The data could have been sealed in a container and sent to the top, but 

 this would take a minimum of half an hour to do. (First, a transfer 

 capsule had to be sent down and hauled into the wet room; then the draw- 

 ing had to be sealed in the capsule, taken out of the wet room and sent 

 to the surface; then it had to be retrieved, taken to the dive barge, 

 and the capsule unsealed, and finally, the drawing had to be taken up to 

 the Command Site for evaluation there.) In the case of a space vehicle 

 this information transfer would be possible only if a separate space 

 capsule were part of the system, but this is highly expensive and could 

 take a minimum of three or four hours, depending on where the original 

 space vehicle was positioned. Conversely, to send new drawings from the 

 surface to either the aquanauts or astronauts would prove at least as 

 time consuming and expensive as the original data transmission. Whereas, 

 as the aquanauts demonstrated, with the video phone, such visual data 

 could be, and was, transmitted instantaneously and in real time. They, 

 in turn, received immediate feedback from the personnel in the Command 

 Van. 



The data exhibit some support for the hypotheses stating that there would 

 be increased usage of the video phone with time into the mission for 

 social, and decreased usage for operational uses. The fact that there 

 were only a few such significant trends may indicate as well that the 

 aquanauts' use of the video phone was either fairly consistent throughout 

 or else without any real pattern. For the consistency approach, one 

 explanation can be seen in that there were a continuing series of minor 

 equipment problems in the habitat throughout each and all of the missions. 

 Another lies in the fact that each day, the aquanauts and the engineers 

 conducted their own work programs and they used the communications 

 systems to maintain operational contact with the surface. If anything, 

 their work schedules increased toward the end of each mission as the 

 aquanauts became more accustomed to their environment, and as the fixed 

 deadline for completing their research approached. While there was also 

 a slight tendency for the social usage to increase toward the end of each 

 mission, this can be attributed to the fact that most of the aquanauts' 

 spouses, etc., came to the Virgin Islands to greet their aquanaut upon 

 completion of the mission. Thus, there was no other opportunity to talk 

 and/or see the aquanauts prior to this time. For those aquanauts whose 

 social community members were present in the Virgin Islands, they used 

 the video phone whenever their visitors came within camera range in the 

 Command Van. Additionally, there was a constant flow of visitors to the 

 Command Van ranging from itinerant tourists to news media reporters to 

 Ambassadors to other scientists to even the Prime Minister of Canada, 

 Pierre E. Trudeau. The only other detectable trends were that the video 

 phone was used nearly four times as much for operational uses as social; 

 that the engineers in almost all cases, used the video phone more than 

 the scientists. It is interesting to note that the female aquanauts, as 

 a whole, used the video phone less than any of the other teams; and 

 rarely used it for social purposes. Interestingly enough, they also 



VIII-66 



