A memoir of a young man's dream of space flight and deep diving, Bending Atmospheres is a dazzling adventure recounting daring, heroic professionals learning to work at undersea pressures to 1,000 feet sea water and in the vacuum of orbital space traveling at 18,000 miles an hour. Readers are taken through the early development of deep diving tri-mix, nitrox and neon diving gas mixtures and decompression tables, to early diving in the treacherous North Sea, National Geographic expeditions seeking famed sunken treasure, and methods used to train astronauts for space walks to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. "Bold, daring, exciting adventures - fraught with danger befitting James Bond - are at the heart of this valuable contribution to the literature of how humans developed techniques, protocols, and different breathing gas mixtures for survival, working, and exploration in both the deep sea and space environment by one of the men directly involved in those developments." - Bernie Chowdhury - Author - The Last