titanic wreckage tour price

Here’s How You Can Visit the Wreck of the Titanic—for $125,000

A series of expeditions will take tourists down to the ill-fated ship in 2021

Courtesy of NOAA/Institute for Exploration/University of Rhode Island (NOAA/IFE/URI)

You’re probably familiar with the RMS Titanic: in 1912, the world’s largest ocean liner of the day embarked on her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York, during which she struck an iceberg, sank, and ultimately took more than 1,500 lives. The Titanic’s final resting place remained a mystery until 1985, when American marine geologist Robert Ballard and French oceanographer Jean-Louis Michel discovered the wreck in the crushing depths of the frigid North Atlantic, nearly 2.5 miles beneath the surface of the sea. 

Rather unsurprisingly, visiting the Titanic has become a bucket-list trip for maritime historians, oceanographers, and, well, anyone who has deep enough pockets to go. However, expeditions are rare: only one team has visited the site in-person in the last 15 years. But all that’s about to change.

OceanGate Expeditions , a company that provides well-heeled clients with once-in-a-lifetime underwater experiences, has announced a series of six trips to the Titanic via submersible in 2021. Each has space for nine paying tourists, whose $125,000 tickets will help offset the cost of the expeditions (and put a pretty penny in the pocket of OceanGate owner Stockton Rush).

OceanGate’s expeditions will each run for 10 days out of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. Nine tourists, who are actually dubbed “mission specialists” on this expedition, will join the expedition crew on each sailing, and they’ll be expected to participate in the research efforts—this isn’t just a sightseeing affair. OceanGate’s goal is to extensively document the Titanic wreck before it disintegrates entirely due to a deep-sea bacteria that eats iron, which researchers are concerned might happen within the next few decades. As this is a scientific project, mission specialists will have to meet certain physical criteria to ensure their compatibility with the expedition, not to mention training, which includes a test dive.

On each expedition, each mission specialist will be able to partake in a single six- to eight-hour dive to the Titanic via the private Titan submarine, which includes the 90-minute descent and 90-minute ascent. The sub seats five—a pilot, a scientist or researcher, and three mission specialists—and it does have a small, semi-private bathroom for emergencies, in case you were wondering.

Now, it should be known that this isn’t OceanGate’s first attempt to visit the iconic wreck: two previous expeditions had to be scrubbed. (In 2018, the sub was hit by lightning, and its electrical systems were fried, and in 2019, there were issues with sourcing a ship for the expedition.) But hey, perhaps the third time's the charm!

Several international treaties protect the Titanic—the wreck sits in international waters—but their primary goal is to prevent looters and illegal salvage operations from damaging and disrespecting the wreck. However, in terms of tourism, it’s actually perfectly legal to visit the wreck, so long as the expedition doesn’t intrude upon it (i.e., land on the deck or enter the hull.)

“A review of the International Agreement on Titanic, as well as the 2001 UNESCO Convention on Underwater Cultural Heritage, would reveal that non-intrusive visits do not even require a permit or authorization,” said Ole Varmer, a retired legal advisor to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who was instrumental in negotiating the legal protection of the wreck. “The scope of the prohibition against commercial exploitation of underwater cultural heritage is to prevent unauthorized salvage and looting; it does not include non-intrusive visits regardless of whether they are for-profit or not.”

In terms of OceanGate Expeditions, the company is working with NOAA, the federal agency in charge of implementing the International Agreement on Titanic for U.S.-based Titanic activities, to ensure it follows all protocols set down by that agreement.

There are two major factors to consider regarding ethically visiting the Titanic. First, it’s a memorial site to the lives lost during the disaster, so the wreck should be treated with respect. But that, of course, is true of all memorial sites around the world.

“Speaking as one who visited Titanic’s wreck twice during RMS Titanic, Inc.'s 1993 and 1996 Research and Recovery expeditions, I see nothing unethical about visiting the wreck, nor about helping to defray the significant expense of bringing a visitor to the wreck,” explained Charles Haas, president of the Titanic International Society. “People around the world learn by seeing and visiting. They pay for access to museums, cathedrals, monuments, exhibitions, and, yes, final resting places.”

But second, it’s a fragile piece of cultural heritage. It should be protected—the expedition organizer must take appropriate steps to ensure that it won’t disturb the wreck.

“In the past, submersibles visiting the site by RMS Titanic, Inc. [the only company legally allowed to salvage the wreck], and others have rested on the deck of the hull portions,” says Varmer. “That practice has likely caused some harm and exacerbated the deterioration of the site.  Hopefully, that will no longer be practiced or permitted.”

Per OceanGate’s description of its expeditions, the company’s submersible won’t disturb the wreck, so if you have $125,000 lying around, fee; free to spring for the bucket-list trip of 2021!

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Titanic tour company offered up-close experience for $250,000

Modern in-person tourism at the Titanic is still in its infancy. 

The submersible that disappeared Sunday near the Titanic wreckage was on only its third trip since the company OceanGate Expeditions began offering them in 2021. 

OceanGate had been promoting the third dive for months on its website and in Facebook posts, offering the chance to “follow in Jacques Cousteau’s footsteps and become an underwater explorer” — for the price of $250,000. 

“ Become one of the few to see the Titanic with your own eyes,” the tour company said on its website. The ticket comes with a title: “mission specialist.” 

Participants have included a chef, an actor, a videographer and someone who worked in banking, the company said on Facebook. 

One of the customers said on Instagram last year that it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience that lived up to her expectations. 

“My lifelong dream of seeing the Titanic has come true!” Chelsea Kellogg, a chef, wrote. “I am still trying to process the whole experience. I’m still crying. Still overwhelmed by all the emotions.” 

Kellogg, who did not respond to an interview request Monday, said she saw the ship’s bow, crow’s-nest and grand staircase. 

OceanGate seems to be the only company offering dive tours to the Titanic wreckage, underscoring the practical difficulty of reaching the site 12,500 feet down in the cold North Atlantic where the ship sank in 1912. About 1,500 people died. 

The resting place of the Titanic was unknown for decades, eluding several groups of researchers racing to find it, until a team led by the explorer Robert Ballard succeeded in 1985. Visits — some of them by artifact hunters — continued off and on for two decades.

Don Lynch, the Titanic Historical Society’s historian, said there was some tourism in the 1990s and early this century, when there were both artifacts to find and Russian-made submersibles capable of reaching the site’s depth. A Los Angeles artist went down in 2000 and produced watercolors from the experience .

Lynch, who went down in 2001, said that eventually, the visits trickled off as Russian-made submersibles were retired and fewer artifacts remained.

“There was a lot of salvage going on prior to that, and I think it reached the point where they weren’t bringing up anything that was increasing the museum visits,” he said. 

Until now, no submersible at the Titanic site had ever gone missing, he said.

Beginning in 2005, there was a 14-year dry spell with no human visits. Then, in 2019, another group visited the wreckage site and reported its rapid deterioration. The pace of visits has picked up since. 

RMS Titanic Inc., the company that owns the ship’s salvage rights, once tried to stop tourist visits, hoping to use pictures and tourism operations of its own to raise money for salvage operations, but in 1999 a federal appeals court ruled that tourists could visit , The Washington Post reported. 

Lynch said he thinks the site should have been treated as an archaeological site with careful documentation of all artifacts. He said he has no objection, though, to tourist visits, especially if they help to pay for research.

“Go down. Take a look. That’s great. It doesn’t damage the ship,” he said. 

Past participants praise the experience in a video OceanGate posted on YouTube in October. The video does not give their names. 

“This is a remarkable event in my life,” one person in the video says. 

“Not many people have done it, and that’s part of the appeal, too, right?” another says. 

Customers travel to the Titanic area from St. John’s, Newfoundland, aboard a ship — this year, the research vessel Polar Prince. 

On dive days, five people can fit into the submersible, named Titan, and the descent takes a couple of hours , OceanGate’s website says . 

“You may assist the pilot with coms and tracking, take notes for the science team about what you see outside of the viewport, watch a movie or eat lunch,” it says. 

There is a small toilet in Titan’s front dome, the website continues. It “doubles as the best seat in the house. When the toilet is in use, we install a privacy curtain between the dome and the main compartment and turn the music up loud.” 

OceanGate’s website promises “hours of exploring” before a two-hour ascent. 

There is required safety training for everyone on the research vessel, the website says. Beyond that, training depends on how much customers want to do, such as assisting with navigation. 

Stockton Rush, the founder of OceanGate, told the travel website Frommer’s in 2020 that about half of his customer pool were Titanic obsessives, while the other half were big-spending travelers also drawn to space tourism and other big-budget ideas. The original price back then was $125,000, or half this year’s price. 

“You couldn’t write a better story,” Rush told the website. “You have the rich and the poor. You have opulence. You have hubris. You have tragedy. You have death.”

The company initially planned to have six expeditions in 2021, Frommer’s reported, but it ended up running one that year and one last year. 

Before then, getting a close-up view of the Titanic’s wreckage meant visiting one of several museums where there are artifacts — including one at the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas — or perhaps visiting one of the replicas in Pigeon Forge , Tennessee, or Branson , Missouri. 

OceanGate’s website laid out various details of this year’s expedition, including a minimum age of 18. The price included training, gear and meals on the ship but not airfare, hotels before departure or insurance. 

Lynch, the historian, said the tours demonstrate the lasting curiosity about the Titanic.

“The movie really brought it to a younger audience and created a lot of new Titanic enthusiasts,” he said, referring to director James Cameron’s 1997 film. “Every couple decades, something happens that puts it back in the public eye.” 

David Ingram covers tech for NBC News.

You Can Take a Tiny Sub to the "Titanic" Shipwreck—for $125,000

Starting in May 2021, OceanGate Expeditions will take small crews of "citizen scientists" in a 5-person sub to see the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean.

By Zac Thompson

November 10, 2020 | Updated June 22, 2023

It’s been more than a century since the RMS Titanic sank in April 1912. And, if you can believe it, nearly a quarter-century has passed since Celine Dion belted “My Heart Will Go On” for the soundtrack of the 1997 movie retelling. 

Across all those decades, the ill-fated ocean liner continues to exert a pull on the public’s imagination. 

So much so, in fact, that some members of that public are willing to shell out a definitely-not-steerage-class $125,000 to board a mini submarine and descend about 12,500 feet (that’s $10 per foot) in the North Atlantic Ocean to reach the Titanic wreck site, located about 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.

Named Titan , the 5-person sub, which sort of looks from the outside like the love child of R2-D2 and an airplane engine, was created for OceanGate Expeditions , a company specializing in underwater exploration. 

Starting in May 2021, OceanGate will be operating dives to the Titanic aboard the submersible, which will launch from a 50-passenger ship setting sail from St. John’s , Newfoundland. Most of the people on the larger vessel will be researchers and crew, but nine will be paying passengers.

And over the course of the 8-day voyage, each guest will get at least one chance (more if the weather cooperates) to spend a day exploring the wreck site from the sub. 

“Demand is good” in spite of the price tag, according to OceanGate founder Stockton Rush (pictured below), who told us he expects to fill up the remaining slots in 2021's six planned expeditions by the end of this year. 

Rush says about half the customers are Titanic obsessives, while the rest are the same type of travelers drawn to space tourism and similar far-flung, budget-busting adventures. 

Rush argues that it’s really only under the sea where those explorers actually have a chance to spot new life-forms and unseen vistas. “In the vacuum of space,” he points out, “by definition there is nothing. But there’s more undiscovered life in the ocean than we’ve discovered on the surface of the planet.”

OceanGate refers to its paying customers as “mission specialists” in order to underscore that this is no Carnival Fun Ship cruise. No scuba certification or other special training is required, but each person who boards the submersible needs to have what Rush calls “basic agility” (an ability to climb a 10-foot ladder, for instance, or stand on a chair without help) and some familiarity with “unusual travel experiences” involving unpredictable weather and cramped quarters. 

Given that the sub is only big enough to accommodate three civilians, a researcher, and a pilot—and given that dives last up to 10 hours from start to finish—it’s probably not a good idea to sign up if you’re prone to claustrophobia. 

Those who do board the sub will get rare, up-close views, through a round window and high-tech cameras, of the sunken ship, the hundreds of marine species that now live on the hull, and the debris field strewn with the Titanic 's fixtures and its passengers' personal items. 

As citizen scientists, those inside the sub will assist researchers using sonar and laser scanners to measure how fast the Titanic is decaying. Rush says there are some historical riddles that still need answering as well. 

“One of the questions the archaeologists have asked,” he told us, “is what did the person in third class wear for underwear? We know the rich-people stuff, but the life of the common man never got documented. What did an immigrant take when he was leaving the Old World? What were the key items?”

Rush thinks it’s that human element that keeps us intrigued by the Titanic  after all these years. 

“You couldn’t write a better story,” he says. “You have the rich and the poor. You have opulence. You have hubris. You have tragedy. You have death.”

All that and old-timey underpants, too. 

Rush is hoping that any attention that OceanGate’s Titanic expedition grabs will inspire further aquatic explorations, whether of shipwrecks or vast underwater canyons and as-yet-unclassified creatures. 

“You’ll pardon the expression,” he says, “but the Titanic is just the tip of the iceberg.”

POSTSCRIPT, June 22, 2023 : On Sunday, June 18, 2023, the Titan submersible described above went missing during an expedition to the Titanic shipwreck site. OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush, interviewed and quoted at length for this article, was piloting the vessel, which contained four other passengers: Shahzada Dawood, Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

Following a frantic 4-day search by rescue organizations, a remote-controlled vehicle found debris from the submersible on the ocean floor, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic . According to news reports , the U.S. Coast Guard said that the sub appeared to have suffered a "catastrophic implosion," killing all five people on board. 

In a statement released by OceanGate, the company, which had reportedly faced safety concerns about Titan before the accident, described the perished crew as "true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans."

The statement continued, "Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time. We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.”

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How Much Does It Cost to See the Titanic in 2024? | The Aftermath of the OceanGate Titan Tragedy

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It’s the adventure of a lifetime: a journey through the chilly depths to the wreck of the RMS Titanic . The Titanic has captivated us since April 14, 1912, when the “unsinkable ship” collided with an iceberg in the North Atlantic and was lost beneath the chilly waves.

She wasn’t discovered until 1985, and some 36 years later, the OceanGate Titanic Survey Expedition made it possible for you to see the Titanic with your own eyes. Starting in 2021, you could descend to the wreck site in a state-of-the-art submersible and explore the remains of the most famous ship in modern history.

How Much Did It Cost Per Person?

