Why Did Nasa Secretly Send 6 Men To The Bottom Of The Ocean In 1969? 

Why Did Nasa Secretly Send 6 Men To The Bottom Of The Ocean In 1969? 

July 1969, off the coast of Florida, a mission is launched that has remained a virtual secret for three decades.  Requesting launch altitude and permission to dive. Roger out. You are clear to dive at 600. Roger out. Your go for landing, over.  As Apollo 11 lands on the moon, an unknown NASA experiment probes the deep.

 The Eagle has landed.  Six courageous men are sealed inside this capsule and set adrift in an unexplored, hostile environment. Their mission, to survive for 30 days. What NASA discovered 2,000 ft below the sea still guides space exploration today. But these images were lost to history for more than three decades.

September 1999, world-renowned marine archaeologist Jim Delgado discovers in a local shipyard something only an ocean expert would recognize, the decaying remnants of an extraordinary submarine that until now had disappeared.  It was overgrown, moldy, half flooded. It was a mess.  35 years ago, this submarine embarked on a mission that culminated deep-sea exploration.

Now, its parts lie scattered in the back of a Vancouver shipyard, Delgado doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  Standing here looking at all these pieces all around me and I’m thinking, not only am I going to get all this stuff picked up and back to the museum, how am I going to put this all back together and how am I ever going to clean this up?  Petty stand clear.

 Delgado’s astounding discovery will become his obsession. He’s determined to reveal what happened inside this submarine.  I’m an archaeologist. So, I don’t mind figuring things out from the material record. It’s a little frustrating, but it’s also interesting because when you go through this kind of a process, you learn more about the sub on a very detailed and an intimate level.

 This guy is holding. So, he’s a solid he’s solid.  The most amazing thing about to me is the fact that as we put this all back together, the basic structure is all there down to tiny little pieces. That just blew me away. It’s a feat in ocean exploration that hasn’t been duplicated, that remains a landmark in human achievement.

 It was like living in an aquarium. You couldn’t get out. There’s all these stories.  With the submarine restored, Delgado searches the world for the crew who manned this one-of-a-kind machine on a single high-stakes mission. These are the remaining aquanauts, reunited after 35 years.  Do you need a Do you have a picture to remind you what they look like when you were on the mission?  I have a picture.

 See?  It’s like an airplane.  Oh, yes.  But that doesn’t look like Owen driving.  But the jet man was on the space station. I had ENOUGH TO WORK.  THAT’S A CATASTROPHE WAITING TO HAPPEN RIGHT THERE. WHEN WHEN WHEN Jack put his hand here, you said, “Don’t touch.”  Don’t touch.  I had it.  Is he Is he asking what’s crushed there?  As these men recall moments of humor aboard a deep-sea experiment, an extraordinary story unfolds.

 And the people are just Oh, wow, it’s so beautiful.  The PX-15 submarine is the brainchild of legendary Swiss explorer Jacques Piccard. Born to a legacy of extreme adventure and scientific genius, his father, Auguste Piccard, designed the world’s first pressurized capsule and was the first man launched into the stratosphere, setting the record for altitude nearly 10 mi high.

Using the same kind of pressurized capsule, father and son designed a deep-sea submarine, the Trieste. Jacques Piccard dives more than 7 mi down into the Mariana Trench in the Philippines with US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh, still the deepest dive in history.  I said we designed it to any depth because my father was a a scientist, engineer, physicist.

There’s no no reason to to not to go down to the bottom. Why not?  Piccard dreams of yet another unprecedented challenge, exploring unknown depths in a bigger submarine, submerged for weeks. He and colleague Erwin Aebersold begin plans for a revolutionary machine. But the world is now mesmerized by the space race.

NASA has its sights set on a moon landing by the end of the 1960s. But Grumman Aerospace, while building the lunar landing module for Apollo 11, is also venturing into deep-sea exploration. Hearing of Piccard’s submarine, Grumman immediately agrees to finance construction. Total cost, $2.5 million.  It is only a civil project, but there is absolutely no financial possibility to to to realize them without the the help and and the contribution from a big company.

