Dennis Chamberland

Dennis Chamberland, an aquanaut and Mission Commander for seven NASA underwater missions, designed and built the Scott Carpenter Space Analog Station underwater habitat. Chamberland was elected a Fellow of the New York Explorers Club in 1991.

At the turn of the 21st century, Chamberland had published nearly 100 articles and reference works, mostly dealing with scientific and technical issues. In 1986, Chamberland published a landmark cover story on Genetic Engineering in Christianity Today magazine. Chamberland also published an in-depth interview with General William Westmoreland in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings that lent a critical insight on the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War. He began writing books and novels in 1994.

Dennis Chamberland had maintained a lifelong interest in the human colonization of the undersea regions of the earth. He calls these regions "Aquatica" and its permanent human citizens "Aquaticans". Chamberland released a book titled, "Undersea Colonies" in 2007 in which he described the imminent permanent human colonization of the seas.

Dennis Chamberland has made three attempts at this process, the first of which began in 1972 while he was a college student at Oklahoma State University. It was his attempt to begin the undersea settlement process beneath Tenkiller Ferry Lake in eastern Oklahoma. His interest continued and he began another serious attempt in 1991, forming a corporate venture called the "League of the New Worlds". Combining his interest in space and ocean explorations, he reasoned that the technologies were in many ways twin technologies. Holding the position as a NASA Life Scientist and developer of Advanced Space Life Support Systems based on Controlled Ecological Life Support Systems for the space agency, he was able to view the two technologies developing simultaneously for all off-planet habitation pursuits. While at the Agency, Chamberland coined the term “Resource Recovery” which replaced the term “waste processing” in all advanced human life support systems.

In 1994, Dennis Chamberland, now a certified aquanaut, planted and harvested the first agricultural crop in a manned habitat on the sea floor off Key Largo. This NASA experiment was titled the OCEAN Project. In two years, Dennis Chamberland had designed and built the Scott Carpenter Space Analog Station, a two-man undersea habitat. In 1997 and 1998, he successfully operated his undersea station near Key Largo, Florida, inviting such guests as filmmaker James Cameron and television producer Rod Roddenberry.

Dennis Chamberland began another attempt at launching the first permanent undersea colony in the Gulf of Mexico in Florida Bay in 1998–1999 called the Trident Project. That project was later reorganized in late 2006 as the Atlantica Expeditions. Chamberland is the author of the landmark book, Undersea Colonies I and II and is generally considered the world's leading expert on permanent human undersea colonization.

While at NASA, Dennis Chamberland was a Principal Investigator for a landmark scientific study conducted by a team from the John F. Kennedy Space Center, Brookhaven National Laboratory, McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory that inquired into the chronic neurological effects of galactic space radiation related to a crewed mission to Mars utilizing the Brookhaven Collider-Accelerator. In 2018, Dennis Chamberland was awarded the Nuclear Professional of the Year Award from the International Atomic Energy Agency – ISOE North American Technical Center.

Dennis Chamberland retired from NASA in 2017 after 30 year career at the John F. Kennedy Space Center and accepted a position at the Wings of Eagles Discovery Center in Elmira, New York in designing a 20,000 square foot Mars Base display for STEM students.

In 2022 Dennis Chamberland published a pair of books titled, "Departing Earth Forever" in which he projected the end of the obsolete Apollo model of human space exploration and its replacement. Chamberland defined the new human exploration model by his “First Principle of Human Exploration”. The revised human exploration philosophy is built on the principle that “In every exploration system, we must require the systems we build to adapt to the human standard rather than expect the human to adapt to the machine or the environment – and in every design activity we will protect the human as a primary objective.” In his publications research, Dennis Chamberland discovered in the scientific literature a human pathology resulting in a wide spectrum of diseases of the sensitive epithelial and endothelial tissues of the body he has identified as “Cosmic Radiation Induced Sensitive-Tissue Pathology” or CRISP disorders. These diseases are expressed in humans who are exposed to full spectrum cosmic radiation for an unknown duration, perhaps in exposures in as little as a week, according to some early results of research on NASA Apollo Lunar astronauts.[1] Dennis Chamberland also coined the term “Hiroshima Unit” to enumerate human radiation exposures that are at or above the level that can statistically predict the probability of delayed carcinogens in those exposed to such levels.

Science and Technology Books

• Undersea Colonies ISBN 978-1-889422-15-2
• Undersea Colonies II - Foundations of a New Empire ISBN 978-1-889422-31-2
• The Proxima Manual of Space Exploration ISBN 978-1-889422-02-2
• Thriving in the Days of COVID-19 ISBN 978-1-889422-35-0
• Departing Earth Forever - Promise and Threat - Book One ISBN 978-1-889422-33-6
• Departing Earth Forever - Alien Worlds - Book Two ISBN 978-1-889422-34-3

Novels

• Abyss of Elysium – Mars Wars ISBN 978-1-889422-06-0
• Alyete – Dogs of Eros Damned ISBN 978-1-889422-11-4

Aaron Seven Series

• Aaron Seven - Quantum Storms – Aaron Seven ISBN 978-1-889422-08-4
• Aaron Seven - Abyss of Space ISBN 978-1-889422-13-8
• Aaron Seven - Apocalypse Moon ISBN 978-1-889422-28-2
• Aaron Seven - Aquatica ISBN 978-1-889422-30-5

Children of God Series

• Consuming Fire ISBN 978-1-889422-00-8
• The Way Back Home ISBN 978-1-889422-09-1
• Proverbs for My Children - 2nd Edition ISBN 978-1-889422-04-6
• Eternity's Child ISBN 978-1-889422-24-4
• Eventide ISBN 978-1-889422-25-1
• Psalms of Ascent at Noon 978-1-889422-29-9

• Presidential Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Behavioral Research
• Personal Website
• NASA Meet: Dennis Chamberland
• Atlantica Expeditions Website