From under the churning Pacific last week came the sound of a human voice: "Greetings, earth people." Far from a Jules Verne fantasy, it was the breezy salutation of one of the men of Sealab II, the U.S.'s capsule in inner space 205 ft. down on the ocean floor, one-half mile off the coast near La Jolla, Calif. The ten aquanauts on board, led there two weeks ago by Astronaut-turned-Aquanaut Scott Carpenter, were winding up the first part of a 45-day adventure that aims to discover man's capacity to live comfortably and work effectively at the lower depths.
A project of the U.S. Navy and the University of California's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Sealab is the nation's most ambitious effort thus far to explore and eventually exploit the ocean's great store of food, oil and mineral resources. In Sealab I, which sub merged last year off Bermuda, four Navymen proved that they could stay down at 192 ft. for nine days. Now three teams of ten aquanauts each plan to stay underwater for 15 days at a stretch, with Carpenter remaining a whole month.
Sealab II will enable the U.S. partly to catch up with, and in several respects to exceed, the undersea exploits of France's Jacques-Yves Cousteau (TIME cover, March 28, 1960). He has stationed teams of divers at 80 ft. for one week. This week, in his third major project, six French divers in a spherical capsule will live for 15 days at 330 ft. in the sea off the Riviera resort at Cap Ferrat.
Papa Topside. Built at a cost of $850,000, Sealab II is a 12-ft. by 57-ft. steel cylinder that houses a well-equipped scientific and medical labo ratory, a compact galley and a dining area with bunks lining the walls. Standing by on the surface is a support barge linked to Sealab by an umbilical cable for power and communications. From the barge, Navy Captain George F. Bond, 50, whom the aquanauts call "Papa Topside," bosses the exercise, chats with them by intercom and observes them by closed-circuit television.
Topside keeps a careful watch over the aquanauts' condition. Each morning the doctor on board Sealab takes blood, saliva and urine samples, checks the aquanauts' heartbeats, brain waves and blood pressures. The aquanauts are tested for sight and hearing, strength and coordination. At night each man sits down to an Electrowriter to file a confidential report to the surface on how he feels and, as Bond says, "what stinks about the program."
Topsy-Turvy Life. Supplies are lowered to Sealab in a small, pressurized capsule—an aquatic dumbwaiter that brings in such goodies as chocolate cake and fresh meat to supplement the aquanauts' stock of freeze-dried food. The men can watch commercial TV but prefer to peer out the portholes at the fish looking in at them. During the flight of Gemini 5, Aquanaut Carpenter even chatted directly with Astronaut Gordon Cooper. In case of emergency, the men could get power and fresh water from a tube linking them to shore, and they could surface in a 14-ft. capsule anchored outside the Sealab.