 For engineer Erwin Aebersold, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance.  In the normal life of an engineer, you are mechanical engineer or electrical engineer or pilot, but you are not all together. And that is a great chance I have for cover to cover to make all work.  Piccard proposes a daring mission. His submarine, the PX-15, will drift without engine thrust. Astounding.

Without engine power, submarines sink. Propelled by the most powerful current on Earth, the Gulf Stream, Piccard believes his design will drift and hover at any depth. Six men will live and work inside this self-sufficient capsule for 30 days. They’ll observe the unexplored depths of the Gulf Stream from inside for the first time in history.

 The vehicle starting to pressurize as far as the propellant tanks are concerned.  NASA sees Piccard’s plan as a vital opportunity, a testing ground, analyzing human tolerance for work and travel in a hostile, unexplored environment.  We had no 30-day missions in those times, you know. In 30 days, how do you really react? How do you respond? How’s your psychological makeup change over the time?  NASA adds one critical condition.

 These men must stay sealed inside for the entire 30 days, or the survival experiment will fail. The engineering challenge is enormous. Design a submarine that will hover at depth without engine thrust. Erwin Aebersold is so consumed by this, he works around the clock. By night, he and his wife continue the calculations, not with a computer in those days, with an adding machine.

 The machine was on the bed in the pillow with my wife, and was on the table, and I said, “That times that make how much?” And during she was calculating, I was preparing the next one. And all the stability of the submarine were calculated that way during the night.  They design a submarine that will hover and withstand deep-sea pressure to 2,000 ft.

 American nuclear submarines of that era are crushed at just 1,000 ft. It’s a triumph of engineering.  What strikes me as being the best indication of the ingenuity of the Picards and Erwin Aebersold is how they make a submarine like this that can just hang motionless in the water and drift in the in the ocean. They basically built just as they did with Trieste, an undersea balloon.

With the lift bags being these ballast tanks that right above us. And these were filled with liquid that’s lighter than the water, just like helium is lighter than air and goes into a big gas bag in a balloon. These are the salt water ballast tanks. And what they do is they would flood these with seawater, and that was just enough to to pull her down.

Okay, so now you’ve counteracted the float, pulling her down, you got to be able to stop that. Got to be able to suddenly hang there and be neutrally buoyant. This round thing here, that’s a huge magnet. It’s the gate. And what you would do inside the sub is when you got to a certain level you wanted to stop, you started letting the ballast out.

You turned the magnet off, or you turned it down, and the steel shot which had been held in place by the magnetic energy now starts to dribble out. It’s an ingenious system.  Ironically, this deep-sea submarine will be built high in the mountains of Switzerland with Piccard’s expert team. Construction begins in January 1967 as the steel sheets are rolled to form the hull.

 The quality of steel is critical. Submarines are like chains, as strong as their weakest link. One flaw and the men inside will be crushed by deep-sea pressure that will reach 900 lbs per square inch.  The hull should be perfectly round, cylinder shape, and hemispheres perfectly spherical. The precision of the construction is fundamentally important to obtain a good dive and a good stability during dive.

 Each phase of construction is painstaking. Picard’s French-speaking team and Grumman’s English-speaking engineers not only speak different languages but use completely different measurement systems.  Difference over between Coca-Cola and Swiss wine, you know. But for me it was extremely interesting. And it sometime difficult because the difference between the metric system and the American system, you know.

 It was a very careful obligation that we had on checking every design.  Every item taken aboard must be weighed precisely, then positioned perfectly to evenly distribute weight throughout the sub.  The weight must be precise. Submarine to heavy will sink, but submarine to light cannot dive. So you have to know the weight continuously.

 Abersold’s ongoing calculations are so accurate they’re out by only 50 lb when the 147-ton sub is finally weighed.  Yeah. It’s a thing of beauty. So these incredible things are the electric motors and they’re one-of-a-kind designed specially for this sub. They haven’t done anything like this since. They rotate on this axis.

