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What we know about the tourist sub that disappeared on an expedition to the Titanic

By Emily Mae Czachor

Updated on: June 23, 2023 / 11:35 PM EDT / CBS News

Five people on board the tourist  submarine that disappeared  on an expedition to explore the  Titanic shipwreck  over the weekend did not survive a "catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber," officials said Thursday.

The announcement came after the U.S. Coast Guard said the  massive search  underway in the North Atlantic had located a debris field on the sea floor, which was confirmed to be pieces of the missing sub .

"The debris field is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel," Rear Adm. John Mauger of the Coast Guard said at a briefing, offering "deepest condolences to the families." A spokesperson for OceanGate Expeditions, the company behind the voyage, told reporters that the passengers, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, "have sadly been lost."

Here's what we know so far about the submersible craft and what led up to this point.

What happened?

A five-person crew on a submersible named Titan, owned by OceanGate Expeditions, submerged on a dive to the Titanic wreckage site Sunday morning, and the crew of the Polar Prince research ship lost contact with the sub about an hour and 45 minutes later, the Coast Guard   said . 

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

The sub was lost in an area about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, in the North Atlantic, in water with a depth of about 13,000 feet, which is about level with the depth of the Titanic wreck . Amid growing concern about its  dwindling supply of breathable air , search and rescue efforts by a unified command composed of several international agencies ramped up accordingly.

The five people aboard included an operator — later identified as Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions — and four mission specialists, a term the company uses for its passengers, who paid up to $250,000 for a seat.

For days, the fate of the sub and its passengers was a mystery.

But after the debris was found, a U.S. Navy official said the Navy had detected "an acoustic anomaly consistent with an implosion" shortly after the sub lost contact with the surface Sunday, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reported. The information was relayed to the Coast Guard, which used it to narrow the radius of the search area, the official said.

Such an implosion, under the intense pressure of the depths of the sea , would have destroyed the vessel almost instantly, experts explained.

"in a fraction of a second, it's gone," Will Kohnen, chairman of the professional group the Marine Technology Society Submarine Committee, told the Reuters news agency. 

"It implodes inwards in a matter of a thousandth of a second," Kohnen said. "And it's probably a mercy, because that was probably a kinder end than the unbelievably difficult situation of being four days in a cold, dark and confined space. So, this would have happened very quickly. I don't think anybody even had the time to realize what happened." 

The Coast Guard is leading the investigation into the incident, and the National Transportation Safety Board  said Friday  it will assist.   

Who were the passengers aboard the sub? 

CBS News confirmed that the five people aboard the submersible were  Hamish Harding , a 59-year-old British billionaire, business owner and explorer; British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman; French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who had made multiple dives over the years to explore the Titanic; and Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, who was serving as pilot.

Just ahead of the Coast Guard briefing Thursday afternoon, a statement issued by OceanGate spokesperson Andrew Von Kerens offered condolences to the families of the Titan crew and recognized that all five people on board the submersible were believed to be dead.

"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 in the statement. "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."

When the Coast Guard confirmed the sub's likely implosion on Thursday, Mauger said they were communicating with consulates general in both the U.K. and France.

The Dawood family, of the large Pakistan-based global business conglomerate Dawood Group, issued a statement Tuesday confirming their family members were on the expedition.

"Please continue to keep the departed souls and our family in your prayers during this difficult time of mourning," the Hussain and Kulsum Dawood family said Thursday in a statement through the Dawood Foundation. "We are truly grateful to all those involved in the rescue operations. ... The immense love and support we receive continues to help us endure this unimaginable loss."

Nargeolet, a renowned French explorer and former diver for the French Navy who was part of the first expedition to visit the Titanic wreck in 1987, was returning for another dive aboard the Titan submersible. 

In a  Facebook  post on Monday, Rory Golden, an explorer who became the first Irish diver to visit the Titanic wreckage in 2000, said he was part of the voyage but was not on the submersible that went missing.

Search and rescue efforts

Authorities  said  early Thursday morning that a Canadian vessel, Horizon Arctic, had deployed a  remotely operated underwater vehicle that reached the sea floor . The ROV ultimately located what the Coast Guard originally described as a debris field on the sea floor, which included identifiable pieces of the sub, authorities confirmed that afternoon.

