How Could This Have Happened?
Five people died in a submersible that was only loosely regulated and may not have been inspected for safety.
The dreadful saga of the missing Titanic submersible is finally drawing to a close. On Sunday, the vessel, called the Titan, was supposed to take five people on an hours-long, 12,500-foot-deep journey to the wreckage of the Titanic, which rests at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, less than two hours into the tour, the submersible lost contact with its support ship. At a press conference this afternoon, the U.S. Coast Guard announced that a remotely operated vehicle had encountered the debris of the Titan, which suggested that the passengers were killed in “a catastrophic implosion of the vessel.”
The debris of the submersible was discovered on the seafloor, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic. For days, rescue workers had operated on the hopeful assumption that the submersible might still be intact, and that its occupants could be alive, even as their oxygen reserves began to run out. The news brings a difficult end to days of frenzied search-and-rescue efforts involving military and research vessels from multiple countries. It also underscores an important question that became more salient with each minute of the search: How, exactly, could this have happened?
In the days since the Titan lost contact with the outside world, reporters have uncovered many details about the submersible and its operator, OceanGate, a research-and-tourism company that has offered such Titanic excursions since 2021. David Pogue, a CBS journalist who traveled on the submersible last year, called the sub “janky” for its scraped-together parts, such as construction pipes serving as ballast. It had no fancy control panels, only a single button that initiates the descent, like pressing “Down” on an elevator, and was piloted using a $30 game controller. The Washington Post’s Gene Park pointed out that such controllers are actually not so unusual for certain kinds of vehicles, even those used by the U.S. military—but the Titan’s controller appears to have been an older model, and it relied on a good Bluetooth connection, which is not the case for military craft.
And, most concerning of all, it is not clear whether the Titan was inspected for safety by outside experts. In 2018, dozens of industry experts warned OceanGate that if the company didn’t put the Titan through an independent safety assessment, its Titanic expeditions could face potentially “catastrophic” problems. Even OceanGate’s own director of marine operations was at the time worried about “the potential dangers to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths,” The New York Times reported this week. At least one previous dive had problems too: According to Pogue, a Titan expedition last year got lost on the seafloor for about five hours.
[From the May 2004 issue: The sinking of the Estonia]
Throughout it all, OceanGate and its CEO, Stockton Rush—who was among the Titan’s lost passengers—declared that innovation was more important than critics’ concerns. In a 2019 blog post, the company said it didn’t want to get the Titan certified for safety standards in part because “bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.” In interviews with Pogue, Rush said, “I think I can do this just as safely while breaking the rules” and “at some point, safety is just pure waste.” There’s no evidence that the Titan was subjected to strict regulation, either. As New York magazine has reported, submersibles are not subject to international maritime law. The United States has its own rules, but they didn’t technically apply, because the Titan launched from a Canadian ship in international waters.
(OceanGate did not respond to a request for comment about Rush’s remarks or about safety concerns regarding the Titan, nor did the company immediately respond to a request for comment about today’s announcement from the Coast Guard.)
Rush repeatedly hyped the Titan’s creative design, including a system that he said could monitor the health of its hull in real time. He and other investors spent tens of millions of dollars on OceanGate, including developing that hull, which needed to withstand the extreme pressures at the bottom of the ocean. Rush asked NASA for help, and the agency agreed, under an arrangement that allows the space agency to work with outside organizations on cutting-edge research. But NASA only “consulted on materials and manufacturing processes for the submersible,” an agency spokesperson said this week, and “did not conduct testing and manufacturing via its workforce or facilities, which was done elsewhere by OceanGate.”
Rush has said that he drew inspiration for his deep-sea adventures from the growing space-tourism industry, which has recently begun offering short jaunts beyond Earth’s atmosphere, as well as journeys to the International Space Station. There are certainly parallels between a submersible at sea and a capsule in space: Help is far away, and the environment is terrifyingly hostile. The bottom of the sea, in this case, seems even more isolated and perilous; radio transmissions can travel through space for many light-years, but they cannot travel underwater.
[Read: The Titanic sub and the draw of extreme tourism]
The big difference is that space-tourism companies publicly make a big deal out of the safety measures of their craft. What they are doing privately is a different question; in 2021, for example, a Blue Origin whistleblower claimed that the company had prioritized speed over safety. (Blue Origin responded to the claims, saying its rocket was “the safest space vehicle ever designed or built.”) But those companies know that their customers have seen pictures and footage of deadly shuttle disasters, and so take pains to reassure them, even as they ask them to sign waivers that likely outline their own brand of danger in great detail. In comparison, OceanGate’s public approach to safety seems almost cavalier, less like modern-day space tourism and more reminiscent of the rushed and occasionally ramshackle efforts of the space race.
Coast Guard officials said that they are still “focused on documenting the scene” with remotely operated equipment. They don’t yet know what caused the Titan to implode, or what regulations might have prevented the disaster. The search-and-rescue effort has now become a gruesome investigation, delving into yet another mystery in a place already steeped in it.