At 1:18 pm, June 22nd 2024, the Titan submersible was found by the United States Coast Guard in the northeast Atlantic Ocean after a catastrophic failure while it was on its way to pay a visit to the wreck of the Titanic. The company behind the submersible, Oceangate, have decided to decline any comments or questions about the incident, as the company is no longer in operation.
Oceangate was founded in 2009 by Guillermo Sohnlein and Stockton Rush with the idea of creating small submersibles to be leased out to organizations and small groups of wealthy people with room for about five passengers in each sub. While Stockton Rush was in the submersible at the time of the implosion, Guillermo was not, declining every offer he was given for reasons of “not wanting to take space away from potential customers,“ which now after the incident, makes me wonder whether or not he knew the risks of the sub and just wanted to keep himself out of it.
The passengers aboard the sub at the time of the incident were Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood, Paul Henri Nargolet, Suleman Rush (Stockton’s Son), and Stockton Rush. They were all very wealthy individuals and that is the reason they were able to board the sub. The boarding cost was up to $250,000, massing a combined cost of $1,250,000 for five passengers.
It’s at this point no secret that this sub’s journey began horribly, with the sub losing contact almost instantaneously at 10:47 AM, the same day of launch, and never being recovered again. The subs’ construction was also very shoddy, made only of carbon fiber, titanium end caps (being the only secure bit of the sub), and a plexiglass window at the very front. And not to forget the ridiculous way the sub was controlled- a Logitech G F710 Wireless Gamepad controller that Stockton had simply plugged into the control panel of the sub.
How this managed to get an ok from any health and safety administration is beyond me but sadly, on June 18th, 2023, the Titan sub would implode due to extreme atmospheric pressure from being in incredibly deep waters, only being found 300 meters away from the wreck of the Titanic. When the news was received of the implosion, it spread like wildfire, considering the insane nature of the case. A multimillion dollar company had just messed up so bad that it ended up ending the lives of 5 individuals. It’s exactly that negligence that caused the reason for uproar against the company, and all Oceangate exploration was suspended shortly after the incident.
