The One Man Submarine Suit

Submarines of the future aren’t big and bulky. One Canadian inventor has created a submarine suit that can be worn and manned by one person.

The all-metal suit weighs up to 595 pounds (270 kilograms) and is equipped with a vast array of life-support systems and tools to explore the deep-sea, thruster pack included, at a depth of up to 300 meters, while withstanding pressures of 500 pounds (227 kilograms ) per square inch. The suit contains a single diver in what is coined a “submarine” of its very own, and is capable of going for up to 50 hours without resurfacing.

“This is a submarine that you wear. When you climb into that suit, you close the hatch on the surface and in the suit the pressure is 14.7 pounds per square inch, same as you and I are both at right now, and it never increases. So you are never, ever exposed to any more pressure than you were designed and built to handle,” Nuytten said to The Canadian Press.

At the price of nearly $500,000 per suit, though, it’s not hard to see why this hasn’t hit mainstream diving yet. That hasn’t stopped interest on a larger scale though, with NASA showing interest in the suit possibly being retro-engineered for use in space. For Nuytten, however, the mystery of the deep-sea will continue to be the final frontier.

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