Space Race Submariners

An early example of a space age submariner can be found in the comic serial Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future (published in The Eagle from 1950). First appearing in the story “The Man from Nowhere” (Frank Hampson in Eagle, 1955), Lex O’Malley is an Irish submarine commander and explorer, whose vessel Poseidon is brought into action to search for a space capsule crashed into the Earth’s oceans - indeed Dan and Lex explicitly compare the Poseidon to a spaceship, albeit one needing to keep pressure out rather than in. Biographical notes for O’Malley in the Titan books comic reprints tell us that “As Colonel Dare is to space exploration, “Lex” is to the underwater world.” However, while initially Earthbound, O’Malley joins the crew of the charismatic pilot Dare for several missions, and ends up travelling with him to distant worlds - presumably just for the thrill of adventure, although the reasons that this voluntary participation is permitted never really become clear.

Of a similar vintage is the BBC radio science fiction drama serial Orbiter X (written by B D Chapman and first broadcast 1959). This told the tale of the Commonwealth Space Programme (CSP)’s efforts to construct an orbital space station, and the efforts of a scientific cabal called “Unity” to subvert it and achieve world domination. The narrative focuses on the crew of Orbiter 2: Captain Bob Britain, McLelland, and Chief Petty Officer Hickey. The latter is a submariner on secondment from the Royal Navy for the purposes of acting as Flight Engineer on the space mission. While Hickey’s role and rank is subordinate to the pilot’s, his technical expertise and practicality are essential for the ultimate success of the CSP team. Indeed, several times the characters comment on his airlock and diving experience in the context of necessary spacewalks, noting that he came into his own in such activities.

Submarine-based American television drama Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (TV, 1964-1968) also investigates this theme. For a submarine, the S.S.R.N. Seaview meets a surprising number of alien species and craft during its four seasons of television appearances. However on one occasion it attempts to return the visit. In “Journey With Fear” (1967), the Seaview acts as an experimental launch platform for an orbital probe - a perhaps logical extrapolation from its established role as a launch platform for the very similar technology of intercontinental ballistic missiles. The probe is crewed both by a trained astronaut and by Chip Morton, the Executive Officer of Seaview herself. There is a clear implication that Morton has been trained as an astronaut himself. Indeed, he had previously been seen acting as flight controller for a space mission (in the attempt to avoid sabotage) in the episode “Shadowman”. While the launch itself is successful in “Journey With Fear”, an alien intervention results in the flight being diverted to Venus, and Morton being joined by Seaview’s Captain Crane and Admiral Nelson before returning to Earth.

Space Battle Submariners

As the space race progressed, both fact and fiction envisioned more elaborate training from first-principles for astronauts, rather than swift retraining of personnel from existing services. The necessity of considering controlled atmospheric reentry as part of space expeditions also diverted attention towards air force rather than navy personnel (although most real-world astronauts are effectively passengers during a computer-controlled descent) [1]. However, submariners continued to appear in space adventures - and often in the context of military science fiction.

Written in the 1980s, Ben Bova’s short story Battle Station describes a conflict in space for control of an orbital weapons platform, when a military faction tries to take control of a large, internationally crewed, military satellite. The station commander, J W Hazard, is an ex-submariner and both his language and his battle tactics are riddled throughout with references to submarine warfare and tactics. Indeed, his decision to change the platform’s orbit and “The old submariner’s instinct: run silent, run deep” is decisive in the outcome of the battle. In his introduction to the short story in his anthology of the same name, Bova credits the germ of the idea to the letter pages of Analog magazine (of which he was the editor) in which correspondents were actively discussing the submarine-spaceship analogy and whether submariners would make ideal recruits.

Starhunt by David Gerrold (originally published in a shorter form as Tomorrow’s Children) took the submarine out further into space. In this novel, the obsolete and poorly-crewed spaceship Burlingame finds itself actively involved in a conflict it had been intended to avoid. Apparently shadowed by an enemy alien spacecraft, it adopts submarine tactics under the direction of its (over) zealous and psychologically trained first officer. Here the submarine analogy is not explicit except in one place - in a discussion of the claustrophobically-limited space:

“A submarine and a starship are actually the same type of vessel; each must protect its crew from a hostile environment while’ providing the most efficient means of transportation through that environment; the only important differences between the two are those that are necessitated by specific functions. Otherwise, it is not surprising that there should be strong similarities between the two types of vessel.”

However, Starhunt is a prequel novel to the same author’s Star Wolf series. As the publisher’s description of these novels note: “The Star Wolf series reflects Gerrold's contention that, due to the distances involved, space battles would be more like submarine hunts than the dogfights usually portrayed—in most cases the ships doing battle wouldn't even be able to see each other.” This is certainly true of Starhunt. The Burlingame drops in and out of warp, navigating in more than three dimensions and running silent at times, while trying to keep track of an equally silent enemy. The tight confines of the ship, and a narrative told in the current tense keep the tension high.

A similar concept appears in the Japanese animation Space Battleship Yamato. Inspired by the World War II battleship of the same name, and the battles it participated in, this imagined the translation of such conflicts to space, with humanity fighting a hostile alien race. As an influential early anime, Space Battleship Yamato has a complex canon, incorporating several reboots, sequels and spin-offs, including video games (none of which I’m familiar with). However, amongst these, a vessel known as the UX-01 Dimensional Submarine (and operated by the series antagonists) makes the submarine analogy explicit, with vessels transitioning in and out of higher dimensions to attack, and the crew treated and trained as submariners.