 So you can spin it so that it goes up and pushes you down, you can spin it so it goes like that and pushes you up or back or this way to move you however you want to go in the water column. These guys were just incredible. To come up with something like this so delicately balanced and weighing so much.  You go up and down like a helicopter and for the observation, for the research, it’s really useful.

 One of the most astounding features of this submarine is that it will run on 26 tons of lead batteries. Batteries that evaporate highly explosive hydrogen gas. To reduce the risk of a deadly explosion on board, Piccard fits the batteries outside in the keel, now exposing them to salt water and enormous deep-sea pressure, potentially lethal.

 This, as much as it was unique, was a little bit of an Achilles’ heel. It’s like an octopus tangle of electrical wires coming out. If they develop a leak, that electrical power is going to drain out into the ocean.  Piccard insists on another risk, portholes. Something submarine designers universally reject.

 But Piccard is determined the men on board will see life inside the Gulf Stream through 29 Plexiglas portholes. Grumman engineers have doubts.  They said the windows are weak points. So, you cannot afford a weak points. I said, “No, they are not weak points. It’s the same solidity for the boat. So, if you are if you have a hull, you can design the hull to have portholes and uh it will not be a weak point.

” So, this was certainly a breakthrough.  The way they’re shaped, smaller on the inside, wider on the outside, shaped that way, you’re looking through that tiny little thing, but you’ve got a field of vision like this, so you can see far more. These special portholes were the key to observing the Gulf Stream, and that’s what the mission was all about.

 March 1st, 1968. 15 months after construction begins, the PX-15 is complete. Now, one of the most complex pieces of ocean technology ever constructed must be deconstructed, packed in crates, and shipped from Switzerland to Florida, where the real test begins. West Palm Beach, Florida. 5 months after leaving Switzerland in crates, the PX-15 submarine is reassembled and ready for ocean testing.

It’s the biggest research submarine ever built. Nearly 50 ft long, 10 ft wide, 147 tons. 560 gallons of water is on board. 2 gallons per day per man. Some stored in these insulated tanks for hot food and showers. They’ll eat the same freeze-dried food as the astronauts, breathe oxygen evaporating from liquid oxygen tanks, and have carbon dioxide absorbed from the air by lithium hydroxide panels.

With only 1 and 3/8 inch steel between the men and the sea, they’ll depend on the Gulf Stream’s warmth to survive. It appears they’ve thought of everything.  Besides river, it start to go a little bit  In honor of the great American inventor who first studied the Gulf Stream, the submarine is christened Ben Franklin.

 I christen thee Ben Franklin.  150 miles away, another NASA Grumman mission prepares for lift off. Launch dates were planned several months apart, but it’s taken longer than expected to give Ben Franklin a thorough testing.  This thing has never been in the ocean. We’ve never done a dive more than 25 ft of water.

And we’re having lots of problems with these wires and the batteries. We had all these big thick wires about an inch in diameter that went into the hull with all this electrical equipment through penetrators. Each wire was copper and had a neoprene insulation on it. Now, if the neoprene insulation isn’t perfect, if there’s a little pinhole, then current will leak out into the seawater.

We’re all pumped up, ready to do this first dive. Can’t wait to go. We check out the batteries with our scuba gear. Looked at it and darn, there was another hole about this big in the insulation. You put your hand up, you could feel the current. It’d make your hand numb as you went through it.

 I said, “We can’t take this thing out to sea. It’s too much of a risk.”  Crews work around the clock repairing problems and installing state-of-the-art equipment. The Ben Franklin drift dive mission will immerse scientists deep inside a current so powerful it affects shipping lanes, commercial fishing, even global climate. They’ll measure every imaginable feature, salinity, temperatures, light levels, and current speeds, finally revealing its secrets.

Cameras will reveal images from the depths, but critical for NASA are the cameras inside.  You’ve got six guys sealed inside this thing for 30 days, drifting. And they’re all on their own, just like astronauts would be in space. The idea, of course, is that they have to rely on a sealed system to eat their food.