"This morning, an ROV, or remote operated vehicle, from the vessel Horizon Arctic, discovered the tail cone of the Titan submersible approximately 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic on the sea floor," said Mauger at a news briefing. "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," he added. "On behalf of the United States Coast Guard and the entire unified command, I offer my deepest condolences to the families. I can only imagine what this has been like for them and I hope that this discovery provides some solace during this difficult time."

Mauger said authorities were "still working to develop the details for the timeline involved with this casualty and the response," and referenced the "incredibly complex operating environment along the sea floor, over two miles beneath the surface."

Paul Hankins, an undersea expert for the U.S. Navy, explained during the news conference that crews discovered "five different major pieces of debris that told us that it was the remains of the Titan." These pieces included, initially, the nose cone, which was outside of the pressure hull. 

"We then found a large debris field," Hankins said. "Within that large debris field, we found the front end bell of the pressure hull. That was our first indication that there was a catastrophic event."

A second, smaller debris field was located shortly after, and the debris found there "comprised the totality of that pressure vessel," Hankins said. 

"The debris field is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel," he said, adding that the team will continue to map the debris field area.

Asked by a reporter what the prospects were for recovering the passengers, Mauger said, "This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor, and the debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel. So we'll continue to work and continue to search the area down there, but I don't have an answer for prospects at this time."

Discovering the Titan debris came after multiple agencies from the U.S. and Canada spent days scouring thousands of square miles of open ocean in search of the missing sub.

The U.S. Coast Guard announced Wednesday that  underwater noises were detected  in the search area and that searches involving ROVs were  focusing on the area where the noises were heard .

On Wednesday, three more vessels had arrived to join the search, including one with side-scan sonar capabilities designed to create images of large sections of the sea floor, the Coast Guard said in a  tweet . That vessel began conducting search patterns alongside at least two others, as multiple military and other agencies worked together under a unified command. 

Frederick said Wednesday there were five "surface assets" involved in the search , and another five were expected to join the operation within the next 24 to 48 hours. He said the team also had two ROVs "actively searching," with several more due to arrive to join the search Thursday.

The Coast Guard  said  it had C-130 aircraft searching for the sub, and that the Rescue Coordination Center Halifax was assisting with a P-8 Poseidon aircraft, which has underwater detection capabilities. Canadian P-3s were also involved in the operation and deployed sonar buoys.

Just after midnight Wednesday, officials said  aircraft had detected underwater noises  in the search area, and underwater search operations were relocated as a result, though the origin of the noises remained unknown. The sounds were picked up several times Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, according to the Coast Guard. 

"With respect to the noises, specifically, we don't know what they are, to be frank with you," Frederick said. "The P-3 detected noises, that's why they're up there, that's why they're doing what they're doing, that's why there are sonar buoys in the water."

News of the vanished submersible and subsequent rescue mission originally broke Monday morning. At the time, Lt. Jordan Hart of the Coast Guard in Boston told CBS News that personnel there were leading the rescue mission, and focusing on waters off Newfoundland in eastern Canada. 

The Boston Regional Coordination Center was managing the rescue operation, as the location of the Titanic shipwreck falls within the Boston coordination center's territory, according to a  map  of jurisdictions along the East Coast of North America.

That combined search area grew to about twice the size of the state of Connecticut, and the subsurface search extended down as far as 2 and a half miles deep, Frederick said, stressing that the search and rescue teams were dealing with an incredibly complex set of circumstances.

"We also have to factor in the ever-changing weather conditions, currents and sea states that expand the search area every hour," he said earlier in the week. "There's an enormous complexity associated with this case due to the location being so far offshore and the coordination between multiple agencies and nations. We greatly appreciate the outpouring of support and offers to provide additional equipment."

What caused the noises?

Frederick acknowledged that the sounds detected underwater by Canadian aircraft could have been caused by multiple sources. 

Following the discovery of the sub debris on the sea floor, a U.S. Navy source told CBS News that the implosion would be inconsistent with banging noises heard at 30-minute intervals. Those noises, the official said, are now assessed as having come from other ships in the area.

