On Sunday, (June 18), a small submersible vessel named Titan, carrying five people nearly 4,000 metres down the Atlantic Ocean to view the 1912 wreckage of the Titanic, lost contact with those at the surface.
Four days on, as the deadline looms for the vessel’s oxygen supply to run out, authorities are making last-ditch rescue efforts.
The trip was organised by the company OceanGate Inc, which mentions private “crewed submersible exploration” as part of its offerings. Notably, among the five people who are now missing is the vessel pilot and OceanGate CEO and Founder, Stockton Rush.
What is OceanGate Inc?
OceanGate Inc is a US-based company founded in 2009. Its website describes itself as “an ocean exploration venture focused on providing crewed submersible services to enable researchers and explorers to access the oceans’ vast resources”, adding that it plans to evolve methods to lower the costs of such explorations.
Apart from the use of submersibles for exploration purposes, it says they can be used for carrying out scientific research, allowing people to carry out “real-time sampling, collecting and experimentation”, deep-sea testing, and for underwater filming.
For the Titan trip, its website says no prior diving experience is required and anyone above the age of 18 can go for it, with each ticket costing $250,000. The eight-day trip includes time to travel near the site of the wreckage and familiarising people with the basics of diving. Each dive takes about 10 hours, including the time to descend and ascend, with around 4 hours for the exploration.
The Titanic’s wreck lies around 700 km south of St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, the starting point of the trip.
Who is Stockton Rush, the founder and owner of OceanGate?
Rush is an alumnus of the Haas School of Business from the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned an MBA degree between 1987 and 1989. He also has a Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from Princeton University. He started his company after spending a few years as a commercial pilot.
In a 2017 interview with the Princeton Alumni Weekly, he said of the inspiration for his company, “I was interested in exploration… I thought it was space exploration, I thought it was Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars … and then I realized, it’s all in the ocean.”
In an interview with Smithsonian Magazine in 2019, he further stressed on ocean exploration over that of space, saying “We’re going to colonize the ocean long before we colonize space.” While the Titanic expedition was to begin that year, it was delayed after the company failed to secure proper permitting for its contracted research support vessel.
According to The New York Times, the Titan began deep-sea ventures related to the Titanic in 2021. It has been to the wreckage twice, not including the current visit.
What were OceanGate’s previous expeditions?
OceanGate says it has completed over 14 expeditions and over 200 dives in the Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. It has a fleet of five-person submersibles, “capable of reaching depths as deep as 4,000 meters”. Submersibles, unlike submarines, are not fully capable of staying underwater for long durations. They need the support of a surface vessel, platform, shore team or sometimes a larger submarine.
Their fleet includes Titan, the submersible that is now missing. “Titan is lighter in weight and more cost efficient to mobilize than any other deep diving submersible”, the website claims, saying “a combination of ground-breaking engineering and off-the-shelf technology” are behind the vessel.
The second vessel of its fleet, named Antipodes, is a 5-person submersible that can reach a depth of 305 metres (1,000 feet). Cyclops 1, the third vessel, can go up to a depth of 500 metres.
In 2016, Cyclops 1 went on an expedition to survey the wreck of the Andrea Doria, an Italian passenger liner that sank near Massachusetts in 1956 after colliding with the Stockholm, a Swedish passenger vessel outbound from New York. It also performed four dives to the SS Governor, a 417-foot passenger liner at a depth of 240 feet, off the coast of Washington, US. However, the depth of the Titanic wreckage is greater than that of other expeditions.
OceanGate offers packages, including for the Bahamas and off the Portugal coast, along with ‘bespoke’ or customisable trips.
The Titan submersible, operated by OceanGate Expeditions to explore the wreckage of the sunken SS Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland, dives in an undated photograph. (OceanGate Expeditions/Handout via REUTERS) 
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