Living Underwater: Subsea Habitats with Former Aquanaut Roger Garcia From Aquarius Reef Base to DEEP

Living Underwater — Subsea Habitats with Roger Garcia

What does it actually mean to live underwater?

• In this episode of Extreme Living, I’m joined by Roger Garcia, who has spent more than two decades working in underwater human habitation first as an aquanaut living inside subsea habitats, and later leading operations that support long-duration missions.

Roger is the former Operations Director of the Aquarius Reef Base and a retired U.S. Navy Deep Sea Diver and Marine Corps Combat Diver. During his 23 years with the Aquarius program, he supported and supervised nearly 100 saturation missions, including scientific research projects, defense initiatives, and NASA’s NEEMO astronaut training analogs.

Roger currently serves as Director of Habitat Operations at DEEP, where he is helping shape the next generation of subsea habitats designed for long-term human presence.

Our conversation explores what makes underwater environments challenging beyond engineering and safety. We talk about:

• Confinement by choice,
• The difference between livable and habitable spaces,
• Why the hardest moments are often the time between the work, and how comfort and human interaction become critical to long-term performance.

We also discuss why decades of lived experience underwater represent a valuable, and often overlooked, knowledge base, how subsea habitats have shaped spaceflight training, and how companies like DEEP are re-imagining underwater habitats as places for sustained human presence.