OceanGate’s Titan submersible has taken two groups of tourists to the Titanic shipwreck twice. The third went missing on June 18. | OceanGate Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
The Coast Guard is still looking for the sub, despite the detection of “banging noises” near where it went missing.
Time is running out for the search and rescue effort to recover a submersible vessel that was lost during an expedition down to the shipwreck of the Titanic. But, in the words of US Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick, who is helping to lead the effort, “You always have hope.”
The craft, called the Titan, went missing in the North Atlantic Ocean on Sunday morning less than two hours after being deployed by a former Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker called the Polar Prince. On board are five passengers, including a French maritime expert, a billionaire British explorer, a British-Pakistani tycoon and his teenaged son, as well as Stockton Rush, the founder and CEO of OceanGate, the company leading the expedition. According to some estimates, they could all run out of oxygen on Thursday, if they’re even still alive.
This is more than a search and rescue story, though. Following news of the missing submersible has become a global media obsession as it touches on everything from the difficulties of underwater exploration to the rise of risky chartered expeditions for the ultra-rich. (A trip on the Titan submersible costs $250,000 per passenger.) It also raises questions about the attention we pay to when a wealthy person’s hobby goes wrong versus to the near-daily reality of maritime disasters affecting the less fortunate.
Here are nine questions about the Titan and the effort to find it. We’ll be updating this post as the story develops.
1. When and where did the Titanic submersible disappear?
After departing from St. John’s on the eastern edge of Newfoundland on June 16, the Polar Prince dropped anchor roughly 900 miles east of Cape Cod and deployed the Titan around 3 am ET the morning of June 18. The sub was supposed to send out a ping every 15 minutes during its descent down to the Titanic shipwreck, nearly 13,000 feet below the ocean’s surface. The entire voyage was supposed to take just two and a half hours, but the Polar Prince lost contact with the Titan approximately an hour and 45 minutes into the trip, triggering a desperate search for the now-missing sub. —Adam Clark Estes
2. Who is on board?
There are five people aboard the Titan submersible, including Stockton Rush, the 61-year-old pilot. He’s the founder and CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, which organized the expedition that the submersible embarked on to see the wreckage of the Titanic. Rush is an aerospace engineer with a well-documented love of deep sea exploration and designing experimental aircraft and modded submersibles (there’s been a lot of talk of how the Titan is maneuvered by a jerry-rigged video game controller). Though OceanGate was founded in 2009, tours to the Titanic weren’t available to paying customers until 2021. As of April 2020, the company had raised almost $37 million in total funding, according to data from PitchBook, including a new $18 million investment that year to help fund the nascent Titanic expeditions.
Also on board is Hamish Harding, a 58-year-old British billionaire with a penchant for adventuring to the extremes of the Earth. In 2016, he visited the South Pole with astronaut Buzz Aldrin; he holds three Guinness world records, including one for a more than 4-hour dive in the deepest part of the Mariana Trench. Last summer, he joined the six-person crew of a suborbital flight with Blue Origin, the space exploration company started by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He also flies planes and skydives; in 2022, he was inducted into the Living Legends of Aviation, an award recognizing people who have made significant contributions to aviation — other honorees include space billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and actors Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford.
Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a 77-year-old former commander of the French Navy, is a deep-sea search expert who has completed at least 35 dives to the wreck of the Titanic. An authority on the famous shipwreck, Nargeolet is also the director of underwater research at RMS Titanic Inc, which has exclusive rights to salvage artifacts from the wreck. Nargeolet was part of the Air France Flight 447 search efforts, helping to find the plane that had disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean.
Shahzada Dawood, a 48-year-old Pakistani-British businessman and philanthropist, joined the Titan crew with his 19-year-old son Suleman. He heads the Engro Corporation, one of the largest conglomerates in Pakistan, which operates in the food and agriculture, energy, and telecommunications sectors. He sits on the board of trustees of his family foundation, which focuses on education in the sciences and technology. Dawood is also on the board of the SETI Institute, a renowned scientific research organization that, in part, searches for extraterrestrial life.
