30 meters, and eleven of Okene's crewmates died.

  Okene felt his way through the flooding interior until he reached the engineer's office. There, he discovered a pocket of trapped air roughly 1.2 meters high, holding just enough oxygen for him to survive.

  Three days after the accident, three South African divers found him, sent from a saturation diving support vessel to investigate the wreck and recover bodies. The rescuers, not expecting to find him alive, gave him a diving helmet to breathe through during the transit to the diving bell. He then returned to the surface only after decompressing from saturation, a process that took about two and a half days.

  Okene faced serious psychological trauma after his ordeal, but he overcame it. He went on to become a commercial diver himself, earning a Class 2 certificate recognised by the International Marine Contractors Association. He has since said he went to work for the very company that pulled him from the wreck of the Jascon-4.