Carl Hartsfield, an expert in underwater acoustics and the director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which is on-site at the search area as a consultant, explained that it can be challenging to differentiate between "human sounds" and "nature sounds" coming from beneath the surface.

"The ocean is a very complex place, obviously, human sounds, nature sounds, and it's very difficult to discern what the sources of those noises are at times," Hartsfield said. 

Before the sub was found, Chris Roman, an associate professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, told CBS News that, technically, it was possible that sounds from inside a submersible could have been detected, but that wasn't the only potential source of the noise.

"Sound travels very efficiently underwater. If people were intentionally making noises within the sub, it's very likely they could be detected with a sound buoy, and that position can be translated into a new search area," Roman said. But he also noted that, as Frederick mentioned in his briefing, "there's a lot of other things in the ocean that make noises."

The submarine

The unique submersible craft that disappeared was owned by OceanGate Expeditions , a company that deploys manned submarines for deep sea exploration and has in the past advertised this particular sub's voyages to carry tourists down to the wreckage of the RMS Titanic for $250,000 per seat. 

More than a century after the Titanic sank in April 1912, the wreck lies on the ocean floor about 400 miles southeast of the Newfoundland coast. 

OceanGate said recently on its website and on social media that its expedition to the shipwreck was "underway," describing the seven-night trip as a "chance to step outside of everyday life and discover something truly extraordinary." In addition to one ongoing expedition, the company had planned two others for the summer of next year, according to the site. 

Because of the sub's oxygen capacity, it can only be fully submerged for a portion of the weeklong voyage. The sub has emergency oxygen and a 96-hour sustainment capability if there's an emergency aboard, Mauger said.

In a statement Monday after news broke of the missing sub, OceanGate confirmed the missing submersible was theirs and that a rescue operation had been launched to find and recover it. The company said it was "exploring and mobilizing all options to bring the crew back safely." 

"For some time, we have been unable to establish communications with one of our submersible exploration vehicles which is currently visiting the wreck site of the Titanic," said Andrew Von Kerens, a spokesperson for OceanGate. "We pray for the safe return of the crew and passengers, and we will provide updates as they are available."

Inside the Titan

Dubbed the Titan, OceanGate's deep sea vessel, was said to be the only five-person submersible in the world with the capabilities to reach the Titanic's depth, nearly 2 and a half miles beneath the ocean's surface, CBS "Sunday Mornings" correspondent David Pogue reported last year. 

BBC News reported that the vessel typically carries a pilot, three paying guests and another person described as a "content expert" by the company.  OceanGate's site says the Titan, weighing around 23,000 pounds, has the ability to reach depths of up to 4,000 meters — over 13,000 feet — and has about 96 hours of life support for a crew of five people.

Last summer, Pogue accompanied the Titan crew on the journey from Newfoundland to the site where the Titanic as lost. Several dive attempts had to be canceled when weather conditions indicated it may not be safe. At the time, he described the Titan as a one-of-a-kind submersible craft made from thick carbon fiber and coated on both ends by a dome of titanium. 

In 2018, a former employee of OceanGate Expeditions, submersible pilot David Lochridge, voiced concerns about the safety of the Titanic tour sub and filed a lawsuit against the company . 

Lochridge, who was fired by OceanGate and sued by the company for allegedly disclosing confidential information in a whistleblower complaint to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, said in a court filing that the Titan would carry passengers as deep as 4,000 meters even though that depth had never been reached in a sub with its type of carbon fiber hull. According to his claim, he learned the vessel was built to withstand a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, although OceanGate planned to take passengers to 4,000 meters.  

Lochridge was not the only skeptic. The same year his complaint was filed, other industry leaders approached OceanGate with questions about the safety of its submersible. William Kohnen, president and CEO of Hydrospace Group, outlined his concerns in a 2018 letter to OceanGate, originally published by The New York Times, that warned of potentially "catastrophic" issues with the "experimental" sub, which was not certified. Kohnen told CBS News on Wednesday that although he did not send it, the letter was leaked to OceanGate and prompted the company to "amend a number of details that made sure the public knew" the submersible had not received its certification.

"The letter to Oceangate was meant as a professional courtesy to the CEO expressing industry concerns that the company was not following a traditional classification route for the certification of the submersible," Kohnen said. "The industry operates along an established and dynamic set of safety regulations and protocols that have served the submersible industry worldwide."