Spaceman Submariners

While the science fiction of the twentieth century focussed on submariners making the leap to space, it’s worth noting that, in at least a couple of cases, the reverse has also been explored.

In The Deep Range (novel, 1957; developed from a 1955 short story of the same name), Arthur C Clarke followed the experiences of Walter Franklin, a spaceman who us grounded after an accident in vacuum left him suffering severe agoraphobia in space. Initially despairing of finding another vocation to replace the one he lost, the character finds a new home under the oceans in the submarine craft used for herding ocean mammals and cultivating the sea floor.

As might be expected, the importance of navigation in three dimensions and thriving in enclosed environments are crucial to his successful transition, and there is discussion of how his existing skills allow him to be fast-tracked into accelerated training. But this doesn’t mean that the environments are treated as exactly equivalent. In a medical report on the man towards the end of that training we’re told that:

“The analogies between sea and space have often been pointed out, and a man used to one can readily adapt to the other. In this case, however, the differences between the two media were equally important; at the simplest level, the fact that the sea is a continuous and sustaining fluid, in which vision is always limited to no more than a few years, gave W. F. the sense of security he had lost in space.” (Chapter 11)

Clarke himself was clearly an ocean enthusiast. He was known for his scuba diving and submarine experience, and also published a speculative fiction novel on the raising of the Titanic - The Ghost from the Grand Banks.

Clarke’s contemporary science fiction master Isaac Asimov also addressed this connection. In his Waterclap, Stephen Demerest, a representative of the struggling fifty-year-old moon colony visits to talk to the leaders of the Earth’s equally precarious twenty-year-old Ocean Deep base. Unlike Clarke’s, Asimov’s spaceman is far from happy in the depths. He dwells on its mass and texture:

“Darkness became tangible. Demerest found his gaze fastened to the viewport. The inside of the gondola was lighted but it was dark in that window. And the darkness was not the darkness of space — it was thick, solid.”

His distaste for the environment is tangible as he tries to put forward the argument that the two settlements are competing for funding and that the ocean pioneers should step aside in the interests of human development toward the stars. It’s clear that there is not a routine interchange between the two. As John Bergen, head of the Ocean Deep notes:

“In a way, this is the first meeting of inner and outer space. No ocean man has ever gone to the Moon as far as I know, and you’re the first Moonman to visit a subsea station of any kind. No Moonman has even been to one of the settlements on the continental shelf.” 

Despite tense moments, Bergen and his wife counter Demerest’s argument over resources with the observation that undersea settlement and exploration could prove a crucial testbed for skills and technologies that can be deployed in extraterrestrial environments. It is notable that here the focus is on planetary environments rather than vacuum, and the idea that spacemen might be happy to become submariners (or vice versa) is rather dismissed in this narrative.

Suitable Submariners

So what are these “often pointed out” (to use Clarke’s words) factors that make submariners potential spacemen (and perhaps vice versa)?

Perhaps the most striking analogy between submarines and spacecraft (as envisaged in the mid-twentieth century or as in use now) is their confined quarters and potentially long mission durations. A six month atomic submarine tour under the ice cap and a year-long interplanetary journey would present many of the same problems for a crew:

• Isolation - the lack of changing visual stimulus or scenery, as well as distance from family members.
• Confined spaces - both in terms of limited living space and the need to share that space with others, with no prospect of escape or ability to exercise (except on fixed machines).
• Interpersonal issues - in terms of ability to cope with irritations or conflicts between crew members, when irritations can spiral out of control unchecked.
• Environmental stability - the difficulty of maintaining a closed system environment, without chemical or biological instabilities developing, and the necessity of dealing with problems without external assistance.

The psychological stability and compatibility required for selection of submariners in the light of these constraints would apply equally to astronaut selection for trips lasting longer than a few days. As already discussed, these are complemented by the 3D spatial awareness and manoeuvring required for space - and which are, in fact, simulated in training by submersion in a deep diving tank.

Indeed the relevance of these skills has been proven within the American space programme. The US Naval College hosts an annual Astronaut convocation and numbers 54 astronauts amongst its graduates. These include Mercury astronauts Alan B Shepard and Walter M Shirra, Gemini and Apollo astronaut James Lovell, and numerous shuttle programme astronauts. Many of these were naval flight officers, but a number were submariners including Christopher Cassidy and Stephen Gerard Bowen (who flew missions to the ISS) and Kayla Jane Barron (who qualified as an astronaut in 2020), while other naval astronauts have been trained divers instead.

With the more elaborate space travel of some science fiction - the vast decks and crews of starships such as the USS Enterprise or the rapid travel of examples such as The Expanse - the analogy begins to fade somewhat. However given our current state of technology, which has progressed so much slower than that envisioned in the early years of the space race, the connection between the inner world and the outer continue to be relevant and impossible to ignore. While the idea of exporting submariners to alien seas remains well beyond us [2], the insights of submariners will help to shape both near-Earth spaceflight and perhaps even the probes that may one day explore the icy moons of our solar system.

In the mean time, the deeps of the ocean and the deeps of space remain of equal fascination to many people. And an equal mystery to most. Submariners may help to elucidate both these inner and outer worlds.