Rendering of the new underwater marine exploration lab at URI’s Bay Campus. It is expected to be completed by 2009.

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COURTESY OF URI

NARRAGANSETT — Celebrity marine explorer Bob Ballard says the Undersea Exploration Center to be completed in spring 2009 will be as integral to undersea exploration as the Johnson Space Center in Houston is to launching crucial missions into outer space.

The $15-million facility on the University of Rhode Island’s Bay Campus will become the national hub for underwater research, communication and education, Ballard says, and will, he hopes, lead the world closer to discovering and understanding the largely mysterious landscape lying miles under the water.

“What Houston is to outer space, this will be to inner space,” Ballard said yesterday at the groundbreaking ceremony. “We are the only institution on this earth dedicated to the exploration of the history of the underwater world.”

Several prominent Rhode Islanders attended yesterday’s groundbreaking ceremony at URI’s Bay Campus, including U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, Governor Carcieri, former U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell and URI President Robert Carothers.

The center will also be home to the expanded Pell Marine Science Library, which is reaching its capacity.

Rhode Island voters in 2004 narrowly approved a $14-million bond measure for the 41,000-square-foot center.

The remaining $1 million of the projected cost was secured through private donations.

The most impressive part of the facility will be the Inner Space Center, which will use a satellite and Internet system to communicate with professors and students at URI and around the world.

The center will have the capability to transmit video and audio data, including underwater imagery, from ships at sea to research facilities on land.

URI plans to have two research vessels at its disposal, the Endeavor and the Okeanos Explorer, which it is working to get from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Ballard, an oceanography professor and director of the Institute of Archeological Oceanography, has been instrumental in garnering support for URI’s underwater exploration projects.

As a child inspired by the Jules Verne novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Ballard has said, he always wanted to be Captain Nemo, a scientific genius who shuns civilization for deep-sea exploration.

Ballard achieved worldwide fame in 1985 when he discovered the wreck of the Titanic more than two miles under the Atlantic Ocean, although he has said that the Titanic is not his most significant discovery.

He pointed to 1977, when a joint American and French research expedition near the Galápagos Islands discovered underwater hot springs called hydrothermal vents that supported ecosystems with a toxic combination of chemicals spewing from inside the earth’s crust.

This discovery changed the fundamental thinking in the scientific world to include the possibility of life created from energy other than the sun.

The first expedition after the center is completed will be in the Pacific Ocean, Ballard announced yesterday.

More than 50 percent of the United States is underwater, he said, and in need of further exploration.

The missions will operate like an emergency room, Ballard said, with crews scanning the ocean floor for evidence of archeological or scientific interest, and then contacting the appropriate experts when, and if, a discovery is made.

ngarcia@projo.com