Ahead of his planned dive last summer, Pogue recalled signing paperwork that read, in part, "This experimental vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body, and could result in physical injury, emotional trauma, or death." 

Space inside the submarine was similar to the interior of a minivan, and, with just one button and a video game controller used to steer it, the vessel "seemed improvised, with off-the-shelf components," Pogue said.

On his voyage, the  sub was lost for a few hours , Pogue said.

"There's no GPS underwater, so the surface ship is supposed to guide the sub to the shipwreck by sending text messages," he reported at the time. "But on this dive, communications somehow broke down."

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

Were conditions right for the dive?

G. Michael Harris, founder of RMS Titanic, Inc. — a company that salvages artifacts from the Titanic wreckage — told CBS News on Tuesday evening that Titanic expeditions are generally conducted within a "three-month weather window" between the end of June and September, when the ocean waters are at their calmest.

Harris, who has led several expeditions to the wreckage site, questioned why the Titan's dive was conducted as early as Sunday.

"Right now, it's really early in the season. I'm not sure why OceanGate went out this soon," Harris said.

Harris also noted that when he conducts diving expeditions, he uses a transponder system, something that he believed the Titan likely did not have.

"It's a net that we navigate in so that we know where we are at all times on the wreck of the Titanic," Harris said. "We're in constant communication with the vessel up top."

Harris said the Titan was "put on a sled and dumped in the water and their only navigation is from the support ship up top."

"I don't adhere to that myself, personally," Harris said. 

Harris noted that he has worked with Nargeolet, who is listed as director of underwater research for RMS Titanic, for the past 30 years, describing him as an "all-around good guy."

Who was Hamish Harding?

Harding, the first of the passengers to be publicly identified, had previously posted on social media about joining the Titanic shipwreck expedition.

In a post shared to his  Facebook  page on Saturday, Harding wrote: "I am proud to finally announce that I joined OceanGate Expeditions for their RMS TITANIC Mission as a mission specialist on the sub going down to the Titanic."

I am proud to finally announce that I joined OceanGate Expeditions for their RMS TITANIC Mission as a mission specialist... Posted by Hamish Harding on  Saturday, June 17, 2023

"Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023," Harding's Facebook post continued. "A weather window has just opened up and we are going to attempt a dive tomorrow. We started steaming from St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada yesterday and are planning to start dive operations around 4am tomorrow morning. Until then we have a lot of preparations and briefings to do."

That post was Harding's most recent social media update related to the submarine trip. It included multiple photographs of him, including one that showed Harding signing his name on a banner that read "Titanic Expedition Mission V" and another that pictured the submersible vessel itself.

Richard Garriott de Cayeux, president of The Explorers Club, where Harding helped found the board of trustees, said they had spoken just a week earlier about the expedition. 

"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," he said in a letter to club members after the sub's disappearance.

Harding was a veteran adventure tourist who also  traveled to space  aboard a Blue Origin rocket last year. Two years ago, he made it to the deepest part of the ocean, traveling with U.S. explorer  Victor Vescovo  to the floor of the Mariana Trench, 35,876 feet below the sea surface. That trip, in a $48 million submersible, earned both explorers the Guinness World Record for the  longest distance traveled  at the deepest part of the ocean by a crewed vessel.

"It was potentially scary, but I was so busy doing so many things — navigating and triangulating my position — that I did not really have time to be scared," Harding told  The Week  after that excursion.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Monday, June 19. Reporting contributed by Emmet Lyons, Roxana Saberi, Alex Sundby, Aimee Picchi, Aliza Chasan, Li Cohen, Caroline Hinson, Anna Noryskiewicz, Analisa Novak and other CBS News staff.

• Newfoundland
• United States Coast Guard

Emily Mae Czachor is a reporter and news editor at CBSNews.com. She covers breaking news, often focusing on crime and extreme weather. Emily Mae has previously written for outlets including the Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed and Newsweek.

