"From humble beginnings in the borrowed pool at McDonogh School," he said, "underwater training facilities were eventually built at every major space center in the world, and now exist in the U.S., Russia, Germany, Japan and China."
It's in today's multi-million-gallon NASA pools that astronauts and engineers have created the tools and techniques that enabled astronauts to build the International Space Station and repair the Hubble Space Telescope.
The underwater environment can simulate - with about 70 percent accuracy, some say - both the weightless conditions of space, and, in a much more limited way, lunar gravity, which is just one-sixth that of Earth.
But all that was unknown in the early 1960s when Mattingly and Loats began Environmental Research Associates. Mattingly was trained in business, Loats, who died two years ago, was trained in science. The Randallstown startup was chasing after any research and engineering jobs they could get from NASA, the military or their contractors.
By 1964, their work began to focus on the Gemini program -- the two-man space capsules that preceded the three-man Apollo missions. Gemini astronauts would be the first Americans to step outside their capsules, and NASA needed a tether to secure them and reel them back in. Engineers also had to develop an air lock, through which astronauts could exit and return to their capsule or space station.
"It ... became obvious that a pressure-suited man in normal gravity would not be agile enough to crawl through the air lock, so we would have to simulate weightlessness by going under water," Mattingly said in his memoir.
At first, Mattingly and his company experimented in an Air Force swimming pool near the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. But there was a host of problems, including the "constant parade of people through the pool building asking what we were doing and why, and could they help," Mattingly recalled.
So they returned to Randallstown and approached McDonogh about using its pool. Fifteen years earlier, Mattingly had sold water filtration gear to what was then an 800-student private boys' school. "They had the best indoor pool in the area," he recalled, with great filtration and the clear water vital to photography.
He told McDonogh Headmaster Robert L. Lamborn that it was "very important for the national space program that we use his pool."