The five passengers aboard the submersible are connected by an interest — and some experience and bonafides — in exploring air, space, and sea, as well as the financial means to pursue these passions. Again, OceanGate’s Titanic expeditions to the wreckage site cost as much as $250,000 per passenger. The company has claimed that its aim is both to increase access to the deep sea for tourists, and to contribute research on the wreck and its surrounding debris. —Whizy Kim
OceanGate Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
The Titan is 22 feet long, has limited power, and only 96 hours of oxygen reserves.
4. How exactly does the sub work and why does it need help?
The Titan is not a big submersible, nor is it designed for extended periods of time underwater, or capable to travel to a port without help from another vessel, as naval submarines are. The teardrop-shaped vessel is 22 feet long, can carry five people, and is equipped with one, small porthole window on the front of the vessel, where there is also a small toilet. The cylindrical, all-metal interior otherwise lacks seats and is approximately the size of a minivan, according to David Pogue, a CBS reporter and former passenger. Mike Reiss, a producer and writer for The Simpsons, traveled on the Titan in 2022 and said passengers were given sandwiches and water on board his voyage, which lasted 10 hours, during which the vessel’s compass was “acting very weird” and the passengers only had about 20 minutes to view the Titanic wreckage.
Because it travels so deep in the ocean, the submersible cannot use GPS and communicates with the Polar Prince through a text messaging system. It’s piloted with a video game controller, which is not as weird as it sounds. Even the US Navy uses Xbox controllers to operate the photonic scopes that replaced periscopes on submarines.
Critically, the Titan submersible only has 96 hours of oxygen reserves on board. That means that as soon as the vessel went missing, the clock started ticking on remaining life support. Even if the sub were able to resurface on its own, the passengers would be stuck inside until help arrived, since the hatch is closed from the outside and sealed shut with 17 bolts. —ACE
5. Who owns and operates the Titan sub?
The Titan is operated by OceanGate Expeditions, a Washington-based private company that offers chartered deep-sea exploration for both commercial and scientific purposes. The company has also become known for leading deep sea tourism trips. Its first trips to the Titanic were in 2021 and 2022, and OceanGate has said it would return to the shipwreck annually to survey its decay.
OceanGate has led more than a dozen underwater trips, including to shipwrecks like the Andrea Doria, which lies up to 240 feet underwater near Nantucket. It has three five-person submersibles in its fleet: Antipodes, Cyclops 1, and Titan. While Antipodes and Cyclops 1 can travel just 1,000 and 1,640 feet below the surface, respectively, OceanGate says the Titan is designed to go 400 meters, or 13,123 feet deep — just enough to reach the Titanic wreckage, which lies about 12,500 feet down. That seems uncomfortably close to the vessel’s maximum depth.
OceanGate has faced criticism from experts about Titan’s safety for years. David Lochridge, who was an OceanGate employee from 2016 to 2018, warned about the thickness of the Titan’s hull and “the potential dangers to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths” in a 2018 report. Lochridge later said in a court filing that he was wrongly terminated after raising these concerns. More than three dozen experts subsequently sent a letter to OceanGate’s CEO Rush saying that the “‘experimental’ approach adopted by [the company] could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic).” OceanGate offered a response of sorts in a 2019 blog post that explained why the company had decided not to class the Titan — that is, get an independent group to evaluate whether a series of standards, including on safety, have been met, which is the industry norm. OceanGate argued that “innovation often falls outside of the existing industry paradigm” and that “by itself, classing is not sufficient to ensure safety.”
Rush seems quite cavalier in his own right. “I mean if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed, don’t get in your car, don’t do anything,” Rush told CBS’s Pogue in 2022. “At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk-reward question.” He added that safety is a “pure waste.” —ACE
Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images
US Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick updated reporters about efforts to find the Titan and rescue its passengers on June 21, 2023.
