KEYPORT — Mary Ryan and Jennifer Heinzelman watched for the arrival of their new artifact with the excitement of art museum curators waiting for the arrival of a Rembrandt or Van Gogh.
Their latest artifact is indeed a masterpiece — not of art, but of life-saving technology.
The newest addition to Ryan and Heinzelman’s collection is Mystic, one of two Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicles, or DSRVs, developed by Lockheed for the U.S. Navy. The 49-foot, 38-ton submarine-shaped vessel was launched in 1970 and retired in 2008, when it was succeeded by the Submarine Rescue Diving and Recompression System or, in Navy parlance, the SRDRS.
A small crowd watched on Sept. 30 as Mystic arrived on a tractor trailer at the Naval Undersea Museum, its new home. Since 2008, it had been kept in San Diego.
The Mystic will be displayed outside, across the grounds from its smaller prototype, Deep Quest.
According to a Wikipedia article, the Deep Submergence System Project was established in June 1965 in the aftermath of the loss of USS Thresher in 1963.
Ryan said Mystic was designed to rescue submariners at a standard depth of 5,000 feet. It would be transported by aircraft, ship or submarine to the area of the disabled sub, then would descend to the ocean floor at a speed of 4 knots.
The Mystic’s power plant consists of electric motors, silver/zinc batteries, one shaft, and four thrusters. It is equipped with a search and navigation sonar, an arm to clear hatches on a disabled submarine, and a combined cable cutter and gripper capable of lifting 1,000 pounds. The Mystic would be crewed by two pilots and two rescue personnel.
Upon reaching the disabled sub, an airtight skirt would attach to the submarine’s hatch. The DSRV could take on 24 submariners at a time; that means five or six trips to retrieve an entire sub crew.
“The U.S. Navy never lost a submarine since the DSRVs were placed in service, so, fortunately, it never had to be used,” Ryan said. “The U.S. Navy made it available [to other countries], and it was used in a lot of drills with foreign navies.”
The newer SRDRS is easier to deploy than the DSRV, but the Mystic and its sister, Avalon, have their own bragging rights: They used twice the computing power of the Apollo space craft.
And, said retired Navy Lt. Cmdr. Paul Lucas, a museum volunteer, “The simplicity of the system, of the concept, is what made it most effective. It went down, it picked them up, it brought them to the surface.”
The museum is an official Navy museum and Mystic is Navy property; Heinzelman and her coworkers are Mystic’s civilian caretakers. She said that once Mystic is in place, an assessment will be made of its conservation and preservation needs inside and out. (By the way, Mystic’s interior will not be open to the public). A fence and interpretive panel will be in place soon.
Ryan said Mystic bolsters the museum’s focus on submarines and submersibles. The museum now “couldn’t be more perfect,” she said.
DSRVs in pop culture
While never used for real–life rescues, the DSRV was portrayed in the 1978 movie “Gray Lady Down,” where it was used to rescue the crew of a sunken submarine.
According to Wikipedia: “Both DSRVs were featured in Tom Clancy’s book, ‘The Hunt for Red October,’ as part of a scheme to seize a defecting Soviet submarine, and one featured in the film adaptation.
Mystic was featured in the pilot of the 2005 NBC TV series “Surface,” plays a role as a rescue vehicle in the game ‘Sub Command” under the mission, “Save The Danes,” and was the main vehicle in the 1989 book and film “The Abyss.”