If you wanted to explore the Titanic firsthand, planning ahead is key. You needed to apply to be a Mission Specialist, OceanGate’s term for someone who is part of the submersible team. You also had to pay $125,000 for the entire journey . Although the cost was arguably steep, what OceanGate was offering was an experience that had been impossible before.

Your adventure would start in St. John’s, Newfoundland. You would’ve been trained and coached before and during the entire 10-day journey. As a Mission Specialist, you had multiple opportunities to help crewmembers onboard, dive support ship and the expedition itself as well as the diver operations team, and also be a team member to everyone onboard.

The crew consisted of mission specialists, content experts, a pilot and support crew, a vessel crew, technical experts, a film crew, and a doctor, all totaling about 50 or 60 people on board during the mission.

And then in June 2023, a horrific tragedy happened.

The Titan Submersible Accident

The Titan made 13 voyages to the Titanic in 2021 and 2022 before its tragic implosion on June 18, 2023. The crew members on board the Polar Prince support ship reported it missing when Titan failed to resurface at the planned time. A futile weeklong search followed, involving multiple agencies scouring the North Atlantic for any signs of the Titan. 

However, On June 22, officials from the U.S. Coast Guard confirmed that a debris field had been found on the ocean floor close to the Titanic’s bow. According to Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger at a press conference, the discovery suggested a “catastrophic implosion” of the vessel, meaning it had collapsed inward killing all five members of the crew.

What Does 2024 Hold For OceanGate?

OceanGate has taken down its social media, and its website has gone dark with the following notice:

“ OceanGate Expeditions has suspended all exploration and commercial operations. ”

This came in July, a week after OceanGate said it would suspend all operations. Only the old OceanGate Foundation’s website remains active. The only certain thing is that OceanGate is going to be dealing with lawsuits for years to come.

Before their website was shut down, OceanGate was still advertising trips to the Titanic wreckage. They listed two missions to the Titanic in 2024 — June 12-20 and June 21-29 — at a cost of a staggering $250,000 per person . Go figure…

The U.S. government has filed a motion to stop a Titanic expedition planned for 2024, citing a law that protects the shipwreck as a gravesite. RMS Titanic Inc. , the exclusive salvage rights holder, faces legal opposition. In the federal court motion in Virginia, the U.S. contends that RMS Titanic Inc. must obtain authorization from the Secretary of Commerce for any activity altering or disturbing the Titanic wreck or its site.

In a June periodic report, RMS Titanic Inc. disclosed plans for a 2024 expedition, stating no intention to seek a permit, as noted in the U.S. government’s motion. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Virginia refrains from additional comments.

What Is OceanGate?

OceanGate is an American privately owned company founded in 2009 in Everett, Washington, by Stockton Rush and Guillermo Söhnlein. The company provides crewed submersibles for tourism, industry, research, and exploration purposes to depths of more than 10,000 feet below the ocean’s surface.

Why Did the OceanGate’s Submersible Fail?

Inadequate design, insufficient testing, and the use of carbon fiber as a structural material have all been suggested as contributing factors. The catastrophic loss of OceanGate’s Titan submersible in June 2023 with all hands aboard has triggered widespread speculation regarding the cause of the accident.

Will There Be Future OceanGate Expeditions?

OceranGate’s future is still undecided. The company’s website showing the forthcoming OceanGate expeditions has gone dark following the public outcry after the tragic accident. The next two OceanGate expeditions were supposed to take place on June 12 – June 20, and June 21 – June 29, 2024.

How Many Trips To RMS Titanic Has Oceangate Made?

Prior to the fatal dive, OceanGate’s Titan made 13 successful expeditions to the RMS Titanic to only a handful of people who had the privilege to dive down to the most famous shipwreck in the world. Over the years, Oceangate has conducted more than 200 dives in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf of Mexico. 

What Do You Get on One Submersible Dive?

With the click of a button, Mission Specialists (those who are part of OceanGate’s submersible team) can switch between a camera and sonar to explore the ocean and the ocean floor. They can also view preloaded images of deep-sea species, and the Titanic as they experience an entirely foreign world.

Elizabeth Lavis is a freelance writer who spends the majority of her time traveling the world and seeing exciting and fun new places. She likes physical challenges, such as mountain climbing, and enjoys interacting with interesting people and learning to appreciate new cultures and ways of doing things. Elizabeth is curious about the world around her and is always looking for ways to make it a friendlier and more welcoming place. Read more from Elizabeth on her personal site .

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

What is submersible tourism? The Titanic expedition, explained.

How common are deep-sea expeditions like the Titan’s? Where else do submersibles go?

Seeing the wreck of the Titanic firsthand is a journey.

One must board a submersible vessel about the size of a minivan built to withstand the pressure of descending nearly two and a half miles into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean . It takes about two hours to reach the sunken ship and another two to get back to the surface, plus time for exploration.

And even with a price tag of a quarter of a million dollars, there has been no shortage of people with interest for such an adventure. Philippe Brown, founder of the luxury travel company Brown and Hudso , said there’s a long wait list for the OceanGate Expeditions submersible experience at the center of the world’s attention. The vessel, called the Titan, vanished Sunday in the North Atlantic with five onboard , triggering a wide-reaching search mission that ended Thursday, when the Coast Guard said a remotely operated vehicle discovered debris from the vessel on the ocean floor. Pieces of the submersible indicated it had imploded in a “catastrophic event," Coast Guard officials said. A spokesperson for OceanGate said the pilot and passengers “have sadly been lost."

For the world’s richest and most intrepid travelers, a submersible trip is not so far-fetched, says Roman Chiporukha, co-founder of Roman & Erica, a travel company for ultrawealthy clients with annual membership dues starting at $100,000.

“These are the people who’ve scaled the seven peaks, they’ve crossed the Atlantic on their own boat,” Chiporukha said. The typical vacation of the ultrawealthy, like a beach getaway on the Italian Riviera or St. Barts, “really doesn’t do it for them,” he added.

That description fits tycoon Hamish Harding , who was among the five people on Titan. An avid adventurer who’s thoroughly explored the South Pole and the Mariana Trench, Harding was also on the fifth spaceflight of Blue Origin , the private space company founded by Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Capt. Hamish Harding (@actionaviationchairman)

Harding and the Titan journey represent the extreme end of the submersible tourism industry, which has been growing in popularity since the 1980s. Ofer Ketter , a longtime submersibles pilot and co-founder of SubMerge , a firm that provides consulting and operations of private submersibles, says such deep-sea journeys are rare in comparison to those in more tropical locations. For example, the luxury tour operator Kensington Tours offers a $700,000, 10-day yacht trip that includes a 600-plus-foot dive in a submersible in the Bahamas to explore the Exumas ocean floor.

Here’s what else to know about the industry.

Deep water, high pressure: Why the Titanic sub search is so complex

Missing Titanic submersible

The latest: After an extensive search, the Coast Guard found debris fields that have been indentified as the Titan submersible. OceanGate, the tour company, has said all 5 passengers are believed dead.

The Titan: The voyage to see the Titanic wreckage is eight days long, costs $250,000 and is open to passengers age 17 and older. The Titan is 22 feet long, weighs 23,000 pounds and “has about as much room as a minivan,” according to CBS correspondent David Pogue. Here’s what we know about the missing submersible .

The search: The daunting mission covers the ocean’s surface and the vast depths beneath. The search poses unique challenges that are further complicated by the depths involved. This map shows the scale of the search near the Titanic wreckage .

The passengers: Hamish Harding , an aviation businessman, aircraft pilot and seasoned adventurer, posted on Instagram that he was joining the expedition and said retired French navy commander Paul-Henri Nargeolet was also onboard. British Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son, Suleman, 19, were also on the expedition, their family confirmed. The CEO of OceanGate , the submersible expedition company, was also on the vessel. Here’s what we know about the five missing passengers.

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How much is the titanic sub tour inside the exclusive oceangate expedition and why it costs so much, government agencies, us and canadian navies and commercial deep-sea firms have joined efforts to find the vessel belonging to tour firm oceangate.

A search is under way after a submersible that takes tourists to view the wreck of the Titanic went missing in the Atlantic Ocean .

Government agencies, US and Canadian navies and commercial deep-sea firms have joined efforts to find the vessel belonging to tour firm OceanGate.

The luxury tour company that promises unforgettable expeditions to see the wreckage of the Titanic has confirmed one of its submersibles has gone missing.

“We are exploring and mobilising all options to bring the crew back safely,” OceanGate said in a statement.

Who are Ocean Gate and how much does it cost?

OceanGate is a Washington-based company that has been offering trips to the wreck for several years , with six guests per voyage paying $250,000 (£195,000) for the privilege. This includes a guided tour around the famous ship 13,000ft beneath the sea, as well as luxury hospitality aboard an expedition vessel.

“You will arrive at depth, and after some navigating across the seafloor and debris field, finally see what you’ve been waiting for: the RMS Titanic ,” says the company in its brochure.

“The content expert on board will point out key features, be they of the wreck itself or the life that calls this corner of the ocean home. Enjoy hours of exploring the wreck and debris field before making the two-hour ascent to the surface.”

The eight-day 2023 expedition was listed as “underway” on a cached page of the OceanGate website, with the original no longer online. The company did not answer calls to its office.

It is extremely exclusive, with the company saying it offers “a select number of individuals to explore the vessel that was once the height of opulence, but whose journey would end tragically”. It says it is a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to travel in the world’s only carbon-fibre submersible capable of diving five people.

OceanGate founder, businessman Stockton Rush, founded the company in 2009 promising to make the depths of the oceans accessible.

The former aerospace engineer told CBS News last year that the Titanic trips represent “a new type of travel”, blending adventure, luxury and history.

What happened to the Titanic tourist sub after it goes missing in Atlantic Ocean

The famous wreck holds a powerful allure that draws passionate guests, he said.

“We have clients that are Titanic enthusiasts, which we refer to as Titaniacs,” Mr Rush added. “We’ve had people who have mortgaged their home to come and do the trip. And we have people who don’t think twice about a trip of this cost. We had one gentleman who had won the lottery.”

The expeditions also double as research opportunities for scientists, allowing them to study rare species in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

Visitors are warned that the experience can be unpredictable, with weather conditions interfering with previous expeditions.

OceanGate is one of several companies offering trips to the Titanic , located around 370 miles off the Canadian coast, with demand said to be intense. Scientists had previously warned that the number of visits from filmmakers and explorers was damaging the wreck.

Tourist visits to the Titanic have been controversial, with some relatives of victims of the 1912 disaster saying they are disrespectful to the dead.

What happened?

The sub normally communicates with its pilot ship the Polar Prince every 15 minutes but contact was lost about an hour and 45 minutes into the dive, the US Coast Guard said.

“We are deeply thankful for the extensive assistance we have received from several government agencies and deep sea companies in our efforts to re-establish contact with the submersible,” OceanGate said in a statement.

“We are working toward the safe return of the crew members.”

Rear Adm John Mauger of the US Coast Guard told a press conference they are doing “everything” they can to find the submersible.

“Right now, our focus is getting on as much capability into the area as we can,” he said on Monday, adding: “We anticipate that there’s somewhere between 70 to the full 96 hours at this point.

“It is a remote area and a challenge, but we are deploying all available assets.”

The US Coast Guard said the Canadian research vessel Polar Prince and 106 Rescue wing will continue to conduct surface searches while the US Coast Guard sent two C-130 flights to search for the missing submersible.

Who was on board the sub?

Five people were onboard the vessel, including one pilot and two “mission specialists”.

Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood have been named as two of the other people on the submersible in a family statement.

“We are very grateful for the concern being shown by our colleagues and friends and would like to request everyone to pray for their safety,” the statement said.

Among the crew is British businessman and explorer Hamish Harding , chairman of private plane firm Action Aviation.

In a subsequently deleted Facebook post, Mr Harding’s stepson wrote that he had “gone missing on a submarine” and asked for “thoughts and prayers”.

The last pictures from before the dive were shared on Action Aviation’s Instagram account, depicting the submersible setting off into the depths.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cto-21dMXpx/?hl=en

Mark Butler, managing director of Action Aviation, said: “There is still plenty of time to facilitate a rescue mission, there is equipment on board for survival in this event. We’re all hoping and praying he comes back safe and sound.”

Mr Harding holds three Guinness World Records, including the longest duration at full ocean depth by a crewed vessel when in March 2021, he and ocean explorer Victor Vescovo dived to the lowest depth of the Mariana Trench. In June 2022, he went into space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket.

His cousin, Kathleen Cosnett, told The Daily Telegraph she saw Mr Harding as “daring” and “inquisitive”, and that she was “devastated” to learn he was missing.

On social media at the weekend, he said he was “proud to finally announce” he would be aboard the mission to the wreck of the Titanic , the luxury ocean liner which hit an iceberg and sank in 1912, killing more than 1,500 people.

The Explorer’s Club, of which Mr Harding is a founding member of, shared the news of his disappearance on Instagram with club president Richard Garriot saying: “When I saw Hamish last week… his excitement about this expedition was palpable,” he said.

“I know he was looking forward to conducting research at the site. We all join in the fervent hope that the submersible is located as quickly as possible and the crew is safe.”

Where is the wreckage of the Titanic?

The shipwreck of the Titanic is 3,800 metres down on the bed of the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 600km (370 miles) off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

The passenger liner hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York in 1912, with more than 1,500 of the 2,200 passengers and crew onboard dying.

The wreckage was discovered in 1985.

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How to Book a Dive to See the “Titanic” Shipwreck

Citizen scientists will soon have the opportunity to participate in research missions to the historic site..

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The five-person submersible, Titan , will be heading out on a series of 10-day Titanic expeditions starting in May.

Courtesy of OceanGate Expeditions

Editors note: OceanGate’s Titan suffered a “ catastrophic implosion ,” killing all five people on board, according to the U.S. Coast Guard on June 22, 2023.

It won’t be cheap and it won’t be easy, but if having the chance to personally witness the Titanic shipwreck is a once-in-a-lifetime dream experience you would like to fulfill—there is now a way to do so. Undersea exploration company OceanGate Expeditions is hosting Titanic survey expeditions starting in May 2021 and is looking for citizen scientists to join the crew.

OceanGate will be sending its five-person submersible, Titan , on a series of 10-day Titanic expeditions (there will be six missions in total next year) that will each include a small group of experts and researchers, along with citizen scientists. Individuals interested in joining these deep-sea research missions will need to apply and be interviewed before being approved to participate in the dives.

Potential eligible participants must be at least 18 years old at the time of the expedition, must be able to board Zodiacs in rough water, and must demonstrate basic balance, mobility, flexibility, and strength.

