Fictional worlds often hold up a mirror to reality and Gerry Anderson's supersonic creations of the 1960s captured substantial real-world interests in post-war technological advances and space exploration. Series like Fireball XL5 and Thunderbirds have often been commented upon for their reflections of the Space Race, while Captain Scarlet and UFO draw noticeable Cold War parallels. 

Stingray may present us with a kaleidoscopic array of underwater fantasy, but the series also captures a real-world fascination with underwater exploration and increasing advances in submarine and diving capabilities which were prevalent throughout the 1960s. Let's take a deep dive into how Stingray reflected a very real underwater zeitgeist of the 1960s!

The Submarines from the Navy

Stingray is by no means the only underwater fictional world to inspire and provoke imaginations. From Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1872) to James Cameron's The Abyss (1989), the worlds beneath our oceans have always sparked adventure and mystery. Speaking about the genesis of Stingray in his 2002 biography, What Made Thunderbirds Go!, Gerry Anderson recognised the vast aquatic landscapes as providing a fertile springboard for a new series: "I was fascinated by trenches in the ocean that are as deep as mountains are high. There are features that man has never seen and pressures that are almost impossible to withstand. I began to wonder if there were areas of the Earth which had been little explored and felt justified in writing some whacky stuff. I was drawn to anything that involved exploration, the future or predictions."

Much as Gerry's worlds speculate on future technologies and attitudes, Stingray's futuristic world has its roots in real-world advances in undersea exploration. The 1960s was a time of revolutionary developments and increasing public interest in understanding the world's oceans. Many landmark technological breakthroughs and deep-sea missions have reflections in Stingray. These real-world developments increased our understanding of the world's oceans from a geological and climate perspective, as we as marine wildlife and how humans may survive living in deep-sea conditions. However, they were often driven by not entirely altruistic means.

Not unlike the politically-driven attitudes of the Space Race between Western and Eastern European powers, many major milestones of undersea exploration were informed by military forces. In 1960, the UK's first nuclear-powered submarine, HMS Dreadnought (S101), went into active service, reflected in the nuclear-powered functionality of Stingray itself. The US Navy's own first nuclear-propelled submarine, USS Nautilus (SSN-571), had been launched slightly earlier in 1958. The encroachment of the Cold War during this period saw the world's oceans serve as battlefields for these nuclear-driven hunters, although diesel-driven submarines were still in service in the Royal Navy. Elsewhere in 1960, the nuclear-powered USS Triton of the United States Navy made its first submerged circumnavigation of the globe. A mere four years after these two milestones, Stingray portrayed the WASP's flagship vessel as a nuclear-powered vessel easily capable of traversing the globe with ease, and was treated as entirely commonplace for the far-flung future of the 2060s.

Technology Down Below

Outside of this underwater arms race, other technological advancements were taking place during the 1960s. Building on advances made throughout the preceding decades, the first multibeam sounding system was achieved in 1963, a breakthrough that would allow increased accuracy in sea mapping, and something else that's treated as an everyday tool only a year later in Stingray in how Lieutenant Phones is able to co-pilot the WASP super-sub. 

In January 1960, oceanographer Jacques Piccard (son of inventor Auguste Piccard) and US Navy lieutenant Don Walsh succeeded in making the deepest dive mission of its time. Within the safety of the bathyscape vessel Trieste, the pair descended nearly 36,000 feet into the Challenger Deep, a depth of nearly seven miles. Stingray would take this deep-sea exploration one stage further with the sub-surface oceans seen in The Big Gun and The Subterranean Sea. Prior to unlocking the secrets of the Challenger Deep, the Trieste had already undertaken 50 deep-sea diving missions. The bathyscape itself was a relatively new invention, having been developed only 30 years prior to the Challenger Deep mission. Bathyscapes themselves were invented by Auguste, who would also create the world's first passenger submarine in 1964.

