After speaking to Dawn Kernagis, Kirk Krack, and Rick Goddard and Harry Thompson as part of our DEEP interview series, we chat to Mike Shackleford, COO at DEEP, about the company’s overall vision, its future, and its ambitious undertaking to make humans aquatic.

Oceanographic: Mike, what’s your role at DEEP at the moment? What is your field of expertise?

Mike Shackleford: “As COO, I’m running the back end of DEEP, so I’m handling the finances, the HR department, and the advanced manufacturing capability. I’m also supporting the Campus build up so we can start to bring people here for training, education and product testing.”

Oceanographic: How would you describe being a part of DEEP?

Mike Shackleford: “I actually have no ocean background! Everything I’ve learned about the ocean I’ve learned here. It’s a perfect environment to learn. It’s so intense. We have so many different people with different backgrounds and almost every single one of them has a different skillset. We have a freediving expert and two submarine pilots and an HR person and so on – it’s a very wide swath of people for you to learn from, which is incredible. I’ve been able to pick the brain of genius-level people – that has probably been my favourite part of being here.”

Oceanographic: What’s the overall vision of DEEP?

Mike Shackleford: “Our mission is to make humans aquatic. When I think of this idea, I think of somebody with gills and somebody that can live in the water. We’re probably a couple of hundred years away from that, but until then, we’re looking at what can be done to get humanity adapted to the water for as long as possible. Our Sentinel habitat is going to be saturation capable which means that people are going to be able to stay down there for extended periods of time. At the moment, we’re aiming for 28 days but in the future, it could be much longer. In essence, you could be down there forever and maybe that’s our goal ultimately. The mission is not a commercial one. While we are certainly a commercial organization as we need money in order to make more habitats and more submersibles, DEEP’s underlying mission is to understand the ocean so that we can protect it.

We know almost nothing about the ocean. We don’t usually go beyond the 40-metre point as divers. Even in a submersible, we don’t typically visit anywhere below 1,000 metres. The DSV Alvin, for example, goes down to 4,500 metres and there are some that go lower than 6,000 metres, but that’s it. Humanity just doesn’t have access to areas lower than that and we can’t directly observe them. It’s going to be difficult to understand what’s down there in the ocean. Just from a scientific research perspective, we have to know more about what’s going on down there. We’re never going to find out if we don’t get people into the water and living down there.”