 They’ve got to live in close proximity to each other, crammed in tiny little bunks, and everything they do is constantly right in the face of the other guy. So, NASA thought this would be perfect.  NASA scientist Chet May will observe moods and behavior, and he’ll measure what microorganisms grow inside this sealed capsule in 30 days.

 Vital data for space travel. US Navy oceanographer Frank Busby will be the first man to map the Gulf Stream floor from the inside.  We use a submersible to remap areas that we mapped from the surface, and we find almost an entirely different picture.  British Royal Navy acoustics expert Ken Haigh will investigate how the Gulf Stream changes along the mission route.

 This equipment over here is measuring the seawater temperature, the salinity, and the speed of sound, and recording the information onto magnetic tape.  After more than 40 test dives, the launch day arrives, 2 days ahead of Apollo 11. The exhilaration surrounding the first moonwalk overshadows the first drift dive into the Gulf Stream’s depths.

July 14th, 1969. In spite of an impressive number of unknowns, Ben Franklin is towed 20 mi out to sea. The batteries are still unpredictable. It’s now hurricane season, and it’s the first time the full crew will be aboard together. Circumstances far from the 99.9% safety margin NASA demands before space flight.

It will be a test of human endurance. Six daring men tackling the Earth’s most unforgiving environment enclosed in less than 500 square feet for 30 days. Jacques Piccard lingers on a walkie-talkie with his son Bertrand as Ben Franklin disappears from the Florida coastline.  I said so, I hope you will be a good boy during my trip and bon voyage.

 He said this is a good trip for for you. And the last voice I heard from the coast was the voice of Bertrand.  Ben Franklin will be tracked on the surface by two US Navy ships, the Lynch and the Privateer.  Requesting launch altitude and permission to dive.  Ben Franklin, you are clear for descent. Altitude 600.

 Roger that. Descending to 600.  July 14th, 8:35 p.m. The crew seals the hatch and descends. Trusting they won’t repeat a test dive when the unthinkable happened.  It started to go down. And it wouldn’t stop going down. And we couldn’t understand what the problem was.  Ben Franklin dropped to the bottom, 1,000 ft deeper than planned.

 Leaks popped, fuses blew, communication with the surface was lost.  Ben Franklin, Ben Franklin, this is the Privateer. Do you read? Over.  We sat on the bottom, we checked everything out. We didn’t go to sleep at all that night. We just stayed up the whole night until we got up in about 8 or 900 ft of water. It got very stable, she was ready to go, and then we relaxed a little bit.

But just that first day was a little tense.  The cold deep water of the Gulf Stream contracted Ben Franklin’s hull, increasing its density, making it sink. Once the crew calculated for the shrinking hull, the problem was solved, for now. Transmitted every 2 seconds, a sonar ping notifies surface command of the sub’s position.

During the mission, it will sound more than 1 million times.  Guidance is internal. 12, 11, 10, 9, ignition sequence start.  July 16th, 1969, during Apollo 11’s lift off, Ben Franklin’s crew is just off the coast of Cape Canaveral, 650 ft deep. They radio a message wishing the astronauts fair wind and a following sea.

Throughout the mission, Erwin Abersold’s journal reveals the crew’s bond with their fellow explorers.  Houston, Apollo 11, star 40 is  At 100,000 times the speed of Ben Franklin, Apollo 11 soars into space.  All right, Roger, 11, it’s like you’re rolling on the way.  And Ben Franklin descends.  It looks like we’re on the moon down here.

 Cameras capture images that haven’t been seen for more than 30 years. More than a research tool, Piccard’s portholes offer a precious link beyond the confines of the sub. With cushion pads protecting foreheads against cold steel, the men marvel at the freedom of life outside.  And sometimes there were little things called salp.

And they’re transparent like jellyfish. And they would join together in chains, maybe 20, 30 ft long. And you see one of these chains coming toward the light, and each little salp would look like a light in a train coming toward you. And they just connect and connect and connect and connect, and they go forever. It seemed like miles.

 And as the light hits them, they shine. You could see them shining really bright. Stuff that I had never seen before.  It’s exactly like a ballerina. Like they were made on crystal. Incredible. I was laying in front of the window listening classical music, and you are alone. The people are sleeping, and you are alone in the world you observe that.

