The Forgotten Girls Aquanauts of the Nineteen Seventies
Among the many 80,000 photos in the picture library of the Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—together with historic charts, whales and coral reefs, and plenty of, many storm-tossed ships—is an image that appears to beg for additional clarification. 5 smiling younger ladies in matching quick crimson wetsuits, sit on the sting of an orange pontoon within the brilliant tropical solar. The enigmatic caption: “In 1970, all feminine workforce carried out in addition to males in scientific sat mission.”
That, in response to marine biologist Alina Szmant, who identifies herself because the second girl from the suitable (“the one with coquettish grin”), is a little bit of an understatement—and solely a part of a narrative that was for her “an expertise of a lifetime.” In actual fact, in response to Szmant, the primary all-female experiment in underwater residing (“sat” refers to “saturation diving”) was an undiluted success.
“We carried out admirably,” Szmant says, of the 14 days she and her colleagues spent residing and dealing in a submerged laboratory often known as Tektite greater than fifty years in the past. “We spent extra hours within the water doing science than any of the male teams.”
After all, Szmant and her fellow aquanauts by no means got down to prevail in a submarine battle of the sexes. They had been there for the scientific alternatives—and for the journey. And though the Tektite challenge could also be little remembered in the present day, its influence on analysis, exploration and the historical past of ladies in science has been quietly profound.
Szmant was a graduate scholar at Scripps Establishment of Oceanography when she heard about an intriguing request for proposals put out by the U.S. Division of the Inside and NASA. They had been on the lookout for a workforce of scientists to spend two weeks within the Tektite underwater habitat, parked off the shore of St. John within the U.S. Virgin Islands. Named for a sort of glassy pebble typically fashioned by meteorite impacts, Tektite consisted of two 18-foot-high steel cylinders related on the base. Inside was a lab and cupboard space, a small kitchen with a Harvest Gold fridge and microwave, a tiny lavatory and no-frills bunks. Its unique inhabitants, the 12 months earlier than, had been a workforce of male scientists whose main analysis objective was to see whether or not they skilled any antagonistic results from spending two months underwater.
“Man had walked on the moon, however NASA was eager about longer missions,” Szmant explains. “They had been within the medical and psychological aspect of issues—what occurs when persons are remoted from society and should stay with only some different individuals?”
NASA hoped that the undersea surroundings may stand in for area, and in a manner it did. To stay at that depth, the aquanauts needed to stay below stress your complete time, their our bodies saturated with nitrogen to counteract the impact. With at the very least 19 hours of depressurization required to keep away from the bends, hasty escape to the floor was inconceivable.
Nonetheless, the boys weren’t as remoted as they could have been on a Martian mission. They watched TV, put away stacks of frozen dinners and stayed in fixed communication with the floor. No critical issues arose. The following step, the challenge’s leaders determined, can be to learn the way scientists would possibly conduct actual analysis below these circumstances. And that’s the place Szmant got here in.
Alongside together with her buddy Ann Hartline and Ann’s husband Peter, Szmant proposed to check the conduct of small coral reef fish. Their utility was accepted, together with a proposal by Renate True, an oceanographer at Tulane College who had been on dives with Jacques Cousteau, and one other by Sylvia Earle, a Harvard College analysis fellow who, 20 years later, would grow to be NOAA’s first feminine chief scientist.
The proposals for what grew to become often known as Tektite II got here from women and men scientists, however authorities companies had been leery of coed missions—and the general public relations potential of an all-female workforce at a time when the feminist motion was gaining energy had clear attract. All that was wanted was a lady engineer to keep up the habitat’s life‐help programs. Peggy Lucas Bond, a graduate scholar in electrical engineering on the College of Delaware in an period with few ladies engineers, had as soon as been a lifeguard, so after finishing a scuba program run by former Navy Seals, Bond, too, was certain for Tektite.
Their scientific credentials might have been stable, however as they ready for his or her mission it didn’t escape the media that the 5 ladies aquanauts—Szmant, Bond, Hartline, True, and Earle—had been additionally handsome younger brunettes.
“The typical peak of workforce members is 5 toes 3 inches and the typical weight 110 kilos,” reported the Related Press, in all seriousness. “All of them put on their hair longer than shoulder size, pulled into pony tails or braids.” Lest readers fear in regards to the results of salt water on that lengthy hair, the article additionally famous: “They’ll have one concession to femininity—a hair dryer of their residing capsule 50 toes beneath the floor. However they don’t plan to spend a lot time primping.”
The ladies who moved into Tektite in July 1970 additionally had little time to dwell on sexist media protection—there was greater than sufficient work to occupy them. Subtle rebreathers—a newly obtainable expertise—allow them to enterprise into the coral reefs and seagrass meadows surrounding the station for as much as eight hours at a time. It was exhilarating, but additionally exhausting.
When not diving, the ladies spent hours sitting in Tektite’s bubble home windows watching marine life move by, as if in a type of inverse aquarium. At evening, many fish had been attracted by the habitat’s lights, and Szmant remembers silvery, six-foot-long tarpons staring in at them “with these gigantic eyes: They’re like, ‘What’s happening in there?’”
The Tektite crew’s analysis findings would result in printed papers, however—at the very least from NASA’s perspective—it was the aquanauts themselves who had been the actual experiment, and their return to the floor at mission’s finish represented a triumph, celebrated with a ticker tape parade in Chicago and a proper luncheon on the White Home with First Girl Pat Nixon. (It was a “circus,” Szmant says, that made them really feel “fairly foolish.”)
As the eye light, the 5 returned to their numerous skilled pursuits. Szmant completed her Ph.D. and have become a professor of marine biology. Bond’s profession as a pc scientist took her to Hawaii and Paris. Hartline later grew to become an environmental lawyer, and True taught anatomy and physiology in Texas. Earle was the one aquanaut whose fame grew after Tektite; a marine biologist and science communicator, she nonetheless holds the world file for deepest dive by a lady (1,250 toes, set in 1979), a feat that received her the nickname “Her Deepness.” True died in 2017, however the different 4 would reunite in 2020 for an online conference marking 50 years since their mission.
Tektite itself hosted a handful of different, all-male missions earlier than it was shut down and put into storage at a Philadelphia shipyard. In 1980, a nonprofit restored the habitat with the purpose of placing it into service once more, however with out the funds to submerge it Tektite once more deteriorated. Its steel was ultimately recycled.
Regardless of its ignominious finish, Tektite’s legacy continued with new generations of undersea habitats—together with the Aquarius Reef Base in Florida, which NASA astronauts have used as a stand-in for area, the moon and even Mars. Classes discovered from Tektite—together with about distant communications, group cohesiveness and even menu planning—knowledgeable NASA’s first area station, Skylab, launched in 1973. In the meantime, Tektite II’s all-female mission furthered the concept ladies may carry out in addition to (or higher than) males in excessive environments, offering proof that helped encourage NASA to start coaching ladies as astronauts in 1978.
“Tektite made it simple for them to say, ‘Okay, we are able to put ladies up there as nicely,’ which they’ve accomplished—and which was fairly successful,” says Bond, who over the previous half century has watched humanity discover area with a way of non-public delight, realizing that she performed a small position in making all of it attainable. “I believe it’s very, essential. I contributed, and I’m happy that I did. “