Living on the Seafloor. (Design Issues on Underwater Habitats. 1st part). Ocean and Space: the same goal?

At the beginning of the space era, during the 50’s, major advance were achieved in technology and the attention of the world was fixed at the sky. But other people turned their looks to other spaces, closer but far more difficult to reach, the inner space, the Oceans.
Conquering the oceans had taken longer than Space. Men had tried to reach and learn the secrets of the deep since the beginning of time.

The development of diving equipment after the WWII, gave a big push to the researchers of the oceans, leaded by Jacques-Yves Cousteau; but money was needed. On the other hand, the richest enterprise of that time, the race for the conquest of the space brought thousand of questions to the scientists, some bind the space and the ocean: “Can we make humans live on that extreme environment of the space?”, “Can we make the same in other extreme environment, like oceans?”. Suddenly a contrasted symbiosis was formed and living in the oceans became important for all the scientific community everywhere and the desire for exploring the unknown started to flow between the people. Could it be possible that the space and the ocean research just crossed their path by chance? Probably, but conquest of the ocean became as important as the conquest of Space. The dream of living on the seafloor awoke in the minds of the world.

Habitats are seafloor laboratories and living quarters where divers and scientist, now call Aquanauts, live and work for extended periods of time.