«The charge on us is to get her built, and once she's built we feel very confident that users will pay the operational costs,» says Chris Cooper, vice president of SeaBase1 and the son of the project's founder Richard Cooper, a former Sealab and
Tektite aquanaut and a longtime University of Connecticut professor of marine sciences who died last year.
As an alternate
aquanaut, Koblick did not get to stay inside the habitat but was in the water every day to help carry out
Tektite science projects, especially chasing down lobsters to attach color - coded tracking tags.