 Uh you cannot forget. It’s impossible.  Day five, 5:30 a.m. The mood of the sea has changed.  Two of the fellows were looking out the rear viewports. They lay on air mattresses, and they saw two swordfish. And they were swimming around like they were angry. They just appeared out of nowhere. And one of them actually went right through the viewport with the sword.

It scared the person looking into it. And everybody got their cap on and went to the windows and really got a big kick out of that. But he only made a couple of runs at us.  Although Ben Franklin drifts silently, the mission is blasting the tranquil sea. Mortars fired from the surface explode underwater, creating sound waves to acoustically map the Gulf Stream floor.

While the sound waves ricochet off the bottom, the surface, and the sub, they’re recorded onto magnetic tape, giving the scientists never-before-seen images of the Gulf Stream’s terrain. More than 1,000 explosions rock the sea during the mission. Then Piccard’s journal reveals a grave concern. Submarines have been paralyzed by depth charges, condemning the men inside to their deaths.

 Commander this is deep in Franklin. We are feeling strong shock waves from the depth charges. Request you immediately You are 2 km north. Roger that.  Acoustic mapping requires drifting in unexplored depths to nearly 1,800 ft with 800 lb of pressure per square inch on the hull. The risk of collision with shipwrecks, even old ammunition dumps, is high.

The hot water tanks failed 3 days ago. The cold water is so laced with disinfecting iodine, it’s barely drinkable. Tension mounts inside the sub. Then, Chet May discovers a coping strategy so effective NASA will take it to Skylab.  Remember we used to play darts in here?  Yeah.  We set the dart board up in the forward area.

We’d stand here and we’d throw darts. We’d play games. And then Chet said, “Now, how can we make this as a safe thing for the spacecraft?” Because he was studying this as an analog for the Skylab. They use Velcro-tipped darts in the spacecraft right now. So, that came out of the trip.  Yeah.  Plus, music was a really great part of the trip.

 Without music, I think we’d have been very unhappy. We’d be sitting up at this little table in the wardroom area. And these are all the readings for the batteries. And every hour we had to send up readings so they knew how much power we had left. And we’re in the middle of a card game and they’re bouncing around in heavy seas.

 And they called down on the underwater telephone, “Could you get the readings?” And they’re hanging on for dear life up there. And we said, “When we finish this hand, we’ll get the readings and send them up.” And then we played the Yellow Submarine song on the underwater telephone and laughed.  That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

 July 20th, 1969. While the world breathlessly watches two men walk on the moon, six men isolated at the bottom of the sea hear an abrupt version of this historic event.  And Franklin, this the privateer. Two Americans have landed on the moon. Roger out.  The Card’s journal is bittersweet.  That is all we shall hear today about the most awe-inspiring expedition ever accomplished by man.

You can do whatever you like on the earth. You can invent in me whatever you like. The conquest of the moon was the most beautiful scientific and technical expedition.  Hello, there. Beautiful.  As the men on the moon triumph, the aquanauts are about to be lost at sea. July 23rd, 9 days into the drift dive mission.

 The sub is gripped by an unknown force. For hours, mysterious underwater waves have thrusted the sub hundreds of feet up and down.  When the force of the ocean starts moving you, who knows what you’re going to run into? You could be pushed all the way to the bottom. You could be pushed all the way to the surface. You could porpoise really fast.

These waves that caught them completely out of nowhere and started moving them up and down in what could best be described as a roller coaster ride.  Pilot Erwin Aebersold faces a critical decision. He has no idea when the direction of the underwater wave might change. Anything he does to counteract it could result in a disasterous overcorrection, perhaps forcing the submarine down beyond recovery.

 What can I do? I have to wait. And this is for hours and hours and something for days. You are just watching, watching, watching. This was very hard for the nerves.  When you have a 4 mile an hour water from the Gulf Stream warm in contact with cold stationary coastal water off the Carolinas, it would set up these underwater waves.

