Missing Titanic tour leader Stockton Rush loved risk. Stockton Rush, the founder of the company that owns the missing submersible on its way to view the Titanic wreckage, has stated that safety is “pure waste.”
“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 said in a 2022 podcast with CBS reporter David Pogue. “At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk-reward question.”
That mindset is now coming into focus as rescuers race to find the Titan, which is carrying Rush and four other passengers and is likely running low on oxygen, with only about 16 hours to go. For at least five years, ocean scientists and at least one former employee of Rush’s company, OceanGate Inc., have raised concerns about its safety procedures.
OceanGate, based in Everett, Washington, has been leading chartered expeditions on the Titan to the Titanic wreckage, 13,000 feet (4,000 metres) below sea level, since the summer of 2021 at a cost of $250,000 per person.
When contacted by Bloomberg News, the company declined to comment.
However, the experimental Titan craft, designed to explore a part of the Earth that few people have ever visited, is subject to little regulatory oversight and explicitly informed passengers of the mortal risks they would face on board.
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Passengers planning to board the Titan signed safety waivers that mentioned the possibility of death several times. The craft, a cylindrical carbon-fiber and titanium tube with a basic video game controller and no GPS system, has been missing since Sunday.
British-born sea adventurer Rob McCallum, who visited the Titanic wreck, consulted for OceanGate in its early years but left the company for a variety of reasons, including concerns that Chief Executive Officer Rush was moving too quickly, according to Bloomberg.
“I know Stockton well and think the world needs more Stocktons prepared to take a chance,” McCallum said at the time. “But he’s a full-speed-ahead, damn-the-torpedoes kind of guy, and in the submersible industry, extreme depth is all about precision and control. Nothing can be left to chance.”
Missing Titanic tour leader Stockton Rush loved risk. Meanwhile, McCallum declined to comment on the Titan mission Tuesday.
OceanGate claimed on its website last month that Boeing Co., NASA, and the University of Washington collaborated on the Titan’s design and engineering. The mention of the three has vanished from the page. Another section of the website expresses gratitude to various industry partners, including Boeing and NASA, for their assistance in designing and engineering the Titan.
The Titan’s safety is described in a promotional video on OceanGate’s YouTube page, and the company says it “partnered with aerospace experts at the University of Washington, NASA, and Boeing on the design of our hull.”
In a statement, Boeing stated, “Boeing was not a partner on the Titan, and did not design or build it.”
OceanGate stated on its website that “NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama, will serve as the facility where the development and manufacturing of a new aerospace-grade hull is completed” for its latest submersible in a 2020 release.
NASA said in a statement Wednesday that it consulted on the Titan’s materials and construction process but did not conduct testing or use its workforce or facilities for manufacturing.
“We regret to hear the Titan submersible is missing, and we remain hopeful the crew will be found unharmed,” said Lance Davis at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Kevin Williams, a spokesperson for the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory told CNN that the laboratory didn’t help design or engineer the Titan vessel.
In March 2018, the Marine Technology Society, a group of ocean technologists and engineers, sent a letter to OceanGate asking the company to adopt recognized safety standards for the Titan, saying the company’s “‘experimental’ approach” could result in “negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic).”
Submersibles, unlike boats and other vessels, are largely unregulated, particularly when they operate in international waters, according to the New York Times.
A former OceanGate employee, David Lochridge, raised concerns about the company’s safety practices, according to documents filed in a 2018 federal case. OceanGate sued Lochridge for disclosing confidential business information about its technology, and court documents show Lochridge argued in a counterclaim that he’d been wrongfully terminated from his position with OceanGate “because he raised critical safety concerns regarding OceanGate’s experimental and untested design of the Titan.”
In 2019, in an unsigned blog post on its website explaining why the Titan wasn’t regulated, OceanGate said such approvals could be lengthy and wouldn’t address operational risks.
“Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation,” the post said.
Since the Titan’s disappearance, several former passengers who boarded the submersible have said they signed a waiver outlining the extreme risks before embarking.
“Before you even get on the boat, there’s a long, long waiver that mentions death three times on page one,” Mike Reiss, a producer for The Simpsons television show who took a voyage on the Titan last summer to visit Titanic wreckage, told the New York Post.
And in a CBS broadcast aired last summer on the Titan’s voyages, Pogue read aloud from a passenger waiver he signed before riding in the craft that described the Titan as an “experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma or death.”
Some have questioned why OceanGate representatives waited so long after losing contact with the Titan to notify the US Coast Guard of the ship’s disappearance. The surface ship lost contact with Titan an hour and 45 minutes into the dive, at 9:45 a.m. New York time on Sunday, but the company did not notify the Coast Guard until 5:40 p.m.
What is one possible explanation? It wasn’t the Titan’s first time losing contact with the surface during a long dive to the sea floor.
Pogue said in a tweet this week that the submersible lost contact with the surface for five hours during his trip. Pogue was in the control room of the research vessel at the time, supervising the journey.
During the voyage, the surface ship could still send short texts to the Titan, but the crew had no idea where the submersible was, according to Pogue. OceanGate even turned off the ship’s internet connection, which he claims was done to keep all communication channels open in the event of an emergency. He stated that there was no way to confirm whether or not this was the case.
