Astronaut and aquanaut Nicole Stott travels where oxygen doesn’t flow.
Space travel and scuba diving may seem worlds apart. But for Nicole Stott, a veteran NASA astronaut and aquanaut, they’re intimately connected — both offering powerful reminders of what Earth really is: a brilliant ocean planet we’re lucky to call home.
In her 15 years as a NASA astronaut, Stott spent 104 days working in space on the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station (ISS). She also lived 18 days at the Aquarius Reef Base, the world’s only undersea research station, as an aquanaut — a diver who remains submerged for extended periods of time.
Though being an aquanaut isn’t explicitly required for NASA astronauts, there’s a similarity between the experiences that just fits beautifully, Stott says. Being underwater provides such a convincing analog to space exploration that NASA uses the Aquarius habitat to test tech like communications and telemedicine that may later be used in space.
“As astronauts, we joke, ‘Isn’t it awesome that we get to go and live and work in ‘inner space’ to learn how to live and work in outer space?’” Stott said during a talk at COMO Cocoa Island resort in the Maldives, where she led a reef dive with the PADI Dive Center and hosted a talk about space. It’s also where I sat down with Stott to pick her brain about the link between the universe above and the one under the sea, including the life-changing perspective you get from crossing either threshold.
The Makings of a Multi-naut
Stott’s journey to space started when she was young. She first became enamored with flying — and wanting to know how things fly — through her father, who worked in business but loved to build and fly small planes. She earned her pilot’s license, studied aeronautical engineering, and then worked for a decade in Space Shuttle operations at NASA. “Over the years, I realized 99 percent of an astronaut's job is not flying in space. It's here on Earth, and most of it was a lot like what I was already doing as an engineer for NASA,” she says. “It made me transition from this idea that it's something other special people get to do — ‘Why would they ever pick me?’ you know, saying ‘no’ to yourself before anybody else does — to, ‘Wow, this could be a possibility.’”
Stott got the job and started training to go to space. One of the first activities in astronaut school? Scuba diving at the NASA Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston: a massive, 40-foot-deep pool with a mockup of the ISS inside, used to simulate the microgravity environment of space. The astronauts submerge themselves in their white space suits and practice moving around the station as they would in a spacewalk.
Not all astronauts continue scuba diving or become aquanauts like Stott, but undersea and space exploration seem to scratch the same itch. And when you go beyond recreational diving to living and working underwater, as Stott did during her 2006 mission to the Aquarius habitat, it offers the most space-like experience you can get while remaining on Earth. For 18 days, Stott lived 60 feet below the Florida Keys with five other aquanauts in a pod the size of a school bus, conducting research, testing remote surgery techniques, and practicing simulated “moonwalks.”
A few years later, Stott got her chance to do the real thing — not a moonwalk, but a spacewalk along the ISS during the STS-128 mission, making her the 10th woman ever to perform one. A thrill? Absolutely, but so was just looking out the ISS window.
“The first time I looked out the window on the station, I was just stunned. It was overwhelmingly beautiful, this glowing, colorful, iridescent planet,” she says. “And I thought, ‘I wonder if I’m going to want to pull the shade down on the window and watch my movie?’ Never. It didn't matter if we were flying over the exact same place on Earth again. The way the clouds were, the color of the water, if it was night or day, it would always surprise you. And I think the same way about diving…you could go to the same reef every day and see something different.”
Although no longer training for missions, Stott still dives regularly. "It's kind of like flying in small airplanes in that when I'm not doing it and then I get back into an airplane, I'm like, ‘Why am I not doing this all the time?’” she says. “There's this liberation, this feeling that you don't get anywhere else. With both things, you’re in this world that's so different from anything else you experience on a day-to-day basis. It doesn't matter where you dive. It doesn't matter where you fly. There's just awesomeness all around you."
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The Overview Effect
Something profound happens when you learn to function in an environment where you can’t so much as take breathing for granted. “The reason why it's so amazing to go live underwater in a place like [Aquarius] — it’s a real extreme environment, just like space,” Stott said during her talk at COMO. Even when scuba diving recreationally, you need to do decompression stops before rising to the surface so your body has time to release extra gas absorbed under deep water pressure. This sort of calculated surfacing is necessary to prevent dangerous bubbles from forming in your blood. It also means “we can't just swim safely to the surface to get back,” Stott says. “And the same thing is true in space. When something goes wrong on the space station, we can't just hop in our spaceship any time we want and come home."
There’s a heightened sense of mindfulness, situational awareness, and personal responsibility that both environments demand — and that’s the biggest takeaway Stott holds onto years later, and the one she shares when speaking in front of groups of people or teaching kids about the opportunities in space through her Space for Art Foundation and with partner Christina Korp and Space for a Better World.
“As humans in space, we have to behave like crewmates and not passengers. We wake up in the morning, and one of the very first things we do is check how much carbon dioxide is in our atmosphere. How much clean drinking water we have. The integrity of our thin metal hull. The health and well-being of all of our crewmates. And we do that because we know we have to do that just to survive in that place,” she said. And when you’re up in space, looking down at our planet, it’s a harsh reminder that we’re living in a delicate ecosystem hurtling through space, too. “It’s a reminder that we live on a planet. We're all Earthlings. The only border that matters is that thin blue line of atmosphere,” she says.
Put a mask on, and just look. It's extraordinary how the world around you just opens up in a whole new way.
This sort of zoomed-out POV is often called “the overview effect.” The term was coined by space philosopher and author Frank White in 1987 to describe the cognitive shift that astronauts often experience as a result of viewing the Earth from space. Researchers have described it as “as a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus.”
While being in space offers a look at the bigger picture, it also forces you to hyperfocus on the present moment unlike anything else — except maybe scuba diving. This is one of the things that keeps Stott coming back to the water again and again.
“I think there's something to treating the experience you have underwater as a very meditative kind of thing,” she says. “I never really meditated before going to space. But what I found, coming back to Earth, is that earthing, meditating, scuba diving — it's all very transcendent in a way that reminds me a lot of what it was like to float in front of a window and look back at Earth. To just get sucked into the experience you're having. Almost to where you just separate from everything else.”
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Entering “Inner Space”
Space flights may be more accessible than ever, but it’s still a luxury most people won’t have in their lifetimes. That zen, otherworldly feeling isn’t miles above the Earth’s surface, though; it’s just a scuba dive away.
If you’ve been meaning to try diving — or never considered it until now — take this as your sign to jump in. “Don't wait like I did,” urges Stott, who first started diving in her 30s. Find an instructor or dive shop certified by the Professional Association of Diving Instructors — better known as PADI, the most recognized dive training organization worldwide — and you’ll be in good hands.
If diving isn’t in the cards, you’re not off the hook. Grab a snorkel and a mask; you’ll be surprised at the way the world quiets when your face is just an inch or two underwater. “Put a mask on, and just look,” Stott says. “It's extraordinary how the world around you just opens up in a whole new way.”
Images Courtesy of Nicole Stott