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June 19, 2023 - Search mission underway for missing Titanic tour submersible

By Elise Hammond , Maureen Chowdhury and Mike Hayes, CNN

Missing submersible lost contact with crew 1 hour and 45 minutes into descent, Coast Guard says

From CNN’s Celina Tebor and Gabe Cohen

The missing submersible near the Titanic wreckage lost contact with a crew 1 hour and 45 minutes into its descent Sunday morning,  according to the US Coast Guard .

The 21-foot submersible was carrying five people, the Coast Guard tweeted .

The submersible lost contact with the crew of Polar Prince, the vessel used to transport it to the site of the Titanic wreckage before the expedition, according to the Coast Guard.

Chief Mi’sel Joe of Miawpukek First Nation, which co-owns the Polar Prince, said he received a call Sunday afternoon from the CEO of Horizon Maritime alerting him that the submersible was two hours overdue and hadn’t surfaced.

He was told communication with the sub was lost as it was going down to the wreckage. At that point, he says, requests for search and rescue had gone out. 

“There’s a tremendous amount of concern,” Chief Mi’sel Joe said. “I have anguish that people are going through this. I wish there was more I can do.”

A trip on Titanic wreckage expedition costs "from $250,000," according to operator website

From CNN's Eric Levenson

The expedition to explore the wreckage of the Titanic costs passengers "from $250,000," according to an archived version of the company's website, accessible via the  Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine .

OceanGate Expeditions, the company that operates the tour, advertised the experience as a way "to step outside of everyday life and discover something truly extraordinary.”

There, up to five people, including a pilot, a “content expert” and three paying passengers, board the submersible named “Titan” and descend to the bottom of the ocean.

“Once the submersible is launched you will begin to see alienlike lifeforms whizz by the viewport as you sink deeper and deeper into the ocean. The descent takes approximately two hours but it feels like the blink of an eye,” the website said.

According to OceanGate, the  Titan is a 23,000-pound submersible  made of carbon fiber and titanium.

As a safety feature, the sub uses a “proprietary real-time hull health monitoring (RTM) system” that analyzes the pressure on the vessel and the integrity of the structure, the company states. It also has life support for a crew of five for up to 96 hours, the website states.

5 people missing on submersible near Titanic wreckage, US Coast Guard says

From CNN’s Raja Razek

The US Coast Guard is searching for five people aboard a missing submersible near the Titanic wreckage, a spokesperson told CNN on Monday.

The Coast Guard received the first phone call about the missing submersible on Sunday, US Coast Guard Boston Public Affairs Officer Lieutenant Samantha Corcoran told CNN.

“There are five people we are searching for,” Corcoran said, adding that she does not know the specifics of all five people.

According to an archived version of the website run by the tour operator, OceanGate Expeditions – accessible via the  Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine – the submersible holds up to five people: a pilot, a “content expert” and three paying passengers.

There are two aircraft and a ship on the scene searching, Corcoran said.

One aircraft is a Coast Guard C-130, and the second is a P-8 Poseidon aircraft from RCC Halifax, which is able to search and detect submarines underwater.

A Canadian Coast Guard ship is en route to the area as well, according to Corcoran.

Some background : The eight-day expedition is based out of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, with a maximum of six people. The trip begins with a 400-nautical-mile journey to the wreck site.

There, up to five people, board the submersible named “Titan” and descend to the bottom of the ocean.

Vessel that carried submersible to Titanic site is 1 of 3 ships involved in search and rescue 

From Gabe Cohen

Polar Prince, a vessel used to transport the missing submersible to the site of the Titanic wreckage before the expedition, is now assisting with the search and rescue efforts, a spokesperson for Horizon Maritime, a co-owner of the ship, told CNN. 

Polar Prince is a former Canadian Coast Guard icebreaking ship, the company said. 

Horizon Maritime says it has also dispatched an additional vessel, the Horizon Arctic, to assist. The company’s website says the Horizon Arctic is “designed and equipped for advanced offshore support operations.” 

Canadian Joint Rescue Coordination Centre (JRCC) Halifax dispatched a third vessel — the Canadian Coast Guard Ship  Kopit Hopson 1752 — to help in the search and rescue operation, it told CNN.

Member of Titanic expedition posted photos of the submersible before it launched on Sunday

From CNN’s Paul P. Murphy

One of the people on the missing submersible posted photos of the vessel on Sunday before the launch of the expedition. 

