The University of Rhode Island broke ground last week on a state-of-the-art oceanographic command center, which it called as important to undersea exploration as the Johnson Space Center in Houston is to NASA’s control of missions in outer space.

When completed in spring 2009, the $15 million, 41,000-square-foot Undersea Exploration Center on URI’s Narragansett Bay Campus will be the nexus for ambitious plans to make URI a world leader in exploration of the ocean floor – 96 percent of which humans have never seen, said Robert Ballard, the celebrity marine explorer who discovered the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic in 1985, and who currently runs URI’s Institute of Archeological Oceanography.

“What Houston is to outer space, this will be to inner space,” Ballard said, speaking at the Nov. 6 ceremony that was attended by U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, Gov. Donald L. Carcieri, and former U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell, whose name adorns URI’s Pell Marine Science Library, which also will be expanded as part of the project.

Rhode Island voters narrowly approved a $14 million bond for the project in 2004, and URI received the remaining $1 million through private donations.

The majority of the new building will house an expanded Inner Space Center, a NASA-style technology command center that uses a high-definition TV satellite and Internet system to instantly link research teams exploring the floor of the world’s oceans in autonomous underwater vehicles with oceanographic experts at URI and across the nation.

The Inner Space Center will act as a fulcrum for ongoing undersea missions that will represent a new paradigm for ocean research, Ballard said. In contrast to the traditional approach to scientific exploration, in which researchers get funding for narrowly defined research, scientists at the Inner Space Center will maintain constant, year-round contact with the research vessels, which will remain at sea except for crew changes and maintenance stops.

URI expects to be in contact with at least two research vessels: its own Endeavor and the Okeanos Explorer, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s new ship of exploration, which NOAA has said it expects to base at Quonset Point in North Kingstown.

Scientists coming off the research vessels will help to man the Inner Space Center, which will operate essentially like a hospital emergency room, with scientific experts on call in case of an undersea discovery who can be linked via satellite directly to researchers on the ocean floor.

“Because the ship is literally going where no one has gone before on planet Earth, we don’t really know what we’re going to find,” Ballard said. “What’s going to happen – hopefully often – is someone here at GSO will be walking around and their cell phone will go off, or let’s say someone in Hawaii who’s not even awake yet, and their phone goes off and … they answer the phone and the person says, ‘Boot up your laptop!’ ”

Ballard has operated a much smaller, temporary Inner Space Center at URI since 2004, when the command center was conceived to assist his first mission back to the Titanic since he discovered it at the bottom of the ocean 20 years earlier.

Ballard and other scientists have used the temporary command center for several subsequent missions, including a summer 2006 expedition to Greece’s Santorini Islands, where Ballard and an international team of scientists discovered that the second largest volcanic eruption in human history, a massive Bronze Age eruption, was much larger and more widespread than previously believed.

“None of us expected to crawl into that crater and encounter the phenomenal vent fields that we found there,” he said, describing the discovery.

The temporary Inner Space Center will be used again in March when a team of scientists explores the sea floor of the National Marine Sanctuary in Monterey, California.

More than half of the United States is underwater, Ballard said, and there is a crucial economic need to map the overwhelmingly unexplored resource, especially the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.

“We have a challenge in this country to maintain our standard of living, and we’re not going to maintain it with … our military might. We’re going to maintain it with what’s between our ears,” Ballard said. “And we have a tremendous challenge in this country of graduating scientists and engineers to be competitive.”

To that end, Ballard said he hopes the Inner Space Center will inspire a new generation of undersea explorers, in the same way that Sputnik’s trajectory in 1957 over his childhood home in Wichita, Kan., inspired him to make a career as an explorer.

URI and NOAA plan to link the Inner Space Center to classrooms across Rhode Island and the nation, providing schoolchildren with unprecedented access to science as it happens.

In particular, Ballard said he believes students will be inspired by listening to the conversations between researchers on the sea floor and scientists on land as new discoveries are made.

“My favorite one is when the scientist will say to the pilot, ‘Can you move the ship about a meter to the right?’ ” he said. “Think about that: Would you move the ship up there, 12,000 feet up, over three feet.”

“Can you imagine a child listening to that conversation, saying, ‘What did they just do? How’d they do that?’ ” Ballard continued. “Wouldn’t it be great if this little kernel of activity at the Inner Space Center, with NOAA, sparked all of these kids wanting to be engineers and explore?” •