That’s what caused it and eventually we got away from the coast further out in the ocean and it went away. But for a while it was nerve-racking.  While the eyes of the world are riveted on a tiny capsule on the sea Ben Franklin has mysteriously disappeared in its depths. Had this happened to the Apollo astronauts, the world would hold its breath.

But six men on an unheralded mission are virtually on their own.  The incredible thing about ocean exploration is we think we know the ocean because for millennia we’ve traversed the surface of it. But that surface is a thin envelope that doesn’t even begin to give us comprehension about what lies in the depths.

 The Gulf Stream plummets to more than 10,000 ft in places along the Drift Mission route. If Ben Franklin is in trouble, if it has again lost buoyancy, the submarine will be crushed. July 25th, the underwater waves have suddenly stopped. The deep sea is remarkably calm.  Caps, we have a critical situation.

You’ve been ejected by a whirlpool and you’re now drifting 35 miles due west of the Gulf Stream. Roger that.  Surface command has located the sub, but is powerless to help.  So, I turned the boat around, turned the motors on, and tried to drive back into the Gulf Stream, but it was so powerful that we were going nowhere.

 Designed only to position, not propel the sub, the electric motors are now draining the batteries dry. They’re 35 miles off course and going nowhere. After only 12 of the 30 days complete, surface command instructs the crew to surface.  Ben Franklin, you are clear to surface. Roger that.  NASA demands the men stay sealed inside to maintain the isolated conditions of the survival study.

The sub will be towed back into the Gulf Stream. Ben Franklin is tossed like a toy.  Okay, guys, you’re secure on the tow rope. Sit tight. This will take a while. Over.  When you’re on the surface, something like this, it’s a bronco. And these guys had it bad. For 7 hours, 90° temperatures, nearly 100% humidity, they’re rocking and rolling and bouncing and I mean not easy, sharp corners, and sealed in with each other, no horizon to look out at.

 I mean, this literally, I mean, if NASA had the vomit comet for training astronauts, I think that Ben Franklin probably would have been the vomit comet for the Aquanaut Corps.  Cruising along the bottom has been bitterly cold and tense. The acoustic explosions have been relentless, and they’ve had no hot water, so no hot food or showers for nearly 2 weeks.

As the sub’s co-designer, Abersold realizes the water tanks have now been warmed by the surface temperature.  I tried the for the shower it was warm.  A shower? So you got a shower? And you didn’t tell us about it? Oh boy. Yeah, 34 years later you had a warm you had a warm shower and we didn’t.  A nice shower. I feel clean.

 A friend, buddy. Oh yeah.  I feel clean.  Yeah, now he gets his mask.  After 16 hours on the surface, Ben Franklin is back in the Gulf Stream. To avoid further strain on the batteries, surface command orders Casimir to take on over a thousand kilograms of lead shot for a fail-safe descent, more than twice what Casimir calculates he needs.

 The submarine really went down fast. I mean, it was going down like a rock.  Privateer, we are going down fast here. 900. 1,000. 1,200. 1,500 ft. We are dumping lead shot, but we are going down.  It finally stabilized, you know, at about 1,500 ft. The whole cooled down. We got rid of a little bit of weight, went up to a a decent depth and it was fine.

But I made him feel a little nervous up there just kind of for fun, really.  July 28th, Chet May’s sampling reveals disturbing new facts. Carbon monoxide rates are rising and bacteria exponentially multiplying on ship surfaces and the bodies of the crew. Despite scouring the sub with disinfectant, the bacteria are relentless.

 It’s now a race against time. Can they last another 15 days? And can they cope with the strain? NASA psychiatrists predicted intense disagreements among six men confined in tight quarters for 30 days. Piccard’s journal discloses a rare moment of pause as Ben Franklin drifts over an abyss that is more than 4,000 ft deep near Cape Hatteras.

 For the first time in my life, I am in a submarine that must not descend to the bottom. Beyond the limit of safety, the hull will implode. We got to worry.  It’s dark, cold, and damp inside the sub. Wearing brainwave sensors, Chet May measures the impact of the strain on sleep. Ironically, the greatest impact is on Chet May himself.

