Tektite: The “Underwater Space Station” of General Electric

Deployed to a depth of 50 feet in Great Lameshur Bay, Virgin Islands back in 1970, the Tektite undersea habitat predated Skylab by three years. It was in fact intended to be a sort of ‘trial run’ for Skylab. Someplace where human behavior in a confined hostile environment habitat over extended periods could be closely observed, without the expense or danger of doing so in space.

Tektite was among the largest, most ambitious undersea habitats ever built. The internal volume, as a single structure (i.e. excluding Conshelf 2) was second only to Conshelf 3. The dual drum-shaped capsules were linked by a water tight corridor, a first for any standalone underwater structure, and several dome shaped windows afforded a magnificent view of the surrounding undersea environment.

Tektite was designed by the space division of General Electric, under the direction of engineer Brooks Tenney, Jr. While it lacked a hangar for accepting or deploying submersibles like Conshelf 2, it did include a shark cage style door to keep unwanted visitors away from the vicinity of the moon pool, as well as a panoramic observation tower atop one of the main living modules.

Deployment was harrowing due to the immense size and weight of the habitat. 64 lbs of pig iron ingots were needed for every cubic foot of interior space, due to the powerful buoyancy of air. That’s just to cancel it out, too. To securely emplace the habitat, yet more weight was added. The bottom being a huge flat slab meant that the seafloor had to be manually leveled before it could be situated stably.

Emplacement required a submersible platform, a team of scuba divers, steel safety covers for the windows (lest one break in the process) and a whole host of other measures. It was an absolute ordeal, as is always the case for these habitats due to the difficulty of moving an entire building in one piece, much less one that weighs countless tons, then precisely guiding its descent to a particular spot on the ocean floor. A second, smaller habitat meant to accompany Tektite did not survive this process and had to be scrapped.

Once in place and hooked up to shoreside utilities like fresh air and electricity, Tektite had an illustrious career ahead of it. Some of the most renown aquanauts like Ian Koblick and Sylvia Earle cut their teeth on the Tektite project which remains the largest American undersea habitat ever built.

Sylvia Earle was among the first all female crew of any undersea habitat, which the local media patronizingly dubbed the “aqua-naughties”. Undaunted, Earle went on to carry out her scientific tasks aboard the Tektite with aplomb, and developed a passion for undersea living which she most recently got to indulge aboard Aquarius Reef Base during “Mission Blue” in 2012.

It’s easy to forget the barriers women faced to participating in the forefront of human exploration of space or the oceans during that era. Even those who exhaustively proved their merits were still percieved and written about in a dismissive way, Earle’s all-female crew more of a novelty to the 1970s public than anything else.

Little did they know the heights Sylvia Earle’s career would reach in more recent years, known in the diving community as “Her Deepness”. Rubbing elbows with the likes of Fabien Cousteau, married at one point to Graham Hawkes, even launching her own deep sea exploration initiative called “Deep Search” which will one day make human missions to the Challenger Deep both safe and routine. She was even named Time Magazine’s first “Hero for the Planet” in 1988 for her conservation efforts.

The issues facing prolonged human spaceflight that the Tektite II missions uncovered were nontrivial. This is where the severity of the martini effect was first properly documented. Crews living under increased atmospheric pressure exhibited behavioral changes which made them unusually chummy and cooperative, but only with others in the same state of mind. The topside crew became unbearably irritating to them and at one point they even cut off communications. This data informed NASA’s future consideration of different breathing gas mixtures for Skylab and the ISS.

Sadly, despite the monumental achievement Tektite represented, like almost every other undersea habitat in history it was removed from the water and destroyed. There were heroic, if doomed efforts to save it though. A non profit named Tektite III was formed in California which was able to purchase the habitat for just $1 under the agreement that they take it off General Electric’s hands and transport it to their own facility.

By 1980 the habitat was fully refurbished, and the plan was to deploy it to San Francisco Bay for use as a teaching tool. That never came to fruition however, as they couldn’t raise the considerable sum needed for the most expensive part, transporting and safely emplacing such a huge, heavy structure on the sea bed. Ultimately it was torn down by welding students, and the scrap was sold off.

Perhaps the most important lessons Tektite yielded were about how to better design underwater habitats to reduce the largest single expense involved: Transporting something really fucking huge and heavy. To obviate the need for a submersible barge, the La Chalupa habitat was designed to be a barge itself while on the surface, made to float or sink as desired by the inclusion of submarine style ballast tanks.

The ballast was concrete, pumped into the space between the outer shell and the actual living modules only when it reaches a coastal shipyard, sourcing the concrete nearby. This and various other refinements made La Chalupa sufficiently affordable to operate compared to Tektite and other habitats that it could be salvaged, post-mission, by private interests. It is now operated as a hotel.

Today, Tektite is just a footnote in the history books. But provided our passion to send humans to dwell in the sea and explore it does not fizzle out, it doesn’t have to be the final chapter. Aquarius Reef Base carries the torch today, and with further technological improvements, the best may be yet to come.