6. What do we know about the search and rescue process?
OceanGate contacted the Coast Guard after it lost touch with the Titan on Sunday afternoon. This kicked off what has become an international rescue effort on the water and in the air. The search yielded few updates until early Wednesday, when several maritime surveillance planes detected underwater noises, described as “banging noises,” in the area where the Titan went missing.
That effort included two American C-130 aircraft and two Canadian P-3 aircraft that can deploy sonar probes into the water. On the surface, the Polar Prince and Deep Energy, a Bahamas-flagged pipe-laying ship with two remotely operated vehicles that can dive nearly 10,000 feet, are assisting with the search. A French research vessel, the Atalante, which is equipped with an underwater exploration robot called the Victor 6000, is expected to arrive on Wednesday. The Victor 6000 is capable of descending nearly 20,000 feet, which is more than deep enough to reach the Titanic shipwreck. Even more ships are on their way to help.
In a press briefing on Wednesday afternoon, Capt. Frederick would not offer a timeline for the search. He said that the search area was now two times the size of Connecticut, or more than 10,000 square miles, and that the number of planes and ships assisting in the search would double from five to 10 in the next 24 hours. Frederick also emphasized that the amount of oxygen believed to be left in the Titan was just one data point for rescuers. If the 96 hours of reserve oxygen figure is correct, that would leave rescuers working under the assumption that the supply would run out some time on Thursday. —ACE
7. Why is it so difficult to explore the deepest parts of the ocean?
You’re probably familiar with the factoid about how 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is ocean, but its depths are a much bigger mystery. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, less than 10 percent of the world’s ocean depths are mapped with sonar.
Think of the ocean floor not as flat and even, but with geological features just like land on the surface. There are canyons, plateaus, mountains, and submarine volcanoes, among other types of formations. Crucially, the technology we have to map above ground doesn’t work as well underwater. Water is a very good shield. It’s excellent at attenuating light, radiation, electromagnetism — all of our conventional tools for studying stuff. Terrain mapping can include satellite imagery and GPS, both of which can’t operate beyond rather shallow depths. So beyond 50 meters of depth, you really can’t know what’s going on unless you’re physically there.
To identify objects in the very deep parts of the ocean, researchers are left to use sound waves, which can travel through water much more accurately, via sonar. We can use echo sounding to map the ocean floor in a practice called bathymetry. There’s also geodesy, a satellite technology that’s increasingly being used to map by measuring tiny changes in gravity, which in turn illustrate the bottom of the ocean.
A part of the struggle comes through relying on sound waves, which physically have to be deployed. It’s expensive to make vessels that can withstand the pressures of the depths, and even more expensive to get people in said vessels. The farther down you go, the higher and more deadly the pressure is. In 2016, scientists estimated it would cost more than $3 billion to map the ocean floor. OceanGate also claims to provide submersibles for scientific projects as well.
“In some ways, it’s a lot easier to send people into space than it is to send people to the bottom of the ocean,” oceanographer Gene Carl Feldman told Oceana, an ocean conservation group. “The intense pressures in the deep ocean make it an extremely difficult environment to explore.”
So while we know where the oceans are, and their surface is mapped with satellites, the depths are still just roughly estimated. We have a better understanding of Mars’s geography than we do of the ocean’s.
As for the rescue, the OceanGate submersible only has sonar to rely on — and that’s if their technology is operational and working. (The New York Times reported that it’s unclear whether the Titan even has an acoustic homing beacon.) —Izzie Ramirez
US Coast Guard Handout via Getty Images
The pipe-laying vessel Deep Energy arrived to aid in the search effort on June 20.
8. How dangerous is deep sea tourism?
In most cases, folks who aren’t experts in deep sea exploration aren’t ending up down near the sea floor. And if they are, usually they’re accompanied or trained by people who know how to operate deep sea machinery and what to do in emergency situations. That’s what makes this particular incident with OceanGate precarious — generally, deep sea equipment has several, redundant failsafes to protect the people inside.
