Ever want to live underwater in a 35-by-8-foot tube? You may soon have your wish, if one UK-based startup has anything to say about it.
New footage from Mashable shows a wild new project developed by DEEP, an ocean engineering company founded in 2021. Its pilot habitat, called the “Vanguard,” recently went online some 56 feet underwater, off the coast of Florida’s Tennessee Reef.
Don’t expect a five-star stay however, because the Vanguard is basically a glorified camper-van. It boasts a few main modules: a living space complete with four bunks, a sofa, and a galley; a combination bathroom-slash-science-lab; a moon pool and dive-chamber; and a semi-autonomous support buoy, responsible for providing oxygen, electricity, and communications with the outside word.
Unlike other underwater habitats that are fully lifted and lowered with every changing of the guard, the Vanguard is anchored to the seabed, indicating the startup plans to keep it operational for some time to come.
As far as technology goes, underwater habitats aren’t exactly cutting-edge. Prior to the Vanguard, there was the “La Casa in fondo al mare” (House at the bottom of the sea), an Italian submersible habitat that went up in the mid-2000s, and the Aquarius Reef Base, an undersea research laboratory established in 1986 which is still operated by Florida International University. Still, as Mashable notes, the DEEP Vanguard marks a notable entry into the deep-sea housing market, representing the first privately-funded undersea habitat installed in US waters in decades.
“It’s been over 40 years since we’ve had an undersea habitat built for humans and launched,” DEEP’s director of scientific research Dawn Kernagis told NPR in an interview. “We’re really building on the shoulders of giants who’ve done this research.”
While privately-funded seafaring companies have a less than stellar track record of late, DEEP is evidently hoping it can win the confidence of researchers working in two major fields: reef restoration and human-machine collaboration.
According to the DEEP website, brave research teams with a maximum size of two can currently submit proposals to the company, the grand-prize being a five-day stay at the bottom of the ocean — after a mandatory two-week training period, of course.
In order to submit a successful application, DEEP’s literature notes that “applicants should explain why continuous residence at depth materially improves data quality, operational efficiency, monitoring cadence, intervention success, or research outcomes compared with surface-based diving.”
Whether there’s enough interest from research teams and funders to justify the enormous venture remains to be seen. But with DEEP offering scientists financial awards of up to $50,000 to carry out their work, it could be the perfect opportunity for a few fearless oceanographers.
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