 You couldn’t quit and even go home to the family. And I’m a coach for my kids, I couldn’t go home coach ball games or or do anything like that. Be with the I couldn’t enjoy the sun, I couldn’t enjoy the rain. And that’s I don’t didn’t realize how much I really missed that kind of an environment. After the mission, I thought I really don’t know that I should place so much importance on things that take me away from my family life.

So, I really made the decision to not travel.  The lessons that came out of that mission had long-lasting implications for the future of human exploration. We learned a tremendous amount about how you react or interrelate sealed in a capsule for 30 days. And those lessons are still being applied by NASA as they plan for extended missions to Mars and beyond.

 August 10th, 4 days remain. The captain’s log reports the men are anxious to surface. Most of their water is contaminated. Bacteria levels are dangerously high and carbon monoxide rates are nearing abort mission levels. It’s a critical moment. If it ends now, NASA’s 30-day survival test has failed.  And I’m reading a book Ice Station Zebra.

 And the same problem in a submarine. And they determined that 50 parts per million of carbon monoxide was the maximum in a submarine. Grumman made a study all over the world of scientists and they said, “What’s the maximum they could have in a submarine and be okay?” 50 parts per million. Same as the book. And we didn’t quite get to that, so we were able to stay stay submerged for 30 days.

 August 14th, 1969. 30 days after launch, the Gulf Stream drift dive mission is complete.  Okay, Ben Franklin, ready to see the sun?  At the end of the dive after spending 30 days in the darkness of the deep sea and finally looking upwards, seeing the sun shining on the waves. This is what I consider to be one of the most beautiful moments of the dive.

 Clear to surface. We have a visual on you now, Ben Franklin. Stand by, we’re coming to get you.  Despite steadily rising threats to their survival, they drifted 1,500 miles, collected 2 million measurements, executed 400 acoustic tests, and spent 90 hours observing life in the Gulf Stream. Six heroic men survived the unique experiment never attempted before or since.

 It’s the first time that you could take that number of individuals, put them into a capsule, have them interrelating and working with each other, and conducting experimentation as well as simply observing. And that’s powerful.  Aboard a US Coast Guard ship, the men relished their first hot meal in 30 days.

 And when we came back, I asked, “What happened?” I said, “We started six men, and we arrived six friends.” I believe we opened a way of studying the sea. We showed what we could do. We demonstrated it is feasible, possible. You can stay in live like this with the sea for for weeks and weeks and months if you you would like.

 The aquanauts and their yellow submarine are celebrated in New York City Harbor. But the crowds thronging the streets for the astronauts just days before in the city’s largest parade ever are nowhere to be seen. Despite their courage, the volumes of discoveries, and a new frontier conquered, the Ben Franklin drift dive mission disappears in the shadow of the moonwalk.

 When you leaf through modern-day reports and plans for things like the International Space Station or the the the flights to Mars, what you see in the footnotes, buried all the way down there, is the Ben Franklin mission studies. This really set the stage. These aquanauts made it possible for astronauts to safely go out into the stars.

 Now, for those of you with cameras, it’s one of those moments.  A few years after the mission, Ben Franklin was transformed from technological marvel to shipyard scrap. A Vancouver businessman bought the sub to relaunch it as a commercial vessel. Instead, it rusted in the back of a shipyard for more than 30 years until Jim Delgado found it hours before it was to be cut into pieces as scrap.

With crew reunited and sub restored, today is a day to celebrate.  To be called NASA’s man in the ocean, I don’t think we’ve had one since. For me, it was a very very unique experience.  It represents for me a great part of my life.  It was so beautiful. It’s just possible to do that once.  It’s one of the happiest days of my life.

 I always wanted to be something like I read about in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and I finally got a chance to do it.  The powerful legacy for me of Ben Franklin above and beyond science or contributions to ocean work is that here they went to see and to observe, to absorb those experiences as human beings and to bring those back and to share them with others.

And in that, I think humanity gained.