“We refer to those supporting the mission as mission specialists. They are active, trained participants in the expedition. They are not tourists or travelers. This is an important distinction. This is a true expedition environment and every crew member, including the mission specialists, are crucial to the successful completion of our mission objectives,” OceanGate said in a statement sent to AFAR about the expeditions.

Indeed, the training is rather involved. Mission specialists must complete a training dive mission prior to joining one of the Titanic survey expeditions. With the training mission under their belt, they will then be expected to participate in various support roles on the Titanic dive, including operating sonar and laser scanners, assisting with navigation and sub-to-surface communications, documenting their observations, and taking photos and video footage of sea life, the shipwreck, and artifacts using onboard cameras.

They will also be asked to participate in processing and reviewing images and footage from the dive and to contribute to a detailed review and analysis of the data.

Mission specialists will be asked to participate in support roles during the mission.

Each of the six missions has up to nine slots for qualified citizen scientists (there are multiple dives per mission)—who must also be willing to invest $125,000 to have this truly unique experience.

Each dive will begin with a briefing, followed by a 90-minute descent to the Titanic site. During the descent, teams look for bioluminescent lifeforms. Once at the site of the shipwreck, they will spend about three hours exploring. With the help of the submersible’s bright exterior lights, the team will observe areas that include the bow section of the ship (the most impressive part of the wreck, according to OceanGate), the area where the ship’s grand staircase was located, the bridge remains, and the debris field where century-old artifacts have been scattered across the ocean floor. The teams will then embark on the 90-minute ascent back to the surface.

The Titanic shipwreck was discovered on September 1, 1985, by oceanographer Robert Ballard. It is located 12,467 feet below the Atlantic Ocean’s surface about 370 miles southeast off the coast of the Canadian province of Newfoundland. Nearly 1,500 people perished when the luxury passenger liner Titanic sank in April 1912, while sailing from Southampton, England, to New York City.

“Expeditions will be conducted with great respect for those who lost their lives in the tragic sinking of the Titanic ,” OceanGate told AFAR. The company said it plans to observe the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s guidelines for exploration of the Titanic , as well as UNESCO’s guiding principles for the preservation of underwater World Heritage sites.

“Our main mission objectives include observing and documenting at a safe distance, and not touching or landing on the Titanic . We will be documenting the site for future generations and going back annually to document and determine the rate of deterioration of this historic site,” OceanGate explained. The six anticipated missions for 2021 are currently scheduled to take place on May 30, June 8, June 16, June 24, July 2, and July 10. The inaugural mission will mark the first time in 15 years that passengers have been able to visit the wreck, Bloomberg reports .

As for precautions that will be in place due to the coronavirus pandemic, OceanGate is mandating that crew get tested for COVID-19 and wear masks; it also is having crew members quarantine in advance of the expeditions. The company has added air filtration systems on its submersible.

>> Next: Scuba Diving Slave Shipwrecks Is a Spiritual Journey

Titanic Tours: What To Know About These Underwater Excursions

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It's safe to say that when an iceberg pierced the Titanic on its maiden voyage just over 100 years ago, no one was thinking about turning the shipwreck into a tourist attraction. But now, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the sinking, some travel companies are offering tours of the site. Visitors can take an expensive excursion or they can simply look on Google, where the wreck is pictured in all its rustic, 3-D glory.

It's a surreal sight ― especially if you know that when the Titanic went down in 1912 it claimed more than 1,500 lives. But is visiting the ship such a good idea? Absolutely, yes!

Package Tours On Titanic Shipwreck Underwater Excursions

There are now two companies offering underwater tours of the Titanic's wreckage. Bluefish and OceanGate, which has its headquarters in Everett Washington, both offer dives to the site that cost roughly $60,000- $105,129 per person, not including airfare or lodging. But what do you get for this price? Here's what to know about the tours:

Now that the wreckage is covered with silt again and no longer clear enough for photographs, some pictures taken on previous dives have been reproduced on tours' brochures. Up-close views of Titanic's exterior can also be seen in the James Cameron documentary Titanic.

Bluefish's brochures claim that "the wreck is eminently photographable providing an opportunity for multiple dive photography." OceanGate's website notes that there are at least a dozen friezes from the ship above water. Both tour companies are adamant about protecting the site and the body of water around it, possibly due to the controversy that arose last year when one company was using a ship to drop tourists onto the wreckage.

A Bluefish video demonstrates what it's like inside the sub by dropping a GoPro camera into an empty one as well as dead still sharks. It also shows some footage of Titanic itself before it was covered up with silt and debris.

Tourists will use OceanGate's custom-built submersibles made out of titanium, not unlike those used for space missions like Apollo 13. The sub is big enough for three passengers and has a window, touchscreen monitors for navigation, a pressure gauge, and all the equipment that tourists will need to live.

Both companies will take precautions like deploying a safety diver. They also plan to check guests' lungs for signs of pneumonia before each dive to ensure that they are healthy enough.

The Titanic sank in 1912 and many people died, but the wreck was never declared a cemetery or war gravesite, so knocking on it is prohibited. Both companies also request that tourists don't take chunks of the ship as souvenirs, which has happened before with other famous wrecks like the Lusitania.

RELATED:   This Is What The Menu On The Titanic Would Have Looked Like, Compared To Cruise Menus Today

5 Things To Take Note About the Titanic Wreck Site

Once you’ve decided on which company to go through to visit this sunken piece of history, the basic accommodations are all set! While the entire site itself is a historical wonder, there are a few things to note. Below are different things to be aware of before you take a dive.

What To Bring With You When Visiting The Underwater Wreckage

According to Blue Marble Private, divers should bring nothing larger than a handbag with them on the excursion. Their kit will include a snorkel plus mask, computer, and regulator, wetsuit, and boots.

What To Expect When Diving At The Site Of The Titanic Wreck

Divers will be able to explore the three most important parts of the wreckage, including its bow section, stern and engine room. Each area has plenty of marine life, so you might feel as though you're swimming through a fishbowl.

RELATED:   What Really Happened To The Titanic's Captain, And Did He Survive Like Some People Claimed?

What To Know When Diving At The Site Of The Titanic Wreck

Dive trips are run with a maximum of 12 divers at one time, and the company cautions that diving can be strenuous if you're not fit or healthy enough for it. This is why they recommend medical checks before each excursion.

What Not To Do When Visiting The Underwater Wreckage Of The Titanic

You must report any sightings of the wreck to the government agencies responsible for its protection, i.e., the Maritime and Coast Guard Agency (MCA) in Belfast. You should also respect all regulations that surround this precious archeological site.

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What To Expect From The Marine Life At The Site Of The Titanic Wreck

Titanic wreck excursions are perfect for snorkelers and scuba divers alike , and visitors will be able to reap the benefits of both in one visit. There are plenty of fish to see if you're snorkeling, and you might even spot some whale sharks, too.

What To Know About The Safety Measures In Place For The Tour

According to the Titanic wreck tour operator's website, there are a number of safety measures in place to ensure that visitors have an enjoyable experience. These include two divers per dive, a support crew on the surface, and medical staff. Visitors should always bring a whistle with them, especially since it is an international sign of distress. A knife and glow stick will also be useful in an emergency.

Titanic wreck trips are a unique and exciting way to learn about the history of one of the most famous vessels to ever sail the seas, which is why they're so popular among Titanic enthusiasts as well as people who have never seen it before. They're also great for anyone who loves the water since it's a chance to explore something man-made while enjoying the natural beauty of an underwater ecosystem. The fact that you can set foot where no other human has for nearly 100 years only adds to the appeal, making this one of the most fascinating excursions you can take.

NEXT:   What The Titanic Looks Like Now Vs The Day It Sank

Innovation | June 2019

A Deep Dive Into the Plans to Take Tourists to the ‘Titanic’

For a handsome price, a daredevil inventor will bring you aboard his groundbreaking submarine to put eyes on most famous shipwreck of all

Tony Perrottet

Contributing writer

Editor's Note, June 22, 2023: On the afternoon of June 22, the U.S. Coast Guard announced the identification of debris from the tourist submersible Titan , which went missing on Sunday during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic . "The debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel" that would have killed all five crew members on board, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, said Rear Admiral John Mauger during a press conference. Investigations into the cause and timing of the explosion are ongoing. Below, read a 2019 story by magazine correspondent Tony Perrottet, who visited OceanGate headquarters and reported on the company's plans to send tourists to the Titanic .

The world looks very different through the eye of the Cyclops. I learned this one freezing morning this past February, after trudging through two feet of snow to get to the marina in Everett, Washington, a small port 45 minutes north of Seattle. On the dock was a cylindrical white pod about the size of a moving van, a five-person submersible whose protruding, semi-spherical window inspired its name, after the monocular monster of myth. A half-dozen men wearing thickly padded khaki jumpsuits and orange helmets gathered on the snow-covered dock ready to send me under the ice-flecked waves of Puget Sound.

The schedule was as rigorously timed as a rocket launch. “Vessel prep” had been completed at dawn, so after a pre-dive briefing, I climbed a ladder to the top hatch of the sub, took off my boots and clambered into the tube, which was sheathed in perforated stainless steel. Inside, the pilot Kenny Hague was checking instruments, including the modified Sony PlayStation controllers used to steer the sub underwater. There were no seats, but with only three of us on the dive (the other was staff member Joel Perry), I could stretch out like a pasha on a black vinyl mat.

With the submersible still resting on its metal launching platform, one end of the platform slowly rose from the dock and we slid backward into the sea. The milky green waters of Puget Sound rose over the eye of Cyclops 1 ; the support team blurred and vanished, followed by the leaden sky. Even though visibility was only about 15 feet, thanks to storm runoff, a condition my crew mates dubbed “the milkshake,” it was still magical to be breathing underwater, an unnatural human state that has captured our imagination since antiquity, when Greek legends of Poseidon and mermen abounded. I was reminded, inevitably, of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea , and Captain Nemo’s near-mystical reverie on the Nautilus over its mastery of the deep: “The sea is everything....It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the ‘Living Infinite.’”

This test “dunk,” in the words of my hosts, from a company called OceanGate, was just a taste of what will happen this summer, when OceanGate will begin taking paying customers to visit the fabled wreckage of the Titanic , which lies some two and a half miles beneath the North Atlantic. The experimental submersible for those trips, named Titan , closely resembles its sibling Cyclops 1 . But Titan is the first deep-sea submersible constructed from a carbon-fiber composite, which allows the vessel to withstand enormous pressure at great depths while being far cheaper to build and operate than more traditional subs of equal abilities. Though the average depth of the world’s oceans is 2.3 miles, or a little more than 12,000 feet, until Titan came along only a handful of active submersibles were capable of reaching that depth, and they were all owned by the governments of the United States, France, China and Japan. Then, last December, OceanGate made history: Titan became the first privately owned sub with a human aboard to dive that deep and beyond, finally reaching 4,000 meters, or about 13,000 feet—a little deeper than where the Titanic lies.

The feat was the culmination of a dream for Stockton Rush, OceanGate’s maverick CEO and co-founder. “Stockton is a real pioneer,” says Scott Parazynski, a 17-year NASA veteran, the first person to have both flown in space (five times) and summited Mount Everest, and a consultant on the Titan expeditions. “It’s not easy to take a white sheet of paper, come up with a new submersible design, fund it, test it and mature it. It was an incredibly audacious thing to do.”

In his zeal for innovation, Rush stands out even in the elite manned submersible community, which attracts wealthy and eccentric individuals willing to risk their fortunes on wildly uncertain endeavors. Rush wants to do for deep ocean exploration what Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are doing for space travel. By taking well-heeled tourists to the deep—at first, each seat cost $105,129, the inflation-adjusted price of a first-class ticket on the Titanic , though the rate has increased to a cool $125,000—Rush hopes to use private enterprise to spur advances in the long-neglected field of underwater exploratory technology, and reveal some of the secrets of the great blue unknown.

Not that he is given to romantic reveries of the sea. “Sometimes Mother Nature works for you,” Rush said, smiling wryly as he settled into a chair in a wood-paneled parlor in downtown Seattle. “And sometimes Mother Nature is a bitch.” The vagaries of the weather are an ongoing theme for Rush, with deluges, lightning storms and other cataclysms wreaking havoc on Titan ’s test schedules. But he was also referring to the difficulties of our meeting, which occurred while Seattle was being pummeled by its snowiest month in half a century, turning roads into rivers of slush and paralyzing transportation. Just reaching a place for us to sit down had the air of an arctic trek in the Edwardian Age, one reason we chose the historic Hotel Sorrento, which was built for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition that put Seattle, then a frontier outpost for gold prospectors and fur-trappers, on the map. Ever since, the city has attracted independent thinkers, inventors and misfits with a spirit symbolized by the iconic Space Needle, built for the 1962 World’s Fair. As we chatted, snow cascaded down outside the hotel window, cocooning us in an eerie silence and creating the sense that we were sitting in a sub on the ocean floor.

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This article is a selection from the June 2019 issue of Smithsonian magazine

With a shock of silver hair and preppy clothes, Rush might be mistaken for a corporate lawyer on casual Friday rather than an ocean adventurer in the mold of a Jacques Cousteau, who was not just a telegenic explorer but also an inventor (of the aqualung, in his case). A conversation with Rush jumps between engineering (“sacrificial weights,” “tensile forces,” and “fairing,” the external shell added to streamline a sub), business (“marketing granularity”) and boyish enthusiasm (Rush has a fondness for “Star Trek” references).

His childhood dream, growing up in a wealthy San Francisco family, was to be an astronaut. His parents assumed he’d grow out of it. “I didn’t,” he says. When Stockton’s father introduced him to Pete Conrad, the commander of Apollo 12 and the first manned Skylab mission (and a personal friend), the astronaut advised the teenage math whiz to get his pilot’s license. So in 1980, at age 18, Rush became one of the youngest commercial pilots in the world, then signed up to fly chartered planes in and out of Saudi Arabia, all while studying aerospace engineering at Princeton. “It was the coolest college summer job,” he says. For his thesis, he designed a high-speed ultralight aircraft; later, he built his own plane, a Glasair III, from a kit. (“You start on Page 1 of the manual, and by the time you get to Page 680, you have a plane!”)

