COURTESY MARK HARRIS
Once it is sealed and moved to its permanent home beneath the waves of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary early next year, Vanguard will be the world’s first new subsea habitat in nearly four decades. Teams of four scientists will live and work on the seabed for a week at a time, entering and leaving the habitat as scuba divers. Their missions could include reef restoration, species surveys, underwater archaeology, or even astronaut training.
One of Vanguard’s modules, unappetizingly named the “wet porch,” has a permanent opening in the floor (a.k.a. a “moon pool”) that doesn’t flood because Vanguard’s air pressure is matched to the water around it.
It is this pressurization that makes the habitat so useful. Scuba divers working at its maximum operational depth of 50 meters would typically need to make a lengthy stop on their way back to the surface to avoid decompression sickness. This painful and potentially fatal condition, better known as the bends, develops if divers surface too quickly. A traditional 50-meter dive gives scuba divers only a handful of minutes on the seafloor, and they can make only a couple of such dives a day. With Vanguard’s atmosphere at the same pressure as the water, its aquanauts need to decompress only once, at the end of their stay. They can potentially dive for many hours every day.
That could unlock all kinds of new science and exploration. “More time in the ocean opens a world of possibility, accelerating discoveries, inspiration, solutions,” said Kristen Tertoole, Deep’s chief operating officer, at Vanguard’s unveiling in Miami in October. “The ocean is Earth’s life support system. It regulates our climate, sustains life, and holds mysteries we’ve only begun to explore, but it remains 95% undiscovered.”
COURTESY DEEP
Subsea habitats are not a new invention. Jacques Cousteau (naturally) built the first in 1962, although it was only about the size of an elevator. Larger habitats followed in the 1970s and ’80s, maxing out at around the size of Vanguard.
But the technology has come a long way since then. Vanguard uses a tethered connection to a buoy above, known as the “surface expression,” that pipes fresh air and water down to the habitat. It also hosts a diesel generator to power a Starlink internet connection and a tank to hold wastewater. Norman Smith, Deep’s chief technology officer, says the company modeled the most severe hurricanes that Florida expects over the next 20 years and designed the tether to withstand them. Even if the worst happens and the link is broken, Deep says, Vanguard has enough air, water, and energy storage to support its crew for at least 72 hours.
That number came from DNV, an independent classification agency that inspects and certifies all types of marine vessels so that they can get commercial insurance. Vanguard will be the first subsea habitat to get a DNV classification. “That means you have to deal with the rules and all the challenging, frustrating things that come along with it, but it means that on a foundational level, it’s going to be safe,” says Patrick Lahey, founder of Triton Submarines, a manufacturer of classed submersibles.
JASON KOERNER/GETTY IMAGES FOR DEEP
Although Deep hopes Vanguard itself will enable decades of useful science, its prime function for the company is to prove out technologies for its planned successor, an advanced modular habitat called Sentinel. Sentinel modules will be six meters wide, twice the diameter of Vanguard, complete with sweeping staircases and single-occupant cabins. A small deployment might have a crew of eight, about the same as the International Space Station. A big Sentinel system could house 50, up to 225 meters deep. Deep claims that Sentinel will be launched at some point in 2027.
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