The photos were posted on a dive participant's business Instagram page. They show the submersible sitting in a cradle-like flotation device in the Atlantic Ocean.

A caption accompanying the photos said that it "had a successful launch" and was "currently diving."  

Another post from the account, posted on Saturday, noted that the weather had been bad but a "window" had opened up for Sunday.

Ocean Gate Expeditions, the company running the expedition, has not responded to CNN's inquiries about what happened during the dive.

CN is not naming the individual at this time but has reached out to their company for comment.

Expedition participant says team that launched missing sub is "focused on board here for our friends"

An expedition participant on board the Polar Prince, the ship that launched the now-missing submersible, said Monday that everybody is "focused on board here for our friends."

Rory Golden made the post on Facebook after being contacted by CNN.   

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

He asked people not to ask for the names of the people on the missing submersible or speculate. “I have seen some comments already on social media that are highly inappropriate and insensitive,” he said.

Golden said that the online and internet options were being restricted "to keep bandwidth available for the coordinated effort that is taking place."

"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," he said.  

Golden ended the post by thanking everyone and saying, "Think positive. We are.”

More agencies providing rescue coordination resources in search for missing vessel

From CNN's Raja Razek

The US Coast Guard's Maritime Rescue Coordination Center in Boston is coordinating the response to a report of a vessel bound for the Titanic wreckage that has gone missing, according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

The Canadian government department added that Joint Rescue Coordination Centre JRCC Halifax in Nova Scotia is also providing assistance.

CNN is reaching out to the Maritime Rescue Coordination Center in Boston.

US Coast Guard mobilizes aircraft in search for submersible near Titanic wreckage 

From CNN's Kristina Sgueglia

The US Coast Guard is “bringing all assets to bear” in searching for a submersible near the Titanic wreckage that was reported “overdue” as of Sunday, an official said.

The particular submersible is “advertised to have 96 hours of survival time, I think that’s based on the amount of oxygen available in the capsule and so that gives us some time to continue searching and continue using all means to try and locate the crew members," District 1 Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger told Fox News.  

CNN reported earlier Monday that a search and was is underway for the missing submersible. It is operated by a company that handles expeditions to the Titanic wreckage off the coast of St John’s, Newfoundland in Canada, according to a company statement.

Assets including aircraft were immediately mobilized Sunday, Mauger said, adding the remote part of the ocean 900 miles off the Massachusetts coast is complicating the search and rescue.

US officials are coordinating with the Canadian Coast Guard and armed forces in the area who have also launched two of their own aircraft, he said. One particular piece of equipment has the ability to drop “sono buoys” and detect underwater noises.

“We don’t have equipment on site yet that can do a comprehensive sonar survey of the bottom, but we’re working very closely with our partners both within the federal government and in the Canadian armed forces and with private resources that are there to provide that capability,” he told Fox News.

“As you noted this is on the site of a wreckage, the wreckage Titanic, and so there’s a lot of debris on the bottom and locating an object on the bottom would be difficult but we will bring all assets to bare that we can to try and find the submersible and rescue the crew members," Mauger added.

 He said if they were to find the vessel underwater, they would need to coordinate with the US Navy and Canadian armed forces to be able to pull it out.

Search and rescue underway for missing Titanic submersible

A search and rescue operation is underway for a missing submersible operated by a company that handles expeditions to the Titanic wreckage off the coast of St John’s, Newfoundland, in Canada.

“Our entire focus is on the crewmembers in the submersible and their families,” Ocean Gate Expeditions said in a statement Monday adding, they are “exploring and mobilizing all options to bring the crew back safely.”

“We are 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,” according to a statement provided by CNN News Partner CTV.

 “We are working toward the safe return of the crewmembers," it said.

CNN has reached out to the Boston Coastguard and authorities in Newfoundland, Canada. 

Tanika Gray contributed reporting to this post.

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Titanic submersible live updates: 'Catastrophic implosion' killed five aboard, possibly Sunday

Editor's note: This page reflects the news on the missing submarine from Thursday, June 22. For the  latest updates on the missing submersible  and the recovery efforts, read our  live updates page for Friday, June 23 .

