In 1988, the Foundation used its MarineLab habitat to conduct a series of NOAA funded programs designed to study diver physiology under a variety of hyperbaric environments.  These studies used Doppler ultrasound technology to detect small nitrogen bubbles in the blood of divers who had spent 12, 24, and 48 hours at depths of 12 - 24 feet  in the MarineLab Undersea Laboratory.  Several papers and presentations resulted from this study, which provided some new and fascinating information on the no-decompression limit for divers.

In 1992, NASA joined with MRDF to simulate the isolation conditions of a long term space mission, placing aquanauts in an undersea habitat for 30 days, the La Chalupa 30 mission.  Overlapping this cooperative program was a privately funded endeavour, sponsored by MRDF, called Project Atlantis.  The program raised public awareness about the possibilities of living and working in the sea and resulted in the establishment of a world record for living in an undersea habitat (69 days). 

In 1993 and 1994, NASA’s OCEAN Project conducted plant growth experiments in one of MRDF’s undersea habitats to learn more about the challenges of maintaining controlled ecological life support systems, in an alien environment.  The scope of the OCEAN Project was expanded in 1995 to capitalize on the educational value of using an undersea habitat to demonstrate the similarities between living in outer space and within the sea. 

On September 9, 1995, the Foundation joined with NASA in a rare sea to space connection - only the second time such a link has ever been established.  During the link, Ian Koblick and Astronaut/Aquanaut Scott Carpenter, speaking from Jules’ Undersea Lodge, communicated with Astronaut Michael Gernhardt on board the Space Shuttle Endeavour.  The event marked the 30th anniversary of the first such link-up when Carpenter spoke from the Navy’s Sealab habitat on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in 1965 to fellow former Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper, orbiting above in Gemini V. 

Building on the success of MarineLab, MRDF helped develop Jules’ Undersea Lodge in 1986. This unique facility,  the world’s first undersea hotel, was created by converting the former La Chalupa habitat into a luxury undersea dwelling. The Foundation consulted on the habitat’s refurbishment and oversaw its installation in the lagoon at MRDF’s Key Largo center.  The Lodge was donated to the Foundation in 1995, by which time it had hosted over 5,000 visitors.  Among these visitors were astronauts, scientists, celebrities, politicians and other people with a taste for adventure. 

in 1990, the Foundation developed an undersea diving program with the Oceanographic Ministry of the former Soviet Union.  Two Soviet scientist/ aquanauts from the P. P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the Soviet Academy of Sciences participated in a NOAA-funded, two week saturation dive study of vital lung capacity in the MarineLab habitat.  The project signified the first time that Russian scientists had lived in a US undersea habitat.