The astronaut dream was dashed when Rush learned that his eyesight wasn’t good enough for him to become a military pilot, in the 1980s still the astronaut fast track. Instead, he moved to Seattle, to work for McDonnell Douglas as a flight-test engineer on F-15 fighter jets, then went to business school. Building on inherited money, he invested in a string of esoteric tech companies (wireless remote-control devices, sonar systems). Still, he dreamed of going to space, perhaps as a passenger on one of the private rockets being developed in the early 2000s by the likes of Richard Branson. In fact, Rush traveled to the Mojave Desert in 2004 to watch the launch of SpaceShipOne, the first commercial craft sent into space. When Branson stood on its wing and declared that a new era of space tourism had arrived, Rush says, he abruptly lost interest. “I had this epiphany that this was not at all what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to go up into space as a tourist. I wanted to be Captain Kirk on the Enterprise . I wanted to explore .”

As it happened, Rush had been a fanatic scuba diver since he was a teenager, and had ventured to the Red Sea, the Cayman Islands and Tahiti. It dawned on him that Seattle had excellent cold-water diving. “Puget Sound is full of nutrients, so you have sharks and whales and crabs and dolphins and seals and anemones,” he said. “It’s an absolutely incredible place to dive—except that it’s freezing!” He took a cold-water dive class, but was put off by the thick, full-body dry suits and vast amounts of paraphernalia, including multiple air tanks. “I loved what I saw, but I thought, There’s gotta be a better way. And being in a sub, and being nice and cozy, and having a hot chocolate with you, beats the heck out of freezing and going through a two-hour decompression hanging in deep water.”

The obvious next step was to rent a submarine. He was shocked to find that there were fewer than 100 privately owned subs in the world, and only a few were available for charter. He then tried unsuccessfully to buy one. Instead, a London company offered to sell him parts for a mini-sub that could be built using blueprints created by a retired U.S. Navy submarine commander. He completed it in 2006, a 12-foot-long tube in which the pilot lies flat on his stomach and looks out a plexiglass window while manipulating control levers and cruising at a max speed of three knots.

Rush recalls his first dive in road-to-Damascus terms. “While I was building the sub, I was thinking, This is stupid. I should have just bought a robot and explored with that,” he said. “But the moment I went underwater, I was like, Oh—you can’t describe this. When you go in a sub, things sound different, they look different. It’s like you’ve gone to a different planet.” Rush was hooked—and his entrepreneurial instincts were piqued. “I had come across this business anomaly I couldn’t explain: If three-quarters of the planet is water, how come you can’t access it?”

Our ongoing ignorance of the underwater world is something of a historical accident, Rush discovered. After the Moon landing in 1969, there was a tremendous push for ocean exploration in the U.S. “The thought was, that’s the next frontier,” he says. The Navy pumped millions into manned submersibles with names like Alvin , Turtle and Mystic , with research fueled by secret Cold War missions such as the 1974 recovery of a sunken Russian ballistic-missile sub from the Pacific floor. But in the post-Vietnam recession, government funds dried up. In Seattle, military sub researchers went into other areas of defense contracting and maritime side-specialties such as sonar.

Soon after, the private market died too, Rush found, for two reasons that were “understandable but illogical.” First, subs gained a reputation for danger. Working on offshore rigs in harsh locations like the North Sea, saturation divers, who breathe gas mixtures to avoid diving sicknesses, would be taken in subs to work at great depths. It was the world’s most perilous job, with frequent fatalities. (“It wasn’t the sub’s fault,” says Rush.) To save lives, the industries moved toward using underwater robots to perform the same work.

Second, tourist subs, which could once be skippered by anyone with a U.S. Coast Guard captain’s license, were regulated by the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993, which imposed rigorous new manufacturing and inspection requirements and prohibited dives below 150 feet. The law was well-meaning, Rush says, but he believes it needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation (a position a less adventurous submariner might find open to debate). “There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown—because they have all these regulations.” The U.S. government, meanwhile, has continued to favor space exploration over ocean research: NASA today gets about $10.5 billion annually for exploration, while NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research is allotted less than $50 million—a triumph of “emotion over logic,” Rush says. “Half of the United States is underwater, and we haven’t even mapped it!”

Although Rush can sound as if he’s found a semi-religious calling—he is fond of saying things like “I want to change the way humanity regards the deep ocean”—he is also blunt about his interest in responsibly exploiting America’s natural resources, pointing out that the country’s “exclusive economic zone,” which extends as far as 230 miles from every coast, is vast, thanks to U.S. island possessions. There could be massive oil and gas reserves, rare minerals or diamonds—to say nothing of deep-sea corals and other possible sources of rare chemicals that might, for example, lead to medical breakthroughs. “We don’t know what resources are out there.”

Rush’s first dive in his mini-sub had only been to 30 feet, but he had contracted what he calls “the deep disease.” From 2007, he began descending to ever-lower depths, first testing the sub by lowering it on a rope to see if the hull or windows would crack. “I went to 75 feet. I saw cool stuff. I went 100 feet and saw more cool stuff. And I was like, Wow, what’s it gonna be like at the end of this thing?” He began to fantasize about seeing what’s known as the “deep scattering layer” around 1,600 feet, where marine life is so dense that early sonar scans in the 1940s reported it as a false, ever-shifting seafloor. Experts surmise that in the darkness below that there exist more than a million invertebrate species, most still unknown to marine biologists.

Rush commissioned a marketing study and found demand for “participatory” adventure travel to the deep ocean, and the idea was born to take clients on expeditions to pay for developing new sub technology that would have wider commercial applications—scientific exploration, disaster response, resource speculation. Rush and a business partner (who has since left the company) formed OceanGate in 2009.

When the blizzard eased up, I made the slow pilgrimage with Rush in his SUV north to OceanGate’s headquarters, in Everett, creeping along a highway lined with snow-covered pine trees that loomed like icebergs. The waterfront office seemed crisply corporate except for the telltale scale models of the Titanic and Titan sitting on a shelf. But opening the door to the workshop revealed the company’s hands-on side: an Aladdin’s cave for tech geeks, a jumble of white hulls that looked like shark fins, sculptural engineering parts, oxygen tanks and oddities like a mysterious Perspex sphere whose interior resembled a medieval clock.

There was OceanGate’s first commercial sub, Antipodes , which was painted bright yellow and whose array of dials and meters had a steampunk air. “I wish it were a different color—I can’t stand that song,” Rush said of “Yellow Submarine.” In 2010, he used the five-person Antipodes , which could descend to 1,000 feet, to carry his first paying clients to Catalina Island, off the coast of California; later, he undertook expeditions to explore corals, lionfish populations and an abandoned oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. To refine the tourist experience, he decided to recruit expert guides. “People would ask me about a fish, and I wouldn’t know anything about it,” he recalls. So he brought along marine biologists. “The difference was night and day. Their excitement permeated the sub.”

“Deep disease” now pushed Rush into a new phase: engineering. He abandoned the traditional spherical submersible shape. “It’s the best geometry for pressure, but not for occupation, which is why you don’t have spherical military subs,” he says. Instead, he developed Cyclops 1 , a cylinder that fits five people and is strong enough to descend to 1,600 feet. The steel hull was acquired in 2013 from a company in the Azores, who had been using it for 12 years. Its interior was entirely revamped by the OceanGate engineering team and the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington, who helped integrate new underwater sensors and install the Sony PlayStation controllers, which gave the sub a uniquely intuitive piloting system.

The idea of trips to the Titanic first arose as a marketing ploy. Shipwrecks, Rush realized, were a way to grab public attention. In 2016, OceanGate mounted an expedition with paying passengers in Cyclop s 1 to the wreck of the Andrea Doria , an Italian passenger liner that sank off the coast of Nantucket in 1956, killing 46 people. Media interest spiked. “But there’s only one wreck that everyone knows,” Rush says. “If you ask people to name something underwater, it’s going to be sharks, whales, Titanic .”

The wreck had been visited by tourists before. More than a decade after the ship was located in 1985, by Robert Ballard, Russia contracted two Mir subs to a company called Deep Ocean Expeditions. (It was also a Mir sub that allowed James Cameron to film the haunting opening scenes of Titanic .) A string of salvage missions funded by private investors has also gathered roughly 5,500 Titanic relics, including plates, unopened Champagne bottles and the window frame of the Verandah Café. Some 250 items are on exhibition in the Luxor Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, along with a piece of the hull recovered from the debris field. (In 2012, the wreck came under the protection of Unesco, which has tried to safeguard the site from looting and further damage.)

Even so, fewer than 200 people have been to the Titanic , and Rush believes there are still original discoveries to be made. The most exciting possibilities lie in exploring the so-called “debris field,” the scattering of the passengers’ personal effects between the two halves of the ship, which broke apart on the surface as it began to sink. OceanGate’s expeditions are also scheduled to conduct sonar, laser scanning and photogrammetric image capture of the entire vessel, in partnership with a company called Virtual Wonders, with an eye toward creating 3-D and virtual reality films, TV shows, video games and exhibition-based immersive experiences.

There was only one catch to Rush’s plan: He still had to prove that Titan could safely get down to the site.

Ever since 1930, when the American inventor and naturalist William Beebe sank to 800 feet in his “bathysphere,” every deep-sea sub has been made of metal, usually steel or titanium. Rush began to experiment with carbon fiber, a lightweight, extremely strong material long used in the aerospace industry. “We thought, Hey, we can use this stuff to make a really cool sub!”

If it worked, it would be a game changer. The weight of steel and titanium subs makes them expensive to transport on land and requires large ships, outfitted with cranes, to launch at sea. Because of their heft, traditional subs tend to require bulky, syntactic foam flotation blocks to maintain neutral buoyancy, which is crucial for maneuverability. Titan , by contrast, is much cheaper to transport and launch, and without the foam is nimbler in the water. Titan uses the same sleek frame design, control panels, thrusters and life support systems as Cyclops 1 , carrying 96 hours of oxygen, but it has a smaller and stronger acrylic window and no top hatch. (Passengers enter through the “eye” itself, as the whole front end of the sub swings open.) Latched onto its 35-foot-long launch platform, it’s transported easily to any location. Most important, Rush believed the carbon fiber body was strong enough to resist crushing pressure down to 13,000 feet.

To test the new sub, Rush chose Great Abaco Island, in the Bahamas. Abaco’s unique advantage is that it sits on the edge of the continental shelf. To reach 13,000-foot-deep waters from Seattle, “I’d have to go 300 miles offshore,” Rush explains. From Abaco, Titan only needs to be towed 12 miles to have 15,000 feet of water to explore. Delays occurred from the start. In April 2018, Titan was in the shipyard just in time for a massive lightning storm that damaged the electrical system, forcing the computers to be replaced. When tests began again in May, an unusual burst of stormy weather postponed the schedule further.

Rush planned to pilot the sub himself, which critics said was an unnecessary risk: Under pressure, the experimental carbon fiber hull might, in the jargon of the sub world, “collapse catastrophically.” So OceanGate developed a new acoustic monitoring system, which can detect “crackling,” or, as Rush puts it, “the sound of micro-buckling way before it fails.” Still, Rush decided to test the hull by lowering the sub to 13,000 feet unmanned. It held.

Last December, the team finally began manned tests, with Rush first dropping 650 feet to the so-called “thermocline,” where tropical water temperature begins to drop precipitously. After successful descents to 3,200, 6,500 and 9,800 feet, Titan was finally ready to plunge to the Titanic’s depth.

The dive was going according to plan until about 10,000 feet, when the descent unexpectedly halted, possibly, Rush says, because the density of the salt water added extra buoyancy to the carbon fiber hull. He now used thrusters to drive Titan deeper, which interfered with the communications system, and he lost contact with the support crew. He recalls the next hour in hallucinogenic terms. “It was like being on the Starship Enterprise ,” he says. “There were these particles going by, like stars. Every so often a jellyfish would go whipping by. It was the childhood dream.”

He had been so focused on the task that the achievement of reaching 13,000 feet only hit him when he regained contact with his crew during the ascent. He had chosen to pilot Titan alone in case anything went unexpectedly wrong, he said. But he also wanted to be only the second person to travel solo to at least that depth, the other being James Cameron, who in 2012 took an Australian-built sub into the Mariana Trench, reaching Challenger Deep, the ocean’s deepest point, touching down at close to 36,000 feet. “That’s a nice club to be a part of,” Rush says. Two weeks later, that club welcomed a new member, when a Texas businessman named Victor Vescovo reached 27,000 feet in his own experimental submersible, whose spherical titanium hull is encased in syntactic foam.

On June 27, OceanGate is scheduled to leave for the first of six trips to the Titanic site.* This summer’s 54 pioneer clients range in age from 28 to 72, and mostly come from the U.S. and Britain, with a few from Australia, Canada and Germany. These 21st-century Astors and Rockefellers are extremophiles, the types of travelers who in the 19th century might have signed up for Amazon explorations and African safaris. Many have traveled to the Antarctic and the North Pole; some have participated in mock dogfights in MIG planes over Russia.

There will be three dives per expedition, and on each descent, three clients will be accompanied by a pilot (drawn from a roster of three, including Rush) and a scientist or a historian specializing in the wreck’s lore. Each dive will involve about 90 minutes of descent, three hours exploring the wreck, and a 90-minute ascent to the surface.

And the future? When the Titanic’s public appeal fades, Rush envisions expeditions to the World War II wrecks in the Coral Sea, to underwater volcanic vents filled with marine life, to deep-sea canyons that no human has ever seen. As for me, the modest dunk in Cyclops 1 gave me an inkling of “deep disease.” As the sub surfaced, every sight and sound seemed strange and unfamiliar. The waterline receded over the sub’s eye to reveal the snow-covered dock and a layer of floating ice; I felt a slight popping in my ears as the hatch opened.

I thought back to a conversation in which Rush painted a portrait of our long-term future that felt, at the time, like science fiction. “We’re going to colonize the ocean long before we colonize space,” he said. In the event that terra firma becomes uninhabitable, undersea settlements could prove more viable “life boats” than interstellar space. “Why leave?” Rush asked. “The ocean is a very protected environment. It’s safe from ozone radiation, nuclear war, hurricanes. The temperatures and currents are very stable.” The idea was undoubtedly far-fetched, and the technology a long way off, but I had to admit that the experience of breathing and moving so freely underwater had captured my imagination. “Every time I go deeper, the experience gets cooler and cooler,” Rush said. “At the very bottom of the ocean, there must be a bunch of octopuses playing chess, wondering why it’s taken us so long to get there.”

* Editor's Note, June 27, 2019: In June 2019, OceanGate postponed its planned Titanic expeditions after failing to secure proper permitting for its contracted research support vessel. The Titanic expeditions are currently being rescheduled for summer 2020.

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Tony Perrottet | READ MORE

Tony Perrottet is a contributing writer for Smithsonian magazine, a regular contributor to the New York Times and WSJ Magazine , and the author of six books including ¡Cuba Libre!: Che, Fidel and the Improbable Revolution that Changed World History , The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games and Napoleon's Privates: 2500 Years of History Unzipped . Follow him on Instagram @TonyPerrottet .

