/sci/ - Science & Math

Basically, for anyone who just HAS to get the full undersea living experience today, there is a refurbished undersea lab from the 70s that was turned into a 4 room hotel called the Jules Undersea Lodge. It's actually one of the largest and nicest habitats that was built in that era, with the biggest windows on any habitat I know of. It's fully furnished, has all the amenities, and it sits a few dozen feet away from a second smaller habitat called Marinelab with a spherical glass observation bubble you can sit inside of while you pilot an ROV. So you not only get a hab to sleep, eat and relax in, but there's another one to go visit and explore during EVAs.

It all rests in about 30 feet of water which sounds shallow until you visualize it as multiples of your own height. There's a fridge, microwave, TV, DVD player, sinks in each room, a kitchenette and a moon pool to dive out of. Cost per night varies between $300 and $400 depending on the activity package you purchase (like whether you visit Marinelab or not, and whether or not you get a pizza delivered)

www.jul.com

From this platform, exercises in piloting UAVs for exterior hab checks and simulations of extended duration missions in a pressurized rover (owing to the small size of the habitat and it's panoramic acrylic bubble section) could be carried out with a degree of accuracy and resulting in insights impossible to gain from an analog habitat on land. While Marinelab stands in for the pressurized rover, the nearby (and considerably more spacious) Jules habitat would serve as the analog Mars base, with two bedrooms both equipped with bunks (Housing four comfortably) a shared livingroom/kitchen/entertainment area and a moon pool/staging room between them. EVAs could be carried out from the Jules as they are from MDRS, substituting a five minute wait in the staging room for the wait in the airlock, and with precise ballasting each aquanaut could weigh exactly what they do on Mars.

The Jules, a 4 room hotel with a second habitat adjacent to it in a Florida lagoon.

Today, anyone with $500 to blow can live the life of an aquanaut for a day, in a former research lab converted to four room undersea hotel, with a second habitat just a few dozen yards from it in the same lagoon. Guests can freely swim between the two and undertake various activities, then spend the night in comfort 30 feet underwater.