Trieste was initially owned and operated by the French Navy before being purchased by the US Navy in 1958. The US Navy caught up with Trieste's achievements with Alvin, its own deep sea submersible vehicle that was specifically designed to be a more mobile alternative to the comparatively stationary bathyscapes. Alvin was the American military's first purpose-built deep sea diving craft of its own and was capable of carrying passengers. First launched in 1964, the year of Stingray's own debut, Alvin remains in active service, having undertaken over 5,000 exploration missions.

Underwater living

During this period of frenzied activity then, the challenges of creating vehicles designed to withstand and uncover the secrets of the oceans were being met face to face, but the possibilities of actually living underwater brought their own advancements and subsequent difficulties. Stingray's portrayal of underwater civilisations and cultures ranged from the likes of Pacifica, in which entire metropolises have been constructed out of the very environment which these aquatic aliens were in close harmony with, to those seen in The Ghost Ship or The Disappearing Ships, where sunken man-made craft are acquired by nomad communities or individuals. 

Various artificial underwater habitats exist in today's world, ranging from the Aquarius undersea laboratory to the underwater restaurant Ithaa. While an underwater equivalent of the International Space Station perhaps remains a fantasy, the 1960s saw many leaps and bounds made to understand the possibilities and endurances required for humans to be able to live underwater.

The US Navy experimented with undersea habitats with the deployment of its SeaLab vessels, designed to test the psychological strains of prolonged periods of living beneath the seas. Three SeaLab habitats were launched in 1964, 1965 and 1969 respectively. However, the SeaLab projects would end in tragedy when one of the aquanauts of SeaLab 3 died during attempts to fix the habitat when it began to leak. Further instances of suspected sabotage were an undeniable factor in the end of SeaLab's development.

American military physician, Dr, Bond, and renowned film-maker and oceanographer Jacques Cousteau joined forces to create their own underwater habitats. Backed by the French petrochemical industry, the experimental Conshelf I (Continental Shelf Station I) was constructed and deployed in 1962. Two inhabitants succeeded in living off the Marseilles coast for a week. Conshelf I was hoped to be the first of many more underwater living stations in which aquanauts could live and work inside to study the world's oceans. Conshelf II and Conshelf III followed respectively in 1963 and 1965, each designed to be more self-sufficient than the last. No further Conshelf habitats would emerge after 1965.

Where Stingray's alien characters live in comfortable abundance in their sprawling underwater cities, the reality of the 1960s clearly had some lengths to go before catching up with Stingray's speculative worlds. Intriguingly, this glacial development is also reflected in Stingray with the series' muted presence of its own human characters actually living under the oceans. The drilling station in The Subterranean Sea and the marine farm in Trapped in the Depths are rare examples, but other human-occupied underwater habitats are seen throughout Stingray's extensive spin-off media, including various other farm labs and research stations seen throughout TV Century 21.

Nevertheless, the US Navy and Cousteau and Bond's experiments proved that living underwater in some level of ease and security was possible and became the forerunners to NASA's own underwater living experiments throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Many further habitats were developed across coastlines during this time, including the Tektite underwater laboratory. Co-developed between the US Navy, NASA, General Electric and the United States Department for Interior, Tektite I was initially home to a group of four scientists who studied the surrounding underwater ecosystems. In 1970, Tektite II became the home of Mission 6, the all-female NASA crew led by Sylvia Earle. Mission 6 documented many new forms of marine vegetation and reef ecology, and provided invaluable data into the psychological and physical effects of living underwater. This in turn helped to inform how humans could survive the complex and dangerous conditions of surviving in outer space. While it may be a more tenuous link compared to the above parallels, it's a pleasant coincidence that Stingray's positive portrayal of well-rounded female characters eventually gave way to the first ever all-female aquanaut mission a few years later.

Anything Can Happen

Fireball XL5 may have come along at just the right time to ignite young imaginations just as the Space Race was gaining traction, but it's doubly remarkable that Stingray should emerge during a time of fantastic advances being made in underwater exploration that also caught the public eye. Like many other Gerry Anderson series that came before and after, Stingray can rightly claim to be an insightful encapsulation of how undersea exploration was such a hot topic throughout the 1960s.

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