Soon You Could Explore the Titanic Wreckage — For a Six-Figure Fee

Few have had the opportunity to see the Titanic wreckage up close, but a new sea expedition venture will make Titanic tourism possible in 2023. But what is the cost?

Sep. 6 2022, Published 12:56 p.m. ET

The bow of the RMS Titanic on the floor of the North Atlantic.

Few explorers have taken the 12,500-foot descent in the North Atlantic to see the wreckage of the RMS Titanic up close and personal. So far, the privilege has belonged mostly to scientists, marine archaeologists, and filmmaker James Cameron , but through Stockton Rush 's company OceanGate Expeditions , citizens with the means to do so can join an expedition as a "mission specialist."

Aside from a hefty contribution, citizen mission specialists have to undergo some arduous training to prepare them for the descent. Let's just say exploring the luxury liner is a far cry from the first class experience passengers of the ill-fated ship enjoyed on their voyage.

So, how much does it cost to take a Titanic Expedition? More than most people make in a year.

If money isn't an object and you don't mind close quarters, you can sign up to be a Citizen Mission Specialist aboard OceanGate Expeditions' Titan submersible for a $250,000 mission training and support fee.

OceanGate's brochure says this fee is essential to funding the expeditions and allows for continued observation of the wreckage's deterioration as well as scientific study of the deep ocean marine life in the area.

The Titan sub has a five-person crew capacity and is capable of reaching depths of up to 4,000 meters, or 13,000 feet. Each OceanGate Titanic Expedition mission can accommodate six mission specialists, who take turns boarding the sub for dives with the support crew. Each dive involves a 2.5-hour descent, followed by three to five hours exploring the wreckage and the surrounding debris field.

When not aboard the sub, mission specialists remain aboard the support vessel and assist the crew with operations such as reviewing dive images and sonar analysis.

What is the Titanic Expedition experience like?

If you join an expedition crew, most of your time will be spent aboard the Horizon Arctic , which is the dive support vessel. The ship has 60 sleeping berths for crew and mission specialists, as well as a mess deck, fitness facility, and lounges. It isn't exactly a luxury liner, but the experience of seeing the most famous cruise ship to ever sail the Atlantic probably makes up for the somewhat spartan accommodations.

The support ship embarks from St. John, Newfoundland, which is about 400 miles west of the Titanic's final resting place. The mission is 10 days long, with eight days at sea. Expeditions can only take place in the summer due to arctic conditions, with each annual mission containing five mission legs. With just si mission specialist positions for each leg, that means only 30 citizens per year will get to make the journey.

While the deep sea excursion isn't attainable for most, exploring the ocean depths is still far cheaper than a trip to the heavens. A seat on Jeff Bezos 's Blue Origin suborbital rocket will cost you millions, while Virgin Galactic 's ticket price is a steep but comparably affordable $450,000. And those trips are less than two hours long with only a matter of minutes spent in suborbital flight.

So, when you compare that to a quarter million for a week-long cruise and several hours exploring the ocean floor, OceanGate almost seems like a bargain!

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TITANIC Expedition 2024

In July 2024, the world’s leading deep ocean imaging experts, oceanographers, scientists, and historians will gather to launch RMS Titanic, Inc.’s first expedition to the wreck site of the RMS Titanic since 2010. This expedition will utilize cutting-edge technology to focus on imaging and high-resolution photography of the site to preserve the Titanic ’s legacy for future generations and scientific study. It will be carried out by ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) to survey the wreck site and debris field. The images captured will reveal important new insights into the condition of the site, areas and artifacts at risk, and contribute to ongoing conservation efforts and educational initiatives already underway.

The mission of the Titanic Expedition 2024 is to utilize the latest technology to continue the important work of surveying the Titanic wreck site, enhancing our understanding of its historical significance, identifying at risk artifacts for safe recovery in future expeditions, protecting and conserving the area for future generations, furthering current scientific study, engaging a world-wide community in discovering and identifying new artifacts and marine life never before seen, and inspiring the next generation of explorers.

Expedition Objectives

• Preserve the existing state of the site digitally.
• Protect the site by comparing to 2010 imaging to determine the impact of the oceans and other expeditions on the site.
• Study the deterioration at the site and the state of the Marconi Wireless Room .
• New areas of the debris field.
• New marine life previously unknown or unseen.
• New areas of deterioration which could provide unobstructed access to the interior of the ship .
• Engage the worldwide community to be involved in the identification/determination of artifacts for future potential recovery.
• Bring the wreck site to the public in exhibitions, classrooms, and immersive experiences through personal computers and mobile devices with unprecedented clarity to see what only a few in the world will ever see first-hand .
• Involvement in carrying the legacy of Titanic forward by continuing the work at the site through education, career paths in science, technology, engineering, arts, deep ocean exploration, digital content, research, and creative storytelling.

The work and contributions of P.H. Nargeolet to our knowledge of the sea, of the Titanic wreck site, and of Titanic ’s passengers and crew through the art of artifact recovery.

RMS Titanic, Inc. is pleased to partner with world-renowned scientists, oceanographers, naval architects, microbial biologists, metallurgists, historians, and other experts for Titanic Expedition 2024. All expeditions to survey and recover artifacts have been a collaborative effort, bringing scientists from many different domains and countries together, united in the goal of studying the wreck site. We are honored to work with the following key individuals in the Titanic Expedition 2024:

Troy Launay

David Gallo, Ph.D.

Rory Golden

Evan Kovacs

Tomasina Ray

C-Innovation

Why do you need to conduct expeditions.

Expeditions allow RMS Titanic, Inc. to fulfill our Mission to preserve the legacy of Titanic and her passengers and crew, not just through artifact recovery, but also through continuous research, imaging, and educational initiatives. Technology is improving at an incredible pace and we are able to do more now than as recently as two years ago. We are committed to bringing the world current and relevant information in innovative and engaging platforms which, unlike the site itself, are accessible to the public and not just a select few. Expeditions allow us to bring the wreck site to the public and meet our responsibility as salvor-in-possession to preserve the site in perpetuity for future generations.

What do you learn from expeditions?

We are committed and passionate about sharing what we learn from our expeditions. The data we collect and the information we uncover spans the scientific, historic, and objects that can be collected, imaged, and analyzed, especially for education and cultural appreciation. However, by utilizing the latest technology and imaging and leveraging the expertise of some of the most respected minds in various fields, the range of domains that benefit from our expeditions to the Titanic wreck site include climate science, marine biology, engineering, geology, geophysics, cinematography, maritime operations, naval science, and public policy as well as the creative arts.

How long does an expedition take?

Our expeditions are deeply researched, planned, and executed to ensure the greatest of care and concern for the safety of our crew, respect for Titanic and the wreck site, and environment. It takes between 2 and 2.5 hours to reach the bottom of the ocean where the Titanic wreck site lies, about 2.5 miles below the surface. The exact length of the expedition depends on the objectives of the mission, the weather conditions, and other factors. The primary objective is the safety of all involved in the expedition.

Can I get updates on what the expedition finds?

We plan to release updates on Titanic Expedition 2024 on a regular basis. We know there is an intense curiosity and interest in this mission worldwide, and we want to fulfill our objective of educating the public about Titanic . The best place to make sure you are among the first to know is by following us on Facebook , Instagram , X , TikTok , and by becoming a Member here .

How often do you do expeditions?

This will be the ninth expedition to Titanic and the first since 2010. To date, we have honorably and respectfully conducted eight expeditions to the wreck site in 1987, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2004. We recovered artifacts from the debris field in seven of those expeditions.

Why are you able to recover artifacts from the wreck site?

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia recognized RMS Titanic, Inc. as the exclusive salvor-in-possession of Titanic in 1994. RMS Titanic, Inc. is the only entity able to legally recover artifacts and we take the designation very seriously. As salvor-in-possession, RMS Titanic Inc.’s activities with respect to Titanic must account for the public interest.

Do you sell artifacts?

No, the artifacts we recover are not sold. Our Collections team ensures that they are carefully protected and preserved upon recovery. Then, working with our collections experts, they research the history and lives that might have been tied to the artifact so that those stories can be shared with guests who visit our permanent, touring and virtual exhibitions.  They are also used in our educational programs to provide insightful and meaningful lessons in STEAM.

Should recovered artifacts be given to museums?

Museums can only display a scant number of objects and artifacts at any one time due to many limitations including space, curatorial staff, and other factors. RMS Titanic, Inc. believes it is in the best interest of the public to provide artifacts for display all over the world, which is why RMS Titanic, Inc. makes touring exhibitions of Titanic artifacts available. Our Collections team consists of some of the most respected, talented, and passionate professionally trained museum staff in the world.

Where can I see recovered artifacts?

TITANIC: The Artifact Exhibition provides many opportunities to see permanent collections in Orlando, Florida and Las Vegas, Nevada. Touring exhibitions, which are extensions of the permanent exhibitions, are located throughout the world. Check discovertitanic.com for the latest touring exhibitions.

Are you recovering artifacts in this expedition?

One of the objectives of Titanic Expedition 2024 is to image, research, and engage the community on potential artifacts for future recovery in 2025 We will not recover artifacts on this expedition. The mission of the Titanic Expedition 2024 is to continue the important work of surveying, mapping, and imaging the Titanic wreck site and debris field.

Who will be part of the crew?

What credentials do you need to be a part of the expedition.

There is no singular credential needed to be a part of Titanic Expedition 2024.  Many of the team members have extensive, decorated careers in oceanography, diving, marine sciences, naval military service, and advanced academic degrees but the commonality lies in the commitment and dedication to preserve the legacy of Titanic .

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Titan submersible: Why the demand for its ticket to visit Titanic wreckage?

Where is Titan? Are the five tourists on the submersible, who were on the way to visit wrecked ship Titanic on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, safe? 

The world has been worryingly pondering over the question for the past few days as updates on various countries joining hand for their rescue mission, the level of oxygen left inside the vessel, the profile of the five people inside it and more are coming out. As per the latest news, a deep-sea diving robot has reached near Titanic for the search. Titan belongs to the US adventure travel firm OceanGate.

The risky tour for the rich In fact, the discovery of the wreckage of the historic luxury liner Titanic – which sank in 1912 – on the ocean floor in 1985, opened a new possibility of adventure tourism. Those who are lured by this tour are extremely wealthy and also adventurous.

Trip to Titanic wreck: Titan's scary pre-tour agreement, safety aspects ignored

Where does the ultra-wealthy tour when tired of snow-clad mountains or picturesque locales?

They are not thrilled by snow-clad mountains, deserts or beaches which entice ordinary tourists but seek much bigger challenges.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by www.calebyeslord.com 📜 🇬🇭 (@calebyeslord)

The risks involved in reaching the depth at which Titanic is located are immense. The journey to the spot, which is 3.8 km below the sea-level, takes two hours and the return journey also consumes an equal time. Several more hours are needed to observe the sunken ship.

During the trip, sunlight disappears completely at a depth of 1,000 m (3,280 feet). Moreover, at the depth where the wreck is located, the pressure would be 390 times that we normally experience on land.

However, such challenges are what make the journey interesting for some people!

No wonder, they are willing to pay the US Dollars (USD) 250,000 (around Rs two crore) which OceanGate charges for the Titanic trip. Incidentally, there is a long waiting list for the adventure.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by R.M.S Titanic (@titanic_fans_official)

Tickets sell like hot cakes According to Philip Brown, founder of luxury tourism company Brown & Hudson, it is not at all difficult to sell tickets for journeys such as the Titanic trip.

Roman Chiporukha, co-founder of luxury travel firm Roman & Erica, supports this view. He says that ordinary experiences don’t satisfy these extraordinary travellers. In fact, the annual membership fee of his firm starts at USD 100,000 (Rs 81 lakh).

Atlantic's adverse weather conditions Hamish Harding, the British billionaire who is a passenger on the Titan submersible now gone missing, has explained the unique features of the trip in an Instagram post. He says that the current weather in the Atlantic is the worst in four decades.

Another human mission to the Titanic is unlikely to take place this year, adds Harding, who is an ocean explorer, pilot and astronaut. He had earlier travelled to the South Pole and Mariana Trench. Harding was also a member of the fifth space mission of Blue Origin.

A depth of 12,500 feet Ocean submersibles are normally utilized for explorations and scientific purposes. Humans do not travel in the submersibles during such missions. Submersibles are also used to locate submerged items and to carry out inspections of undersea cables.

Tours on submersibles with travellers started from the 1980s, but such expeditions are still rare. These trips are expensive too. For instance, the fare for a 10-day yacht trip by Kensington Tours is USD 7 lakh. The main attraction of this trip is travelling to a depth of 600 feet below the ocean surface at Bahamas in a submersible.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Old Photos In Real Life (@oldphotosinreal)

Most of such trips in submersibles take tourists to depths of only around 150 feet and last two to three hours. Passengers in the submersibles can observe undersea creatures and remains of aircraft and warships wrecked during World War II.

At the same, the Titan submersible currently in the news has taken the five adventurers to a whopping depth of 12,500 feet!

Visited Titanic over a dozen times OceanGate, which was launched in 2009, has been conducting tours in a submersible to the wreckage of Titanic over the last two years. The firm has also been able to visit Titanic over a dozen times since 2010.

OceanGate’s ticket price of USD 250,000 does not include a 650-km sea voyage from Newfoundland in Canada to the ocean surface above the Atlantic. The total duration of the trip is eight days, says the firm’s website.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Dr. Gino Caspari (@ginocaspari)

Apart from OceanGate, Brown & Hudson also conducts a Titanic tour and charges USD 2,93,535, which includes the sea voyage from Canada coast to the spot above the wreck.

The websites of these firms say that travellers need to start preparations for the Titanic trip several months in advance. The travellers are also given guidance on issues like claustrophobia.

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Missing Titanic Submersible ‘Catastrophic Implosion’ Likely Killed 5 Aboard Submersible

Pieces of the missing Titan vessel were found on the ocean floor, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, the Coast Guard said. OceanGate Expeditions, the vessel’s operator, said, “Our hearts are with these five souls.”

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Coast Guard Says Debris of Submersible Has Been Found

The u.s. coast guard said parts of the titan submersible found on the ocean floor indicate a “catastrophic implosion” of the vessel..

