Stone, a cave explorer and engineer, explains why he walked away from the astronaut program. By the time NASA considered him, he says, his cave-diving expeditions were operating much further from safety than spacewalks, and he argues NASA still hasn't rethought EVA for serious work on the moon.
And now you've got the lion by the tail.
…said you were too independent to be an astronaut. And you said you were very proud of that. And I really, really appreciate you sharing that. And I wonder if you could kind of talk about that. I mean, obviously, it must have been a huge disappointment on one level, right? But for the best reason.
…you know what? By that time, I was already out there on the limit at places that were way more remote than what those guys were doing. And to give you just an idea of what the right word is here, the seriousness of it, I was beginning to see that things like, okay, yeah, they do EVA. Boy, that is really cool. By talking to these people and by talking to people in the cruise systems division, I discovered that nobody does EVA more than 10 minutes from an airlock because that's how far you have on your emergency gas supply to get back if there's a problem. Well, you know what? By 1987, which was two years before I got selected to go down there and meet with those guys, we were doing 24-hour underwater missions and doing it in caves where we were up to three to five hours one-way travel from an entrance. If anything went wrong out there, forget it. Well, you know what that makes you do? That makes you think, how do I keep myself alive? So by that time, we were building twin…
Let me make sure I understand something because I thought I had a sense of what you got, what you and Gilly do, what you guys do. And I know you invented that rebreather. You're telling me that you guys go underwater for 24 hours straight, presumably not sleeping.
Yeah.
To access from point A to point B. I'm I struggle to be awake at sea level with all the air I want for 24 hours. I, that I'm, I'm, well, I'm not so that's amazing.