This summer, the Florida Keys will play host to the first new subsea human habitat in four decades.
In late April, UK-based ocean engineering company Deep is set to deploy Vanguard, the company’s pilot habitat designed to accommodate a crew of four aquanauts on sustained missions of a week or longer. After receiving its final permits from the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary earlier this month, it’s set to be installed at Tennessee Reef Research Only conservation area south of Long Key, touching down in a sandy patch at a depth of 59 feet with the living quarters stationed at 46 feet.
The large yellow pill-shaped tank is a 40-foot-long steel structure with acrylic windows, split between living quarters and work space and a “wet porch” for crew to enter and exit the water – complete with an open downward-facing hatch known as the “moon pool.”
Once the habitat reaches the seafloor, the hatch can remain open as long as the pressure within the capsule mirrors or exceeds the ambient water pressure. That means longer bottom times and repeat dives for researchers, who won’t have to go through the process of depressurization and risk of decompression sickness (the bends) while surfacing after each swim.
“If there’s coral research or restoration that requires a significant amount of bottom time, this is how you do it,” said Deep chief technology officer Norman Smith at an unveiling event in Miami in October 2025. “Instead of minutes, you get hours and days.”
The extended bottom time has applications for ocean research, monitoring, wind farm maintenance and pipeline and cable inspection, among others.
Fresh air and water for the habitat come from a surface support buoy, which pipes both down to Vanguard while hosting a diesel generator, a Starlink internet connection and a wastewater tank. The company claims it can withstand hurricane conditions, and that the capsule can store enough air, power and water to sustain a crew for up to 72 hours without support.
A shoreside base in Marathon, known as Deep Station Florida, supports Vanguard in case of an evacuation, trains divers and houses emergency hyperbaric equipment.
Photos by Deep/Contributed
“We have a mission to make humans aquatic, and we want to see a permanent human presence in the ocean starting in 2027, but largely by 2030,” said Kirk Krack, the company’s human diver performance lead.
And with subsea tragedies making headlines in recent years, the company says it aims to be the first subsea habitat certified by Det Norske Veritas (DNV), a global organization that lays out stringent safety and engineering benchmarks for marine structures.
If successful, Vanguard will join just a handful of subsea habitats created since Jacques Cousteau’s Conshelf 1, deployed in Marseilles, France in 1962. But it would be the second underwater lab in the Keys – at press time, FIU’s Aquarius Reef Base off Key Largo has operated 62 feet below the surface since its refurbishment and redeployment in 1992.
Deep leaders hope Vanguard is a stepping stone to a flagship “Sentinel” system, a larger modular habitat with a service life of 20 years that can allow larger crews to stay at depths up to 650 feet for nearly a month.
The new habitat’s deployment is set to take place just under three years after Navy veteran Joseph Dituri’s record-setting underwater residence in Key Largo. Emerging on June 9, 2023 from the Jules Verne Undersea Lodge after 100 days beneath the waves, he set a world record for living underwater without depressurization. During his stay 30 feet down, he submitted to dozens of tests meant to measure the effects of a prolonged high-pressure environment, giving crucial insight for the world of hyperbaric medicine.