This morning, an ROV or remote-operated vehicle from the vessel Horizon Arctic discovered the tailcone of the Titan submersible approximately 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic on the seafloor. The ROV subsequently found additional debris. In consultation with experts from within the unified command, the debris is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber. Upon this determination, we immediately notified the families. This is a incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the seafloor, and the debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel. This was a incredibly complex case, and we’re still working to develop the details for the timeline involved with this casualty and the response.

Daniel Victor ,  Jesus Jiménez and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

After days of searching, no hope of finding survivors remains. Here’s the latest.

The five people aboard the submersible that went missing on Sunday were presumed dead on Thursday, after an international search that gripped much of the world found debris from the vessel near the wreckage of the Titanic. A U.S. Coast Guard official said the debris was “consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel.”

On Sunday, a secret U.S. network of acoustic sensors picked up indications of a possible implosion in the vicinity of the submersible around the time communications with it were lost, a senior Navy official disclosed on Thursday. The search continued because there was no immediate confirmation that the Titan had met a disastrous end, according to a second senior Navy official. Both officials spoke anonymously to discuss operational details.

However, the revelation is likely to raise further questions about a vast, multinational dayslong search and rescue effort that has ended in failure.

Those presumed lost onboard were Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate, the company that operated the submersible, who was piloting. The four passengers were a British businessman and explorer, Hamish Harding ; a British-Pakistani businessman, Shahzada Dawood, and his teenage son, Suleman ; and a French maritime expert, Paul-Henri Nargeolet , who had been on over 35 dives to the Titanic wreck site. ( Read more about the lives that were lost .)

Here’s what else to know:

A remote-controlled vehicle had located the debris from the Titan, including the submersible’s tail cone, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic on the ocean floor, according to Admiral Mauger.

Leaders in the submersible craft industry warned for years of possible “catastrophic” problems with the vehicle’s design. They also worried that OceanGate Expeditions had not followed standard certification procedures .

OceanGate has provided tours of the Titanic wreck since 2021 — for a price of up to $250,000 per person — as part of a booming high-risk travel industry . The company has described the trip on its website as a “thrilling and unique travel experience.”

The Titan squeezed five passengers into a tight space with no seats, only a flat floor and a single view port 21 inches in diameter. Here’s a closer look at the craft .

Eric Schmitt

Secret Navy sensors detected a possible implosion around the time the Titan’s communications failed.

The U.S. Navy, using data from a secret network of underwater sensors designed to track hostile submarines, detected “an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion” in the vicinity of the Titan submersible at the time communications with the vessel were lost on Sunday, two senior Navy officials said on Thursday.

But with no other indications of a catastrophe, one of the officials said, the search was continued.

The data from the sensors was combined with information from airborne Navy P-8 surveillance planes and sonar buoys on the surface to triangulate the approximate location of the Titan, one of the officials said. The analysis of undersea acoustic data and information about the location of the noise were then passed on to the Coast Guard official in charge of the search, Rear Adm. John Mauger.

Because there was no visual or other conclusive evidence of a catastrophic failure, one of the officials said, it would have been “irresponsible” to immediately assume the five passengers were dead, and the search was ordered to continue even though the outlook appeared grim. Both of the Navy officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational details.

It was not immediately clear how widely the Navy’s acoustical analysis was disseminated among the search team, nor why the Navy had not made it public earlier. The Navy’s acoustic analysis from the secret sensor network was first reported by The Wall Street Journal .

Search Vessels Around the Titanic Wreckage

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Deep Energy

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The Titanic wreckage

sits on the ocean

floor, approximately

12,500 feet down.

North Atlantic Ocean

that discovered a debris field

containing remains of the Titan.

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William J. Broad

The director and deep-sea explorer James Cameron points to flaws in the Titan submersible’s design.

“We’ve never had an accident like this,” James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of “Titanic,” said on Thursday.

Mr. Cameron, an expert in submersibles, has dived dozens of times to the ship’s deteriorating hulk and once plunged in a tiny craft of his own design to the bottom of the planet’s deepest recess.

In an interview, Mr. Cameron called the presumed loss of five lives aboard the Titan submersible from the company OceanGate like nothing anyone involved in private ocean exploration had ever seen.

“There’ve never been fatalities at this kind of depth and certainly no implosions,” he said.

An implosion in the deep sea happens when the crushing pressures of the abyss cause a hollow object to collapse violently inward. If the object is big enough to hold five people, Mr. Cameron said in an interview, “it’s going to be an extremely violent event — like 10 cases of dynamite going off.”

In 2012, Mr. Cameron designed and piloted an experimental submersible into a region in the Pacific Ocean called the Challenger Deep. Mr. Cameron had not sought certification of the vessel’s safety by organizations in the maritime industry that provide such services to numerous companies.

“We did that knowingly” because the craft was experimental and its mission scientific, Mr. Cameron said. “I would never design a vehicle to take passengers and not have it certified.”

Mr. Cameron strongly criticized Stockton Rush, the OceanGate chief executive who piloted the submersible when it disappeared Sunday, for never getting his tourist submersible certified as safe . He noted that Mr. Rush called certification an impediment to innovation.

“I agree in principle,” Mr. Cameron said. “But you can’t take that stance when you’re putting paying customers into your submersible — when you have innocent guests who trust you and your statements” about vehicle safety.

As a design weakness in the Titan submersible and a possible cautionary sign to its passengers, Mr. Cameron cited its construction with carbon-fiber composites. The materials are used widely in the aerospace industry because they weigh much less than steel or aluminum, yet pound for pound are stronger and stiffer.

The problem, Mr. Cameron said, is that a carbon-fiber composite has “no strength in compression”— which happens as an undersea vehicle plunges ever deeper into the abyss and faces soaring increases in water pressure. “It’s not what it’s designed for.”

The company, he added, used sensors in the hull of the Titan to assess the status of the carbon-fiber composite hull. In its promotional material , OceanGate pointed to the sensors as an innovative feature for “hull health monitoring.” Early this year, an academic expert described the system as providing the pilot “with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface.”

In contrast to the company, Mr. Cameron called it “a warning system” to let the submersible’s pilot know if “the hull is getting ready to implode.”

Mr. Cameron said the sensor network on the sub’s hull was an inadequate solution to a design he saw as intrinsically flawed.

“It’s not like a light coming on when the oil in your car is low,” he said of the network of hull sensors. “This is different.”

A senior U.S. Navy official said that the Navy had, through acoustic analysis, “detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost.” The official said that the identification was “not definitive,” the information was immediately shared with the search effort, and that the decision was made to continue searching to “make every effort to save the lives on board.”

Christina Goldbaum and Emma Bubola

Shahzada Dawood, Executive, 48, and Son, 19, Die Aboard Submersible

Shahzada Dawood, a British Pakistani businessman who was among the five people aboard a submersible journeying deep into the Atlantic to view the Titanic, was killed when the vessel imploded during its descent to the ocean floor, the authorities said Thursday. He was 48.

His 19-year-old son, Suleman, who was with him on the Titan submersible, was also killed.

Mr. Dawood was the vice chairman of Engro Corporation, a business conglomerate headquartered in the Pakistani port city of Karachi that is involved in agriculture, energy and telecommunications. His family is known as one of the wealthiest business families in the country.

His work focused on renewable energy and technology, according to a statement from his family.

Mr. Dawood was born on Feb. 12, 1975, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. He studied law as an undergraduate at Buckingham University in Britain and later received a master’s degree in global textile marketing from Philadelphia University, now part of Thomas Jefferson University. In 2012, he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

His son was a business student at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow and had just completed his first year, a spokesman for the school said. Like his father, he was a fan of science fiction and enjoyed solving Rubik’s Cubes and playing volleyball, according to a statement from Engro.

“The relationship between Shahzada and Suleman was a joy to behold; they were each other’s greatest supporters and cherished a shared passion for adventure and exploration of all the world had to offer them,” the family’s statement said.

The pair’s shared passion for science and discovery, friends and family said, led them to embark on the expedition to the wreck of the Titanic.

Travel and science were “part of his DNA,” said Ahsen Uddin Syed, a friend of the elder Mr. Dawood who used to work with him at Engro.

A lover of “Star Trek” and “Star Wars,” Mr. Dawood was also fond of nature and often traveled to faraway places and shared pictures of his adventures, Mr. Sayed said.

His Instagram profile is like a memory book of his love of travel and nature; it is blanketed with photos of birds, flowers and landscapes, including a sunset in the Kalahari Desert, the ice sheet in Greenland, penguins in the Shetlands and a tiny bird in London with the caption “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.”

“Don’t adventures ever have an end?” Mr. Dawood wrote in a Facebook post last year from a trip to Iceland, quoting Bilbo Baggins from “The Fellowship of the Ring.” “I suppose not. Someone else always has to carry on the story.”

Khalid Mansoor, another former colleague of Mr. Dawood’s, said that Mr. Dawood was a passionate champion of the environment. He was also a trustee at the SETI Institute, an organization devoted to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

In his role at Engro, the company statement said, Mr. Dawood advocated “a culture of learning, sustainability and diversity.” He was also involved in his family’s charitable ventures, including the Engro Foundation, which supports small-scale farmers, and the Dawood Foundation, an education-focused nonprofit.

“Shahzada’s and Suleman’s absence will be felt deeply by all those who had the privilege of knowing this pair,” his family’s statement read.

Mr. Dawood is survived by a daughter, Alina, and his wife, Christine.

Salman Masood contributed reporting.

Sam Roberts

Stockton Rush, Pilot of the Titan Submersible, Dies at 61

Stockton Rush, the chief executive and founder of OceanGate and the pilot of the Titan submersible, was declared dead on Thursday after his vessel was found in pieces at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, near the rusting wreck of the R.M.S. Titanic. He was 61.

Mr. Rush oversaw finances and engineering for OceanGate, a privately owned tourism and research company based in Everett, Wash., which he founded in 2009. In 2012, he was a founder of the OceanGate Foundation, a nonprofit organization that encouraged technological development to further marine science, history and archaeology.

Mr. Rush first looked skyward for adventure. In 1981, when he was 19, he was believed to be the world’s youngest jet-transport-rated pilot.

If the sky was the limit, though, it was too confining for Mr. Rush.

“I wanted to be the first person on Mars,” he told Fast Company magazine in 2017.

Ineligible for Air Force pilot training because of poor eyesight, he said, he abandoned his dream of becoming an astronaut. Interplanetary travel didn’t seem economically viable in the foreseeable future. But he saw potential in underwater travel, and he said he was willing to take on risk and bend the rules to achieve his goals.

“I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed,” he said in an interview with “CBS News Sunday Morning” last year. “Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything. At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk-reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”

Richard Stockton Rush III was the scion of one of San Francisco’s most famous families. He was descended on his father’s side from two signers of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton.

He was born on March 31, 1962, in San Francisco. His father is chairman of the Peregrine Oil and Gas Company in Burlingame, Calif., and the Natoma Company, which manages apartment and other investment properties in and around Sacramento. His grandfather was the chairman of the shipping company American President Lines. Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco was named for his grandmother.

The Davies family’s inherited wealth was derived from Ralph K. Davies, who began at Standard Oil of California as a 15-year-old office boy and rose to become the youngest director in the company’s history.

Stockton, as Mr. Rush was known, graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton University in 1984. He received a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business in 1989.

During summer breaks, he served as a DC-8 first officer, flying out of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for Overseas National Airways. The year he graduated, he joined the McDonnell Douglas Corporation as a flight test engineer on the F-15 program and was named the company’s representative at Edwards Air Force Base on the APG-63 radar test protocol.

Before founding OceanGate, he served on the board of BlueView Technologies, a sonar developer in Seattle, and as chairman of Remote Control Technologies, which makes remotely operated devices. He was also a trustee of the Museum of Flight in Seattle from 2003 to 2007.

In 1986, he married Wendy Hollings Wei l, a licensed pilot, substitute teacher and account manager for magazine publishing consultants. She became the director of communications for OceanGate.

Her grandfather, Richard Weil Jr., was president of Macy’s New York, and she was the great-great-granddaughter of the retailing magnate Isidor Straus and his wife, Ida, two of the wealthiest people to die when the Titanic sank.

The aging Mr. Straus, a co-owner of Macy’s, refused to board the lifeboat while younger men were being prevented from boarding. Ida Straus, his wife of four decades, declared that she would not leave her husband, and the two were seen standing arm in arm on the Titanic’s deck as the ship went down.

Information on Mr. Rush’s survivors was not immediately available.

In his CBS News interview, Mr. Rush acknowledged that it was prudent while exploring the ocean at depths of thousands of feet to avoid fish nets, overhangs and other hazards. But, he said, safety concerns could also be a drag on a swashbuckling career in which risk paid returns not only in profits but also in unforgettable experiences.

“It really is a life-changing experience, and there aren’t a lot of things like that,” he told Fast Company. “Rather than spend $65,000 to climb Mount Everest, maybe die, and spend a month living in a miserable base camp, you can change your life in a week.”

His trips in the Titan brought him the adventure he craved.

“I wanted to be sort of the Captain Kirk,” he said. “I didn’t want to be the passenger in the back. And I realized that the ocean is the universe. That’s where life is.”

Jacey Fortin

The Coast Guard says it found five major pieces of debris on the ocean floor.

The Titan submersible that vanished in the North Atlantic on Sunday appeared to have suffered a “catastrophic implosion,” the U.S. Coast Guard said on Thursday, and offered its condolences to the families of the five people who were on board.

Debris from the vessel, which vanished while descending to view the wreck of the R.M.S. Titanic, was found on the ocean floor on Thursday morning, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the shipwreck, Rear Admiral John Mauger of the Coast Guard said at a news conference on Thursday afternoon.

The debris was “consistent with catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber” of the submersible, he added.

Asked about the possibility of recovering the bodies of the victims, Admiral Mauger said that he did not have an answer. “This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor,” he said.

Chances for the survival of the five passengers had begun to look grim by midweek, but rescuers had said that they were holding out hope that the Titan could be out there somewhere.

But on Thursday morning, a remotely operated vehicle discovered a debris field on the ocean bottom. Paul Hankins, a salvage expert for the U.S. Navy, said there were “five major pieces” that appeared to be parts of the Titan, a 22-foot-long vessel owned by OceanGate, including a nose cone, the front end of the pressure hull and the back end of the pressure hull.

It was too early to tell exactly when the vessel imploded, Admiral Mauger said. The implosion “would have generated significant broadband sound down there that the sonar buoys would have picked up,” he added, but listening devices in the area did not hear any signs of such a catastrophic failure.

Some underwater banging noises were picked up by searchers earlier this week, but they did not appear to have had any relation to the submersible, Admiral Mauger said. Previously, the Coast Guard had said that they repositioned their search efforts around where those noises were detected.

