The Rock-web page idea also bore tons in regular with NASA's designs for underground moon bases. Very seemingly all three ideas — invulnerable bastions, house outposts and ocean bases — would have shared options to issues ranging from environmental control to crew morale.
point Sur is 600 toes of difficult rock facing Pacific rollers that come 6,000 miles to pound the principal California coast. just like the nineteenth-century lighthouse that marks the aspect, the now-derelict compound of the previous Naval Facility point Sur inspires another period.
And it evokes a mystery — one involving secret underground naval bases, high-tech submarines and bloodless battle nuclear brinkmanship.
As late as the Sixties, Navy technicians and their households at factor Sur monitored undersea listening posts used to music Soviet subs. according to one legend, it wasn't in simple terms hydrophones the Navy ran from element Sur, however submarines themselves primarily based in big man-made caverns dug into the rock.
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there is something mythic and compelling about seaside scarps and naval bases — whatever drawing on archetypal imagery of treasure hid in cave waters open to the ocean. The premier supervillain's lair, after all, is an island base with undersea access.
however as background has proven time and once again, even the most unearthly fantasies have their actual-lifestyles counterparts. and those that dive for Atlantean gold now and again surface with treasure. There in fact were — and are — some extraordinary ideas deep down in the sea.
by 1966 both surges into outer area and "internal house" had been at their flood tide. while NASA gathered ever greater momentum with month-to-month Gemini flights and a new Mission handle, the success of Sealab II and the CONSHELF III underwater habitat led to a presidential commission on oceanography and an even bigger undersea dedication.
The Navy's efforts to improve a misplaced hydrogen bomb off the coast of Spain that 12 months and the lack of the attack sub usaThresher three years earlier than had brought new funding and discipline to deep submergence programs. In such heady times, goals of colonizing the continental shelf inside a generation seemed like sober predictions.
It was in this atmosphere that C.F. Austin of the China Lake Naval Ordnance test Station proposed the Rock-web page conception: manned undersea installations excavated into the rock of the seafloor. by using applying neatly-understood concepts employed for decades by the mining trade, Austin proposed that large bases can be built and operated anywhere proper bedrock passed off in the ocean, at any depth.
Austin realized that even with mid-1960's know-how, it might be feasible to sink a wide shaft into the sea flooring, seal and drain it, then use it as a staging enviornment for extra excavation. A tunnel-boring computing device may well be lowered into the shaft in items and then assembled to bore out more tunnels, together with one for a small modular nuclear reactor tons like those used at Camp Century in Greenland and McMurdo Base in Antarctica.
There's very little hype in Austin's record; the majority of it's taken up with documentation of tunneling methods and mining operations performed beneath the ocean flooring. These commonly follow seams and drifts underground as they continue offshore.
according to Austin, one Nova Scotia mine, Dominion Coal's Cape Breton operation, consisted of "a posh of many consolidated undersea mines ranging intensive from 200 to 2,seven hundred ft under the ocean ground, with a water cover of 60 to 100 ft. These mines span a neighborhood of approximately seventy five rectangular miles and at this time make use of some four,100 guys within the undersea workings."
among the benefits of Rock-website, Austin noted its immunity to weather and currents, its shirt-sleeve atmosphere and its (very) controlled access. And Austin changed into now not pondering small. "buildings in the sea ground can conveniently be made large and comfy satisfactory to allow the quartering of crews and their households for extended periods of time," he wrote, "and might be made enormous adequate to function give and repair depots for large submersibles."
contemporary research on hardened missile basing concepts have confirmed a considerable number of ideas for growing submarine-sized constructions in tough substrates. The Air force's building of underground silos, subways and principal commands produced actual-world hardware and adventure with construction concepts.
in the Seventies the Los Alamos country wide Lab investigated an atomic rock-drilling conception known as the Nuclear Subterrene, which like Rock-web site seems like whatever thing out of Johnny Quest, however additionally definitely came about. One wonders what may have took place had the Navy put its nuclear expertise to work drilling holes within the ocean flooring.
The Rock-web site idea additionally bore lots in commonplace with NASA's designs for underground moon bases. Very possible all three ideas — invulnerable bastions, house outposts and ocean bases — would have shared options to considerations ranging from environmental handle to crew morale.
Austin foresaw that Rock-site bases may well be ultimate for industrial makes use of equivalent to fossil-fuel construction and deep-sea mining. in the many years because Austin's look at, industry has created the tools deserve to understand his imaginative and prescient. though it's now not atomic-powered, the area's greatest tunnel-boring machine is set to drill a two-mile-lengthy tunnel underneath Seattle huge satisfactory to dangle an Ohio-category sub.
One enterprising enterprise servicing the offshore renewables industry has designed a remote drilling rig for planting monopile anchors on the seafloor, whereas others are setting up total subsea electrical grids. agree with a bodily cozy statistics center, with free cooling, in an industrial park beneath the ocean …
Did the Navy ever basically pursue the Rock-web page concept at point Sur or in different places? A 1971 study discussed quite a few methods of sea-floor excavation, however by then most man-in-the-sea building turned into categorized. within the absence of advice fable takes to the air — er, fin — but just about 50 years later C.F. Austin's dream is still each sober and dazzlingly novel.
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