FriendsVINP Produces ‘Project Tektite – America’s Undersea Space Program’

The Source US Virgin Islands | October 4, 2026 | By Amy H. Roberts | When you think of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands in the 1960s, what three words come to mind?

Chances are “cutting-edge science” isn’t what popped up.

Yet St. John played a pivotal role in both outer-space and undersea exploration starting in the 1960s. Those were the years that NASA, the U.S. Interior Department, and the U.S. Navy collaborated with companies like General Electric to operate projects Tektite I and II, research programs conducted from 1969-1970 at an underwater habitat at remote Lameshur Bay.

The primary goal of the first Tektite program was to find out how astronauts (gearing up for lengthy Skylab missions) would fare in confined living quarters where there was no ready means of escape. Would humans be able to handle the psychological stresses of prolonged spaceflight?

In 1966, NASA contacted James “Jim” Miller, then the Civilian Director of Psychological Programs for SEALAB II. Miller suggested that using an underwater habitat could simulate the experience of being isolated in outer space, and could do it with significantly less risk and cost.

St. John’s Lameshur Bay, within the Virgin Islands National Park, was selected over proposed sites in Hawaii and Puerto Rico. The state-of-the-art research conducted on (and by) the aquanauts led to discoveries in human physiology and behavior, along with numerous studies in marine biology and ecology.

Project Tektite faded from public acclaim decades ago, but the Friends of the Virgin Islands National Park wants to bring the story back, and they’ve enlisted two of St. John’s most experienced filmmakers to make this happen.

Steve Simonsen and William “Bill” Stelzer are now collaborating on an hourlong documentary, “Project Tektite – America’s Undersea Space Program.”   The trailer can be viewed by clicking here.

It happens that the two filmmakers had fallen in love with the Tektite story 15 years ago. They completed a trailer about Tektite in 2009, working with St. John history-buff Bruce Schoonover (with whom they had previously produced a film on the Virgin Islands National Park). But the fundraising to complete the film proved to be too daunting, and they put the project aside.

This year, Friends of the Virgin Islands National Park selected Simonsen and Stelzer for their artists-in-residence program, providing them with basic funding to continue the project. FriendsVINP is now actively trying to raise another $100,000 to complete an hourlong documentary in the manner the filmmakers envisioned.

“From my perspective, it was a forgotten story,” said Tonia Lovejoy, executive director of FriendsVINP. When she learned that Sylvia Earle, the renowned marine oceanographer and activist, had led an all-women’s team of aquanauts as part of Tektite II, she became even more committed to the project.

Living at a depth of around 50 feet, the aquanauts in Tektite I were observed 24/7 during their 60 days in the underwater lab as part of the behavioral studies on the effects of isolation. But they were free to leave the habitat to explore the marine environment safely as long as they stayed at depths between 80 and 20 feet from the surface. A “moonpool” in the wet room of the habitat allowed them easy access to the surrounding waters.

As anyone who has tried scuba diving knows, divers have to monitor their time and depth carefully. That’s because nitrogen, one of the gases they breathe from air tanks, becomes saturated in the blood at depths of more than 15 feet. Divers have to come to the surface slowly to let the nitrogen emerge from the bloodstream without producing bubbles that lead to life-threatening embolisms.

When Tektite began, scientists had a pretty good idea of how long a diver could remain safely at a particular depth, but the Tektite programs allowed the Navy to refine the limits and establish the dive tables now used by millions of divers.

Aquanauts living underwater for weeks at a time were not free to pop up to the surface without first spending hours in a decompression chamber to release the buildup of nitrogen. “They had about 15 minutes or less to get into the chamber, or else they would die a horrifying death,” said Stelzer. In this way, aquanauts’ extended confinement psychologically mimicked conditions astronauts would soon experience in space.

Decades later, the decompression chamber used by the Tektite missions is still functioning at Schneider Regional Medical Center in Charlotte Amalie, providing treatment for divers with decompression sickness as well as those with other medical conditions.

The aquanauts selected for Tektite I, all scientists by profession, spent a record-breaking 60 days at depth. Project designers built scientific research into their missions, just as Skylab astronauts (who were also scientists) would conduct experiments on their flights.

Living in an underwater habitat, they could swim out of the structure at all hours of the day and night to conduct a range of environmental research studies.

The aquanauts attached small sonic transmitters to the shells of spiny lobsters to track their migration patterns and feeding habits. (This required some discipline as some were tempted to eat their research subjects.) They monitored populations of reef organisms over extended multi-week periods. And they mapped types of sediment from the sea bottom to create a detailed geological profile of Lameshur Bay. (Simonsen joked that they were on a first-name basis with most of the local fish.)

Luckily, underwater footage of their studies still exists today, although the quality of the film has deteriorated. “It’s possible that some of the surviving photography can be rescanned at a better quality,” Stelzer said.

The filmmakers conducted interviews with members of Tektite I when the team gathered at a reunion on St. John in 2009.

“We also have interviews with two of the backup Tektite 1 aquanauts, project manager James “Jim” Miller, and female aquanauts Sylvia Earle and Alina Szmant from that time,” Stelzer said. Luckily, that footage survived the hurricanes of 2017.

Now all four Tektite I aquanauts — geologist Ed Clifton, marine biologist Conrad Mahnken, oceanographer Richard Waller, and marine biologist John VanDerwalker — have passed.

Additional funding would allow the filmmakers to get further interviews with other surviving participants, like the two backup Tektite I aquanauts, Gary Davis and Ian Koblick, the Navy Seabees, the medical people and GE engineers, as well as other Tektite II aquanauts — especially the women aquanauts.

Meanwhile Stelzer is continuing to sift through a hundred-plus hours of footage and thousands of pages of documents as he edits and shapes the four separate but related segments of the documentary: the history, the legacy, the technology, and the women who participated in the program.

In the late 1960s, it was considered inappropriate for women and men to dwell together in such confined spaces, but when female scientists applied to the program, the project managers decided to create an all-female team as a part of Tektite II.

Sylvia Earle, who went on to become the first female chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (and eventually logged more than 7,000 hours underwater), led a team of five women. The team, which included marine biologists Alina Szmant and Ann Hartline, oceanographer Renate True, and electrical engineer Margaret Ann “Peggy” Lucas Bond, published numerous papers in scientific journals.

The success of the women’s Tektite II mission helped pave the way for NASA’s female astronauts. For an insightful TV news video made 20 years after the Tektite II mission, click here.