A nursing professor and explorer have designed a portable life-support system that they claim allows divers to eat, sleep and decompress underwater.
Ocean Space Habitat functions like an underwater tent that can be rapidly deployed to provide and maintain a breathable environment.
The design takes the form of a frame covered by an inflatable collapsible envelope, which can be anchored. The envelope can be fixed with a removable propulsion unit that propels it through the water.
The interior is equipped with windows, a seat, a replenishable oxygen source and a carbon dioxide scrubber which continuously removes carbon dioxide from the mobile environment.
The Ocean Space Habitat can be packed up and transported on a plane
It was designed and patented by diving pioneer and explorer Michael Lombardi and Professor Winslow Burleson, the director of NYU Meyers College of Nursing's cross-disciplinary NYU-X Lab. In conventional scuba diving, divers must periodically come up for air, restricting the depths that they can reach before having to return to the surface.
Much like an underwater base camp, the habitat provides a place where divers can remove their equipment before transferring to the tent. Once inside the tent is "blown down" with fresh gas to create a relatively dry atmosphere suitable for napping, talking, eating, and decompressing before returning to a dive.

The habitat allows divers to dive deeper and stay underwater for longer periods of time. Several divers ...