The five people aboard the submersible that had been missing for days were killed when the small vessel carrying them to the Titanic wreckage site had a "catastrophic implosion,'' the Coast Guard said Thursday afternoon.

Members of a massive international search effort found a debris field in the general area of the Titanic earlier in the day, and it was confirmed to contain parts of the Titan sub.

"The debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel," Rear Adm. John Mauger, commander of the First Coast Guard District, said in a news conference.

The debris was found about 1,600 feet from the Titanic's bow on the sea floor, Mauger said, adding that it was too early to tell when the Titan imploded.

However, an "anomaly'' the U.S. Navy detected Sunday was likely the small watercraft's fatal blast, according to a senior military official. The irregularity was picked up when the Navy went back and analyzed its acoustic data after the submersible was reported missing that day.

That anomaly was “consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior Navy official told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity. The Navy shared the information with the Coast Guard, but the data was not considered definitive.

Paul Hankins, the U.S. Navy director of salvage operations and ocean engineering, said the debris found Thursday indicated a "catastrophic event." He and Mauger said it included a tail cone, the end bell of the pressure hull and the aft end bell, which according to Hankins, "basically comprise the totality of that pressure vessel."

The 22-foot vehicle was on a dive to the Titanic site when it lost contact with its support ship Sunday morning.

OceanGate, the company that operated the Titan – and whose CEO, Stockton Rush, piloted the watercraft – issued a statement saying the travelers "have sadly been lost.''

"We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew,'' the statement said.

The other four people believed to have perished were Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, British adventurer Hamish Harding and French deep-sea explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

“Our hearts go out to the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives on the Titan,” the White House said in a statement. “They have been through a harrowing ordeal over the past few days, and we are keeping them in our thoughts and prayers.”

Debris field discovered early Thursday

Search and rescue crews remotely operating an underwater vehicle had discovered debris near the Titanic earlier Thursday, the day the submersible was expected to run out of oxygen .

The debris was found by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) associated with the Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic that reached the sea floor and began searching for the submersible early Thursday, according to the Coast Guard, which said ROVs will be used in a continued investigation of what happened.

The complex search and rescue mission attracted international attention and involved personnel from the U.S., Canada, France and the United Kingdom . Another ROV, associated with the French vessel L'Atalante, also deployed Thursday, the Coast Guard said.

The accelerating search efforts came as an updated prediction by the Coast Guard said the Titan submersible was likely to run out of oxygen roughly around 7 a.m. EDT Thursday. It initially had 96 hours of oxygen for a crew of five. Experts have noted that the estimates are imprecise. In the end, running out of oxygen was not the biggest problem.

Inside the underwater vessel: Reporter who rode Titanic submersible tells USA TODAY about 'less sophisticated' parts

Wife of OceanGate CEO descended from Titanic victims

The wife of OceanGate's CEO is descended from victims of the Titanic wreck of 1912, genealogical records suggest.

Wendy Rush, the wife of Stockton Rush, is the great-great-granddaughter of Isidor and Ida Straus , The New York Times first reported . USA TODAY confirmed the tie through genealogical records online.

The couple was last seen together on the deck of the Titanic holding hands as it sank, according to the U.K. government's National Archives. Rush's great-grandmother was their daughter Minnie, who married Richard Weil, said Joan Adler, executive director of the Straus Historical Society, a nonprofit that preserves information relating to the Straus Family.

Rush works as OceanGate's director of communications and has participated in three past OceanGate journeys to the Titanic site, according to her LinkedIn page .

Pakistani teen was student in Scotland

Suleman Dawood, the Pakistani 19-year-old aboard the vessel, was a student at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, the university confirmed Thursday. He just completed his first year in the business school there.

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

Deep ocean salvage system arrives for search

Rescue crews on Thursday had faced wind gusts up to 19 mph and ocean swells up to 5 feet, with an air temperature of 50 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the Coast Guard.

The U.S. Navy said Wednesday afternoon that a special deep-water salvage system capable of hoisting up to 60,000 pounds had reached St. John’s, Canada, and could be used to lift the Titan to the surface, though it may not be ready for another 24 hours. The Titan weighs 23,000 pounds, according to the OceanGate website.