Because deep sea exploration trips are so expensive, there are limited ways to get on one. You can be conducting government-funded research, have extremely wealthy benefactors (or are wealthy yourself), or be contracted as an employee of an industry that’s operating in the depths. In the research arena, that’s improved loads. Just earlier this month, a Florida scientist — nicknamed “Dr. Deep Sea” — broke the world record for living underwater the longest. He stayed in a subaquatic compound for 100 days.
But it hasn’t always been so safe. And safety, of course, is dependent on the infrastructure and systems around an individual. In 1983, a team of saturation divers for Byford Dolphin, a semi-submersible oil rig in the North Sea, experienced a terrible accident. The diving bell, or the structure that maintains pressure to keep divers safe, released before a connecting chamber’s doors were entirely closed, instantaneously decompressing the area. Three of the divers died instantly, with the nitrogen in their bodies erupting, “boiling” into gas. Another was sucked through an opening — his internal organs scattered onto the deck after being torn from his body.
The danger of pressure underwater will likely never go away, but we’ve gotten better at building vessels and ships that have backup plans for their backup plans. That, and we don’t send as many crewed vessels into the deep. —IR
9. How does deep sea tourism compare to space tourism?
Rush, in an interview with the New York Times last year, argued that OceanGate’s private explorations served a public good. “No public entity is going to fund going back to the Titanic,” he said. It’s an argument not dissimilar to the one spacefaring billionaires make about the societal value their multibillion-dollar ventures provide. They too point to a diminishment of interest and funding for space exploration — so thank the heavens that they’re magnanimously picking up the slack. In a 2017 interview with Fast Company, Rush noted that as a teenager he dreamed of being the first person on Mars, only later turning his eye to the ocean.
He also said that the cost of OceanGate’s expeditions were a “fraction” of going to space. That’s true more broadly — setting up an aerospace company and building reusable rockets probably requires a lot more capital than sending submersibles into the depths of the ocean. But a ticket on a Virgin Galactic spaceflight also cost around $250,000 in 2021, though it has since upped the price to a cool $450,000. In February of this year, Rush was sued for fraud by a Florida couple alleging that the Titanic voyage they paid a hefty sum for had never happened.
In recent years, space exploration — often with dreams of colonizing Mars — has become the billionaire pet project du jour. But there have been plenty of other trendy, expensive fascinations too. In fact, the elite fascination with the deep sea appeared to be having a moment in the early 2010s. Richard Branson spent an estimated $17 million on a submarine in 2011, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen also revealed in 2011 that he had a megayacht big enough to house a personal submarine. Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt founded the Schmidt Ocean Institute in 2009, which aims to advance oceanographic research. To date, Schmidt and his wife Wendy have contributed over $360 million to the institute.
While the degree of danger associated with the hobbies of the ultra-rich varies greatly, there’s a surfeit of adventurous pastimes enjoyed by the wealthy, whether it’s yacht racing — enjoyed by the likes of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and Wendy Schmidt — or flying private planes, an infamously perilous activity that nonetheless remains a favorite hobby of rich people. —WK
OceanGate Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Experts have raised safety concerns about the Titan since at least 2018.
9. Why does the media care so much about this story?
The quick answer to that question is that it’s pretty hard to imagine people spending $250,000 to voluntarily go to an extremely dangerous place in a claustrophobic tube with no additional safety. Rich people doing something astonishingly baffling and risky is always a point of curiosity. It’s a story, in the classic sense of the word.
The more complex — and arguably interesting — answer is that such a search endeavor reveals how little we know about the ocean. The hurdles with sonar, the physical challenges, the fact there’s so much science and guessing involved (Are they still alive and running out of oxygen? Were they instantly crushed?) can lead to a lot of important development in the future. This might be the impetus for governments to invest more in ocean exploration.
And yes, migrants unfortunately do go missing in oceans regularly in arduous, treacherous journeys for a better life. At least 78 migrants died and hundreds of others are missing after a boat capsized in the Mediterranean earlier this week, for instance. Outlets could do more to cover this painful issue with justice and accountability. As local and national outlets continue to cover immigration, human rights, and poverty, it’s a dual responsibility from news organizations and readers alike to decide what really matters. —IR