“I know there’s a lot of questions about how, why, when this happened,” Admiral Mauger said, adding that the authorities had those same questions. “That’s going to be, I’m sure, the focus of future review,” he said. “Right now, we’re focused on documenting the scene.”

Daniel Victor

The five people on board included the chief executive of the company that operated the submersible, a Guinness World Record-holding explorer, a man who dived to the Titanic more than 35 times, and a father-and-son duo. Read more about the lives that were lost here .

Alex Williams

Hamish Harding, an Explorer Who Knew No Bounds, Dies at 58

Hamish Harding, an aviation tycoon and ardent explorer, made it his quest to probe the heavens as well as the depths, landing him a place in Guinness World Records and ultimately leading him to a fateful plunge to the wreckage of the Titanic some two and a half miles below the surface of the North Atlantic.

The submersible craft in which he was traveling with four others lost contact with its mother ship on Sunday. After a five-day multinational search across an area the size of Massachusetts, the U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday that all five had been killed when the vessel, belonging to OceanGate Expeditions, suffered “a catastrophic implosion.”

Mr. Harding was 58.

Passengers had paid up to $250,000 each for the privilege of plunging nearly 13,000 feet below the surface for a glimpse of the remains of history’s most storied oceanic tragedy. The R.M.S. Titanic hit an iceberg and sank in 1912, four days into its maiden voyage, about 400 miles off Newfoundland. More than 1,500 people died.

At the outset of the tour, Mr. Harding saw the opportunity as an unlikely stroke of good fortune. “Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years,” he wrote in a social media post on Saturday, “this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023.”

He described himself as a “mission specialist” on the expedition.

Mr. Harding seemed to presage his own fate in a 2021 interview after a record-setting plunge to Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the ocean in the Mariana Trench.

At nearly 36,000 feet below the western Pacific Ocean, deeper than Mount Everest is tall, that four-hour, 15-minute voyage took him nearly three times further down than the Titanic site. That expedition, with the American explorer Victor Vescovo, earned two citations by Guinness World Records, for the longest distance traversed at full ocean depth by a crewed vessel and the longest time spent there on a single dive.

As Esquire Middle East magazine pointed out at the time, only 18 people had ever journeyed to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, as opposed to the 24 astronauts who had orbited or landed on the moon and the thousands who successfully had scaled the peak of Mount Everest.

Mr. Harding knew the risks. “If something goes wrong, you are not coming back,” he told The Week, an Indian newsmagazine. But in business, and in his life of adventure seeking, he seemed to embrace them.

A pilot licensed to fly both business jets and airliners, Mr. Harding started the first regular business jet service to the Antarctic in 2017, in partnership with the luxury Antarctic tourism company White Desert. The service landed its first flight, a Gulfstream G550, on a new ice runway known as Wolf’s Fang.

A lifelong space buff, he traveled to Antarctica in 2016 with Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo 11 astronaut and the second man to walk on the moon. At 86, Mr. Aldrin became the oldest person to reach the South Pole. Four years later, Mr. Harding took a similar journey with his son Giles, who at 12 became the youngest person to accomplish that feat.

In 2019, Mr. Harding set off on another record-setting venture with a former astronaut when he and the former International Space Station commander Col. Terry Virts completed the fastest circumnavigation of the world over both the North and South Poles in a Qatar Executive Gulfstream G650ER long-range business jet.

In June 2022, Mr. Harding finally got to experience the wonder of being an astronaut himself, soaring some 60 miles aboard the New Shepard spacecraft, from Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space tourism company, to the edge of outer space.

“Once the liquid hydrogen/oxygen booster rocket gets the capsule to the edge of space, 350,000 feet above the earth,” he said in an interview last year with Business Aviation Magazine , “the sky above you is totally, completely black, even right next to the sun.”

Despite a life of dramatic quests that seemed drawn from boys’ adventure books, Mr. Harding was by nature “an explorer, not a thrill seeker,” Colonel Virts said in an interview with the BBC .

Mr. Harding apparently agreed. In discussing the Challenger Deep mission, he emphasized science, not derring-do.

“As an explorer and adventurer, I want this expedition to contribute to our shared knowledge and understanding of planet earth,” he said in the Esquire interview. He spoke of collecting samples from the ocean floor “that could contain new life forms and may even provide further insights into how life on our planet began.”

“And in searching for signs of human pollution in this remote environment,” he continued, “we hope to aid scientific efforts to protect our oceans and ensure they flourish for millennia to come.”

George Hamish Livingston Harding was born on June 24, 1964, in Hammersmith, London.

He was always drawn to the skies, and beyond. “I was 5 years old when the Apollo landing took place,” he said in the Business Aviation interview. “I vividly remember watching the event on an old black-and-white TV set with my parents in Hong Kong, where I grew up.”

“This event set the tone of my life in a way,” he continued. “We sort of felt that anything was possible after that, and we fully expected there to be package holidays to the moon by now.”

At 13, he became a cadet in the Royal Air Force flying Chipmunk trainer airplanes. He earned his pilot’s license in 1985 while an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, where he studied chemical engineering and natural sciences.

In the 1990s, he built a career in information technology, rising to managing director of Logica India, a company based in Bangalore. He used the money he made in that industry to found Action Group, a private investment company, in 1999. He started Action Aviation in 2002.

His survivors include his wife, Linda; his sons, Rory and Giles; a stepdaughter, Lauren Marisa Szasz; and a stepson, Brian Szasz.

In the Business Aviation interview, Mr. Harding said that the Titanic dive, initially scheduled for last June, had been delayed because “the submersible was unfortunately damaged on its previous dive.” Instead, that summer he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania with 20 family members and friends.

When asked about the risks of his boundary-pushing ventures, Mr. Harding, who was the chairman of the Middle East chapter of the Explorers Club, said, “My view is that these are all calculated risks and are well understood before we start.”

“I should add that I do not go out seeking these opportunities,” he continued. “People tend to bring them to me, and I keep saying ‘Yes!’”

Anushka Patil

The implosion “would have generated significant broadband sound down there that the sonar buoys would have picked up,” Mauger said. Listening devices in the area, which were dropped Monday, did not hear any signs of such a catastrophic failure, he reported earlier.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

The underwater banging noises that were picked up by the authorities earlier this week do not appear to have had any relation to the site of the submersible’s wreckage. “There doesn’t appear to be any connection between the noises and the location on the sea floor” where the debris was found, Mauger said. Previously, the Coast Guard had said that they repositioned their search efforts around where those noises were detected.

Jesus Jimenez

Asked about the prospect of recovering the bodies of the victims, Mauger said he did not have an answer. “This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor,” he said.

“I know there’s a lot of questions about how, why, when this happened,” says Admiral Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard, adding that the authorities have those same questions. “That’s going to be, I’m sure, the focus of future review. Right now, we’re focused on documenting the scene.”

Mauger said it was too early to tell when the vessel imploded. Remote operations will continue on the sea floor, he said.

Where the Titan submersible was found — 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic — and the size of the debris field indicates that the vessel imploded, according to Carl Hartsfield, an expert with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. There does not appear to be any indication that it collided with the wreckage.

The authorities found “five major pieces of debris” that indicated they were from the Titan, including a nose cone, the front end of the pressure hull and the back end of the pressure hull, said Paul Hankins, a salvage expert for the U.S. Navy. He said that finding these pieces of debris indicated there was a “catastrophic event.”

Mauger said that officials are still working to come up with a timeline of events.

The debris found today was “consistent with catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber” in the submersible, Mauger said.

Debris from the Titan submersible, including its tail cone, was found on the ocean floor on Thursday morning, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, said Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard.

In a few moments, Rear Adm. John Mauger and Capt. Jamie Frederick of the U.S. Coast Guard will provide updates on findings from the sea floor near the Titanic.

The announcement by the company that all five passengers on the submersible are believed to be dead appears to cap an international search that stretched across several days and gripped much of the world. Even as the chances of survival looked grim, rescuers had said they were holding out hope that the Titan could be out there somewhere, hopes that appear to have been dashed by the discovery of debris.

“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” the company said. “Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time.”

OceanGate said in a statement that “we now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost.”

Jacey Fortin and Eric Schmitt

Here is why the U.S. Coast Guard led the search effort.

It would be a tall order for any agency: finding a submersible vessel that could be more than two miles below the surface of the ocean and hundreds of miles away from land.

But the United States Coast Guard was the best trained and equipped agency for the task, government officials and outside analysts said.

Most Americans are familiar with Coast Guard operations closer to home — from interdicting drug smugglers to assisting recreational boaters — but the maritime force has long been dedicated to search and rescue efforts at sea, including those in international waters.

For the past week, the Coast Guard oversaw an armada of vessels, aircraft and specialists from North America and Europe to find the Titan. International agreements divide the ocean into regions and offer guidance about which nations and agencies take primary responsibility for search and rescue in each. The site of the Titanic wreck is in an area generally assigned to the Coast Guard , even though it is closer to the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, than that of the continental United States.

Beyond that, the U.S. Coast Guard is considered “the premier maritime search and rescue agency in the world,” said Aaron C. Davenport, a senior researcher at the Rand Corporation and 34-year veteran of the service.

Chris Boyer, the executive director of the National Association for Search and Rescue, a nonprofit advocacy group, called the Coast Guard “the best prepared and the best choice, given the circumstances.” He added that while the United States Navy also had underwater rescue capabilities and was participating in the search, it was more focused on defense than on this type of mission.

The disappearance of the Titan, which vanished while descending to view the wreck of the Titanic, presented a unique challenge. The small, privately owned vessel was sealed shut from the outside, and rescuing people from it far below the surface would have been very difficult, Mr. Boyer said.

The Coast Guard handles thousands of rescues every year, but many are comparatively straightforward, like finding a lost fishing boat, according to Robert B. Murrett, a retired Navy vice admiral who is now deputy director of the Syracuse University Institute for Security Policy and Law.

“This one’s a little bit different because of the water depth involved, and the nature of the vehicle,” Professor Murrett said.

Even so, he said, the Coast Guard is adept at coordinating search efforts involving different agencies from different countries.

The search for the Titan was “an incredibly complex operation,” Rear Adm. John Mauger, a Boston-based Coast Guard commander, told reporters on Thursday.

“We were able to mobilize an immense amount of gear to the site in just a really remarkable amount of time, given the fact that we started without any sort of vessel response plan for this or any sort of pre-staged resources,” he said.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs ,  Jenny Gross and Anna Betts

OceanGate was warned of potential for ‘catastrophic’ problems with its Titanic mission.

Years before OceanGate’s submersible craft went missing in the Atlantic Ocean with five people onboard, the company faced several warnings as it prepared for its hallmark mission of taking wealthy passengers to tour the Titanic’s wreckage.

In January 2018, the company’s engineering team was about to hand over the craft — named Titan — to a new crew who would be responsible for ensuring the safety of its future passengers. But experts inside and outside the company were beginning to raise concerns.

OceanGate’s director of marine operations, David Lochridge, started working on a report around that time, according to court documents, ultimately producing a scathing document in which he said the craft needed more testing and stressed “the potential dangers to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths.”

Two months later, OceanGate faced similarly dire calls from more than three dozen people — industry leaders, deep-sea explorers and oceanographers — who warned in a letter to its chief executive, Stockton Rush, that the company’s “experimental” approach and its decision to forgo a traditional assessment could lead to potentially “catastrophic” problems with the Titanic mission.

A spokesman for OceanGate declined to comment on the five-year-old critiques from Mr. Lochridge and the industry leaders. Nor did Mr. Lochridge respond to a request for comment.

The United States Coast Guard said on Twitter that a debris field was found in the search area by a remote-operated vehicle. Experts are evaluating the information, the Coast Guard said.

The Coast Guard said it would hold a news conference at 3 p..m. Eastern time in Boston to address findings from a remote-operated vehicle deployed by the Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic on the sea floor near the Titanic.

Jenny Gross

Another remotely controlled deep-sea vehicle is en route to the search area.

A remotely operated vehicle that can reach 6,000 meters (about 19,700 feet) below the surface of the ocean was en route to join the search for the missing Titan submersible in the North Atlantic, the Explorers Club, a New York-based organization that counts two of the missing passengers among its members, said on Thursday.

The vehicle, owned by Magellan, a deepwater seabed-mapping company, was being transported from Britain to St. John’s, Newfoundland, where it was expected to land early afternoon local time on Thursday. Two other remotely controlled vehicles are already at the search site around the wreckage of the Titanic. The Titan was on a voyage to visit the shipwreck when it disappeared on Sunday.

Magellan’s vehicle has been to the wreckage of the Titanic — which sits at a depth of about 12,500 feet — more than any other vehicle and has mapped the site , including the surrounding debris, Richard Garriott de Cayeux, president of the Explorers Club, said in a statement. It has manipulator arms that can attach lifting cables directly to a submersible, and “may prove invaluable” to the ongoing search and rescue efforts, Mr. Garriott de Cayeux said. Magellan did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Garriott de Cayeux said that other club members with experience diving to similar depths had a sense of what the passengers on the Titan may be facing.

“While the planned life support supply depletes, we believe crew conservation and the near freezing temperatures could prolong life support by some time and the crew knows this,” he said in the statement.

“While the situation is very difficult, we can all be grateful and hopeful as the very best people are on the job,” Mr. Garriott de Cayeux said.

Derrick Bryson Taylor

The University of Strathclyde in Glasgow confirmed on Thursday that Suleman Dawood, the 19-year-old man who is on board the missing submersible along with his father, is a business student at the school. He recently completed his first year, a spokesman for the university said.

“We are deeply concerned about Suleman, his father and the others involved in this incident,” the spokesman said. “Our thoughts are with their families and loved ones and we continue to hope for a positive outcome.”

In discussing the amount of oxygen left on the Titan, Rear Adm. John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said on Thursday that “people’s will to live really needs to be accounted for, as well.”

Rear Adm. John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard speaks to TODAY about the latest efforts to rescue the five people on board the missing submersible Titan as it runs low on oxygen. “People’s will to live really needs to be accounted for, as well,” he says. pic.twitter.com/6FJ3w1Z0Ty — TODAY (@TODAYshow) June 22, 2023

The search for the missing submersible was well underway as of Thursday morning. The Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic has deployed a remotely operated vehicle that has reached the sea floor, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Twitter.

The French vessel Atalante is also preparing to deploy its remotely operated vehicle.

