Photo: OceanGate (Composite)
On Sunday, June 18, 2023, after just one hour and 45 minutes into its dive to the wreck site of the Titanic, the Titan submersible went missing. It's been missing ever since with five people onboard and, as of the time of this writing, June 22, the emergency oxygen supply has run out.
UPDATE: : On June 22, 2023, the five crew on Titan were pronounced dead. The sub suffered a "catastrophic implosion" on the way down, the U.S. Coast Guard confirmed.
Titan was the only submersible in the world capable of doing manned deep dives to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic. It was built for this specific purpose, too, as a Cyclops-class sub that would take a crew of five (four tourists and one pilot) to the underground site for leisure and research, to record data that would help further map the wreck and study its decay. It was mainly presented as a tourist submersible, with tickets for one seat selling for $250,000.
On June 18, 2023, Titan went for the first dive of this year. All communication with the mothership on the water surface was lost within one hour and 45 minutes and never picked up again, prompting an international search and rescue operation that is still underway right now. Also as of this writing, the 97-hour emergency oxygen supply on Titan has run out.
The mishap has brought attention to builder OceanGate, resurfacing older reports about the safety of Titan and its rudimentary build. Despite the carbon fiber and titan hull and the seven failsafe features that would have helped it refloat in case of a power outage, Titan seemed very MacGyver-ish in many other aspects, from the fact it used scrap metal tubes as ballast, or camping lights, to the PlayStation joystick used for steering.
This brought safety questions to light, many of which OceanGate tried to address preemptively. Founder and CEO Stockton Rush repeatedly did so, specifically citing involvement from Boeing, NASA, and the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory in the design and engineering of Titan. At least two of these often-cited partners have now distanced themselves from OceanGate.
Rush never claimed that Titan was infallible, even once joking that the same once said about the Titanic. But he did insist that Titan was built on a design to which Boeing and the UW had contributed over years of collaborative work. Neither Boeing nor the UW wants any kind of association with OceanGate, in light of Titan's disappearance. NASA is yet to comment on the supposed partnership.
"Boeing was not a partner on the Titan and did not design or build it," Boeing says in a statement. Kevin Williams, the executive director of UW's Applied Physics Laboratory, also insists that "the Laboratory was not involved in the design, engineering or testing of the Titan submersible used in the RMS Titanic expedition."
The UW is a bit more specific about the kind of partnership it had with OceanGate, saying that they initially signed a $5 million multi-year contract. All collaboration stopped after $650,000, which mainly went on OceanGate renting testing tanks at the Lab and the development of a scale prototype.
Beyond issuing a statement to confirm that Titan was lost as sea, OceanGate has remained silent on all matters regarding the sub.
Titan was the only submersible in the world capable of doing manned deep dives to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic. It was built for this specific purpose, too, as a Cyclops-class sub that would take a crew of five (four tourists and one pilot) to the underground site for leisure and research, to record data that would help further map the wreck and study its decay. It was mainly presented as a tourist submersible, with tickets for one seat selling for $250,000.
On June 18, 2023, Titan went for the first dive of this year. All communication with the mothership on the water surface was lost within one hour and 45 minutes and never picked up again, prompting an international search and rescue operation that is still underway right now. Also as of this writing, the 97-hour emergency oxygen supply on Titan has run out.
The mishap has brought attention to builder OceanGate, resurfacing older reports about the safety of Titan and its rudimentary build. Despite the carbon fiber and titan hull and the seven failsafe features that would have helped it refloat in case of a power outage, Titan seemed very MacGyver-ish in many other aspects, from the fact it used scrap metal tubes as ballast, or camping lights, to the PlayStation joystick used for steering.
This brought safety questions to light, many of which OceanGate tried to address preemptively. Founder and CEO Stockton Rush repeatedly did so, specifically citing involvement from Boeing, NASA, and the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory in the design and engineering of Titan. At least two of these often-cited partners have now distanced themselves from OceanGate.
Rush never claimed that Titan was infallible, even once joking that the same once said about the Titanic. But he did insist that Titan was built on a design to which Boeing and the UW had contributed over years of collaborative work. Neither Boeing nor the UW wants any kind of association with OceanGate, in light of Titan's disappearance. NASA is yet to comment on the supposed partnership.
"Boeing was not a partner on the Titan and did not design or build it," Boeing says in a statement. Kevin Williams, the executive director of UW's Applied Physics Laboratory, also insists that "the Laboratory was not involved in the design, engineering or testing of the Titan submersible used in the RMS Titanic expedition."
The UW is a bit more specific about the kind of partnership it had with OceanGate, saying that they initially signed a $5 million multi-year contract. All collaboration stopped after $650,000, which mainly went on OceanGate renting testing tanks at the Lab and the development of a scale prototype.
Beyond issuing a statement to confirm that Titan was lost as sea, OceanGate has remained silent on all matters regarding the sub.
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