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.

In this episode of Extreme Living, Anchal speaks with Andrzej Stewart — an analog astronaut, mission operations specialist, and aerospace engineer who has lived inside long-duration Mars simulation habitats and asteroid analog missions for NASA-related research.

Andrzej shares firsthand insights into:

• Managing interpersonal conflict inside small, high-stakes crews

• Communicating with Earth under multi-minute communication delays

• Why analog missions are essential for future human space exploration

• How environmental design shapes mood, resilience, and mental health

• Balancing technical precision with emotional well-being in isolation

• The challenges of reintegrating into everyday life after mission confinement

Together, they explore what extreme environments — from Mars analog habitats to deep-space simulations — can teach us about human behavior, design, adaptation, and the psychology of isolation.

Guest link:

Solar System Ambassador profile — https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/ambassadors/1973/

Recorded as part of Extreme Living — a design inquiry into human isolation and adaptation.

Learn more: https://extreme-living.com

Inquiries: ExtremeLivingDesign@gmail.com

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A glimpse into Extreme Living — a design inquiry into human isolation, exploring how people live, heal, and adapt in confined or extreme environments - from space stations and Antarctic labs to cancer wards and prisons.

Hosted by Anchal, a licensed architect based in New York.