Submersible in Santa Barbara
James Berry, an operations technician for the deep submersible rescue vehicle Mystic, answers questions in 1985 at Stearns Wharf in Santa Barbara. The 50-foot-long Mystic, one of the world’s most sophisticated submersibles, provided rapid-response submarine rescue capability from 1970 to 2008 for the U.S. Navy. If there was a submarine accident, Mystic or its sister submersible Avalon would rescue the survivors. Today the Mystic is in the U.S. Naval Undersea Museum. The museum’s website (navalunderseamuseum.org/dsrv-mystic) explains that the DSRVs had a smart-vehicle system twice as complex as the one that guided the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. (By the way, the difference between submarines and submersibles is that the latter requires a mother ship for transportation. Submarines leave ports under their own power.)
