Space and diving exploration go hand in hand

Searching through packets of photos of my mom from before the digital photography age, my daughter found some pictures I thought were lost: me sitting at the controls of the space shuttle.

But let me backup a second.

Throughout the 2000s, I was the training director for Divers Alert Network. My job there was developing and teaching first aid programs for divers with a great team. Through some work we were doing with the scientific diving community, I was invited to go to Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas to work with the divers at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab.

This is the pool where astronauts practice working in a weightless environment. When I was there in 2003, there was a lifesize mock-up of the International Space Station in the pool.

For the safety of the astronauts, there is always a team of divers in the water with them. And that was my focus. I trained their team to administer oxygen first aid and use an AED poolside if necessary in an emergency.

When that work was done, they took me on a tour of the facilities that tourists don’t often get to see. Space shuttle missions would continue through 2011. My guides took me into a massive building that held several lifesize space shuttle trainers where the astronauts would drill through procedures so everything would become second nature.

And then they asked me if I wanted to sit in the captain’s chair. I was born about two years before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. I remember later landings and then the entire space shuttle program. Sitting behind the controls of the shuttle, and getting a photo of it, was close to sitting in the captain’s chair of the Starship Enterprise.

Diving is considered being in microgravity. When you have everything right, you float easily through the water and can move in three dimensions with a simple fin kick. That’s the closest most of us will ever get to being in space.

As a journalist, diver and tourist, I’ve been to Russian Mission Control, Johnson Space Center and Kennedy Space Center.

All of that said, I am heartened by the efforts to explore the ocean more thoroughly. There are billionaires taking vanity rides to space, but there are some privately funded projects exploring the ocean with a focus on science: Deep and OceanExplorer to name a couple. And, of course, the work done by NOAA. Although that work is under threat.

Space and ocean exploration are equally important. I had nothing to do with the research, other than being amazed it was going on, but I recall the scientists at the Duke University hyperbaric lab preparing protocols to reduce the amount of time astronauts had to prepare before being able to take space walks. Space suits are not one atmosphere suits. They are pressurized to about 4.3 PSI or the equivalent of 30,000 feet above sea level.

Stepping outside of the space station, or the shuttle, was the rough equivalent of being shot more than 5 miles into the air as soon as you open the airlock. Duke researchers determined a protocol, using exercise and breathing pure oxygen, that allows the astronauts to remove a significant portion of the nitrogen from their bodies, quicker, to avoid getting decompression illness — just like divers worry about. Also known as “the bends.”

I see Dr. Richard Moon received a new grant last year to continue that work. (I had the honor of co-authoring a chapter on oxygen in Wilderness Medicine with Dr. Moon. He is a brilliant man.)

The Neutral Buoyancy Lab has their own hyperbaric chamber just off the pool deck to care for injured divers, but that isn’t practical in space. And anything that saves oxygen in space is a good thing.

Inner and outer space both have a lot to teach us and will help us move civilization forward. Neither should be taken for granted, or for vanity. They are both too important.

“To live a life most people don’t, you must be willing to do things most people won’t.”

— unknown

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