Stephen Castle

A senior British naval submariner, Richard Kantharia, has been assigned to the search-and-rescue mission, Downing Street said. The lieutenant commander was already working with the United States’ Atlantic submarine fleet and was deployed to the search mission on Tuesday night. Britain is also providing a C17 aircraft to transport specialist equipment, the British government said.

Judson Jones

After a day of undesirable weather conditions yesterday, fair weather is expected in the search area on Thursday. Winds may still gust to over 20 miles per hour, but mostly clear skies and wave heights of only about four to six feet are expected.

Victoria Kim

Photos from an early test of the Titan show how the submersible is deployed.

OceanGate Expeditions , the company behind the Titan submersible missing in a remote part of the North Atlantic since Sunday, conducted tests of its craft in early 2018 outside a marina at its headquarters in Everett, Wash.

It was one of the first saltwater test dives of the vessel, made of carbon fiber and titanium, that was billed as the largest submersible of its type in the world. The company said at the time that the Titan was meant to dive far deeper than its earlier submersibles, and was made out of different material.

The company announced plans to take visitors to the Titanic wreckage in 2017, as its co-founder and chief executive Stockton Rush emphasized the rarefied nature of the experience. “Since her sinking 105 years ago, fewer than 200 people have ever visited the wreck, far fewer than have flown to space or climbed Mount Everest,” he said in a news release at the time. Mr. Rush is on board the missing submersible.

The Titan’s lighter weight and launch and recovery platform would make it “a more financially viable option for individuals interested in exploring the deep,” the company said in a 2018 news release.

But even before the April 2018 saltwater test, experts inside and outside the company had begun warning of potentially “catastrophic” problems that could result from what they said was the company’s “experimental” approach.

• Entertainment

Long-running Titanic exhibition will dock in Seattle this summer

It’s been more than a century since the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg and sank in the Atlantic Ocean, killing more than 1,500 people, but the April 1912 shipwreck still captures the public’s attention. Now, a long-running Titanic exhibit is coming to Seattle.  

Starting July 25, “ Titanic: The Exhibition ” will take place in the Maritime Building on the Seattle waterfront. The exhibit includes replicas of the ship’s interior and more than 200 artifacts from the Titanic, including handwritten letters from passengers. The narrative-driven exhibit is a 90-minute history lesson on the ship’s construction, voyage and sinking. There will even be a piece of an iceberg to touch.

The exhibition has been produced and operated by Spanish company Musealia since 2000. Tickets are on sale now, with slots available July 25-Sept. 8; timed entry tickets start at $34 for adults, $29 for seniors, students and veterans, and $19 for children (ages 4-12; kids under 4 get in free).

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Musealia CEO Luis Ferreiro said Seattle was an obvious location for the exhibit’s next run, as its “maritime connection made it special for us, in addition to being a market with a strong reputation of a public demanding quality exhibitions.” 

“Titanic” is a collaboration between Musealia and Swedish historian Claes-Göran Wetterholm, who’s worked with the company as a curator and historian since 2003. Wetterholm has published multiple books about the ship, been involved in more than 50 Titanic exhibits worldwide and even visited the wreckage himself.

For more than a century, the Titanic tragedy has captivated public attention. Last year, a submersible expedition to view the ship’s wreckage led by Everett-based company OceanGate ended in the deaths of all five passengers aboard. That was decades after the record-breaking 1997 blockbuster that glamorized the catastrophe, and there have been countless books on the subject, from nonfiction to romance. 

“Titanic. The Exhibition” aims to break through myths and misconceptions accumulated over 112 years. 

“Consciously or unconsciously, we have transformed and commercialized a story of repeated failures into a legend filled with myths and heroes,” Ferreiro said.

Under Wetterholm’s guidance, the exhibit tells the story of the passengers and crew who were aboard the ship — the majority of whom died when the Titanic sank — by drawing on artifacts acquired on loan from survivors or the families of those who died. These include photos, letters, keepsakes and more. 

“These are objects that we can trace back to particular passengers or crew members, adding the human dimension we so much believe ‘Titanic’ is based on,” Ferreiro said. “Seeing these objects makes one understand that Titanic is not a movie but a real story with real people.”

“Titanic” visitors will see the difference between replicas of the posh first-class and humble third-class quarters. They’ll also hear an audio tour (included with admission) explain the true narratives of the passengers — and how the events that led to the ship’s destruction unfolded. For an element of suspense, there’s a life-size replica of the wireless room from which the ship’s distress signal was sent. 

The exhibition is scheduled to open in Seattle about 13 months after the OceanGate tragedy. To Ferreiro, “Titanic” is coming to Seattle at an apropos time.

“[The Titanic] is a reminder of the beauty and tragedy of the human condition; of how, in our quest for greatness, we often encounter our greatest tragedies,” Ferreiro said. “The story of the Titanic is, ultimately, a story about ourselves.”

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The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times.

Missing Titanic submersible live updates: Texts show OceanGate CEO dismissed concerns

Five people, including the company CEO, were aboard the sub when it imploded.

All passengers are believed to be lost after a desperate dayslong search for a submersible carrying five people that vanished while on a tour of the Titanic wreckage off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

The 21-foot deep-sea vessel, operated by OceanGate Expeditions , lost contact about an hour and 45 minutes after submerging on Sunday morning with a 96-hour oxygen supply. That amount of breathable air was forecast to run out on Thursday morning, according to the United States Coast Guard, which was coordinating the multinational search and rescue efforts.

Latest headlines:

Rcmp to investigate the deaths aboard titan sub, us taxpayer cost for search and rescue may be $1.5 million, expert says, oceangate ceo claimed sub was safer than scuba diving, texts show.

• OceanGate co-founder defends development of submersible
• Sub's carbon-fiber composite hull was the 'critical failure,' James Cameron says
• Probe seeks answers on why Titanic sub imploded
• Navy likely detected sound of the implosion on Sunday: Official
• All lives believed to be lost: OceanGate

Officials with Canada's Transportation Safety Board said at a press conference Saturday that they have begun speaking with people on board the Polar Prince, which launched the ill-fated Titan submersible.

The Polar Prince returned to its port, St. John's, Newfoundland, on Saturday morning.

"I would say that we've received full cooperation," TSB Director of Marine Investigations Clifford Harvey said. "It's been a really good interaction thus far and is really getting full cooperation with all the individuals involved."

In addition, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said they are "examining the circumstances" of the deaths on board Titan, and will launch a full investigation if "the circumstances indicate criminal, federal or provincial laws may possibly have been broken."

-ABC News' Matt J. Foster

A defense budget expert estimates once the U.S. military participation concludes, the cost for the search and rescue mission of the five passengers on board the Titan submersible will cost the U.S. around $1.5 million.

Mark Cancian, a senior advisor with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, came up with the estimate based on aircraft sorties, cross referencing the U.S. Department of Defense cost numbers, Coast Guard Cutter costs and flying hour costs. He said some costs have already been set aside in various budgets, with resources simply diverted to the site.

He emphasized that these are strictly well-informed guesses.

A spokesperson for the Coast Guard's District 1 in Boston would not give an estimate of costs so far, saying, "We cannot attribute a monetary value to Search and Rescue cases, as the Coast Guard does not associate cost with saving a life."

-ABC News' Jaclyn C. Lee

US Coast Guard to lead sub investigation

The U.S. Coast Guard will be the organization leading the investigation into the OceanGate sub incident.

The NTSB announced the news on Friday via Twitter, noting it will "contribute to their efforts."

A Las Vegas father and son told ABC News OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush pressured them for months into taking two seats on the now failed mission to the Titanic, making bold claims about the vessel's safety.

Financier Jay Bloom shared text messages between himself and Rush where Rush dismissed concerns from Bloom and his son Sean about taking the trip on the Titan submersible.

"While there's obviously a risk it's way safer than flying in a helicopter or even scuba diving," Rush texted.

"He sort of had this predisposition that it was safe," Bloom told ABC News. "And anybody who disagreed with him, he felt it was just a differing opinion."

Bloom added that Rush flew out to Las Vegas in a homebuilt plane to convince him to attend the voyage aboard the submersible.

"He flew it all the way to Vegas. And I was like, 'This guy is definitely down to take risk,'" Bloom said.

-ABC News' Sam Sweeney

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Submarine on expedition to Titanic wreckage missing with 5 aboard; "search and rescue operation" underway

By Emmet Lyons , Tucker Reals , Aliza Chasan

Updated on: June 20, 2023 / 2:53 AM EDT / CBS News

A search and rescue mission was underway Monday for a submarine that went missing in the North Atlantic on an expedition to explore the wreckage of the Titanic. Lt. Jordan Hart of the U.S. Coast Guard in Boston first confirmed to CBS News that personnel were "currently undergoing a search and rescue operation" when asked about the rescue efforts off the coast of Newfoundland. 

At a news conference Monday afternoon, Rear Admiral John Mauger confirmed that five people were aboard. A Coast Guard official identified them as an operator and four mission specialists — a term the company uses for its passengers.

The vessel submerged on a dive Sunday morning, and the crew of the Polar Prince — the ship that ferried the submersible and expedition members to the dive site — "lost contact with them approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes into the vessel's dive," the Coast Guard said in a tweet . 

OceanGate Expeditions , a company that deploys manned submersibles for deep sea expeditions, confirmed in a statement that its sub was the subject of the rescue operation, adding that it was "exploring and mobilizing all options to bring the crew back safely."

The company did not say whether any of the people on board are paying tourists. It takes them as passengers on its expeditions. 

"Our entire focus is on the crewmembers in the submersible and their families," said OceanGate, adding that it was "deeply thankful for the extensive assistance we have received from several government agencies and deep sea companies in our efforts to reestablish contact with the submersible." 

The U.S. Coast Guard  said  it had a C-130 crew searching for the sub approximately 900 miles off Cape Cod, and that the Rescue Coordination Center Halifax is assisting with a P8 Poseidon aircraft, which has underwater detection capabilities. Aircraft are searching from above while vessels also search on the water, Mauger said at the briefing. Sonar buoys have been deployed in the water in an attempt to listen for the missing sub. They're capable of listening to a depth of 13,000 feet.

"It is a remote area and it is a challenge to conduct a search in that remote area, but we are deploying all available assets to make sure that we can locate the craft and rescue the people on board," Mauger said. 

The Coast Guard is also working with military and civilian partners to develop a rescue plan if the vessel is located underwater, Mauger said. 

"Right now we're focused on locating the vessel. But at the same time, if we find this vessel in the water then we will have to effect some sort of rescue," Mauger said. "We're coordinating, reaching out to different partners within the U.S. Navy, within the Canadian armed forces, and within private industry to understand what underwater rescue capability might be available."

The sub is believed to have a 96-hour sustainment capability if there's an emergency on board.

"We're making the best use of every moment of that time to locate the vessel," Mauger said.

Asked about the emergency oxygen supply, Mauger said, "We anticipate that there are somewhere between 70 to the full 96 hours available at this point."

The Coast Guard first alerted mariners Sunday night that a "21 foot submarine" with a white hull was overdue, giving its last known position. "VESSELS IN VICINITY REQUESTED TO KEEP A SHARP LOOKOUT, ASSIST IF POSSIBLE," the message said.

Contacted by CBS News, the Canadian Coast Guard said the rescue operation was being managed by the Boston Regional Coordination Center, and a map showing jurisdictions for the various coastal search and rescue agencies off the North American coast shows the location of the Titanic wreck within the Boston center's area of responsibility.  

OceanGate recently said on  its website  and social media feeds that an expedition to the wreckage of the RMS Titanic, which lies about 400 miles southeast of the Newfoundland coast, was "underway." 

The company last tweeted about the Titanic expedition  on June 15 .

On Saturday, British businessman Hamish Harding shared on Facebook that he was among the group on the OceanGate expedition that had departed from St. Johns, Newfoundland, the day before. "The team on the sub has a couple of legendary explorers, some of which have done over 30 dives to the RMS Titanic since the 1980s," Harding wrote. He said it was "likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023" due to weather conditions, and that the team planned to start dive operations at around 4 a.m. Sunday.

Mark Butler, managing director of Harding's company, Action Aviation, told The Associated Press, "There is still plenty of time to facilitate a rescue mission. There is equipment on board for survival in this event. We're all hoping and praying he comes back safe and sound."

Richard Garriott de Cayeux, president of The Explorers Club, said in a letter to the club's members that, "When I saw Hamish last week at the Global Exploration Summit, his excitement about this expedition was palpable. I know he was looking forward to conducting research at the site." Harding helped found the club's board of trustees. The club, which was started in 1904, describes itself as " a multidisciplinary, professional society dedicated to the advancement of field research, scientific exploration and resource conservation." 

Harding, a veteran adventure tourist, had  traveled to space  aboard a Blue Origin rocket last year.

The Dawood family, of the Dawood Group, a Pakistan-based multi-faceted global conglomerate, issued a statement Tuesday saying, "Our son Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman" are on the expedition.

"We are very grateful for the concern being shown by our colleagues and friends and would like to request everyone to pray for their safety while granting the family privacy at this time," the statement said.

The California-headquartered Seti Institute says "Shahzada Dawood is Vice Chairman of Dawood Hercules Corporation, part of the Dawood Group, which has been a family business for over a century."

Diver and explorer Rory Golden also posted about being on the Titanic expedition. In a Facebook post Monday afternoon, he wrote: "I'm OK. We are all focussed on board here for our friends."

He continued: "We have a situation that is now the part of a major Search and Rescue effort, being undertaken by major agencies. That is where our focus is right now. 

"The reaction and offers of help globally is truly astonishing, and only goes to show the real goodness in people at a time like this." 

OceanGate's submersible, The Titan, is the only five-person sub in the world capable of reaching the Titanic wreck, which sits about 2.4 miles below the sea surface. CBS News "Sunday Morning" correspondent David Pogue joined the crew of the vessel , along with a small group of intrepid tourists, for a journey to see the world's most famous shipwreck last year.  

As he got situated in the vessel, which he said had about as much room inside as a minivan, Pogue said he "couldn't help noticing how many pieces of this sub seemed improvised, with off-the-shelf components," including a video game controller that was used to pilot the sub.

On Monday, following news of the missing sub, Pogue tweeted about how the vessel "got lost for a few hours LAST summer, too, when I was aboard," including a link to watch that portion of  his video piece on YouTube .

You may remember that the @OceanGateExped sub to the #Titanic got lost for a few hours LAST summer, too, when I was aboard…Here’s the relevant part of that story. https://t.co/7FhcMs0oeH pic.twitter.com/ClaNg5nzj8 — David Pogue (@Pogue) June 19, 2023

Miles Doran contributed to this report. 

• North Atlantic
• United States Coast Guard

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