Submersible previously had battery issues

At least 46 people successfully traveled on OceanGate’s submersible to the Titanic wreck site in 2021 and 2022, according to letters the company filed with a U.S. District Court in Virginia.

"On the first dive to the Titanic, the submersible encountered a battery issue and had to be manually attached to its lifting platform," one filing says. "In the high sea state, the submersible sustained modest damage to its external components and OceanGate decided to cancel the second mission for repairs and operational enhancements."

Arthur Loibl, a retired businessman from Germany, took a dive to the site two years ago. "Imagine a metal tube a few meters long with a sheet of metal for a floor. You can't stand. You can't kneel. Everyone is sitting close to or on top of each other," Loibl told the Associated Press. "You can't be claustrophobic."

During the 2.5-hour descent and ascent, the lights were turned off to conserve energy, he said, with the only illumination coming from a fluorescent glow stick. The dive was repeatedly delayed to fix a problem with the battery and the balancing weights. In total, the voyage took 10.5 hours, he said.

Underwater noises heard for two days

Aircraft detected underwater noises in the search area on Tuesday and Wednesday, prompting officials to redirect rescue efforts, said Capt. Jamie Frederick, the First Coast Guard District response coordinator, in a news conference Wednesday. Navy acoustic analysts were studying the sounds, he said.

"We don't know what they are," Frederick said. "The good news is, we’re searching in the area where the noises were detected." The search net covers a surface area roughly two times the size of Connecticut and 2.5 miles deep, he said.

At the press conference Wednesday, Carl Hartsfield, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said the sounds have been described as "banging noises." He cautioned against jumping to conclusions and said sounds that aren’t man-made may sound man-made to the untrained ear.

Missing Titanic submersible: Maps, graphics show last location, depth and design

Who is on the passenger list of the submersible?

These are the passengers who were on the submersible :

◾ Stockton Rush, 61, CEO of OceanGate, who co-founded the company in 2009.

◾ Paul-Henry Nargeolet, 73, a French maritime explorer and director of the Underwater Research Program at Premier Exhibitions, RMS Titanic Inc., the only company with exclusive rights to recover the artifacts from the Titanic wreck.

◾ Hamish Harding, 58, a British explorer, private jet dealer and chairman of Action Aviation, a global sales company in business aviation.

◾ Shahzada Dawood, 48, a member of one of Pakistan’s most prominent families.

◾ Suleman Dawood, 19, son of Shahzada Dawood.

– Isabelle Butera, USA TODAY

Who pays the cost of Coast Guard rescues?

The cost of the search and rescue mission is likely in the millions of dollars – and will fall to taxpayers, said Chris Boyer, the executive director of the National Association for Search and Rescue, a nonprofit education, training and advocacy group.

He said the Coast Guard doesn’t charge people for search and rescue. "That’s their job," he said, noting fear of costs could deter people from seeking lifesaving help.

While some adventure expeditions require patrons to take out insurance policies, few would come close to covering the likely costs of the rescue mission, he said. High-risk adventures have long fueled complex debates about risk and rescue, he said.

"I think it's going to become a larger issue for us. Because it's not just under the water. We now have private spaceships flying private astronauts into space," he said. "What happens when that private spaceship can't come back home?"

– Chris Kenning, USA TODAY

What does it look like inside the missing submersible?

The Titan submersible was about 8 feet high, 9 feet wide and 22 feet long, according to the OceanGate website. It was designed to reach about 13,000 feet deep and travel at 3 knots, the company says. The vessel had a five-inch-thick carbon fiber and titanium hull and four 10-horsepower electric thrusters, according to court filings.

Several exterior cameras provided a live view of the outside, and passengers could access the camera views on a large digital display or on a hand-held tablet, according to court filings. Images posted to the website show people seated on the floor in the small, open space with their legs crossed.

Science writer and CBS correspondent David Pogue, who boarded the submersible for a report that aired in November , told USA TODAY he was concerned about the vessel's safety.

"There were parts of it that seemed to me to be less sophisticated than I was guessing. You drive it with a PlayStation video controller … some of the ballasts are old, rusty construction pipes," Pogue said. "There were certain things that looked like cut corners."

Contributing: Kayla Jimenez, Dinah Pulver and Anthony Robledo, USA TODAY ; The Associated Press

Titanic tourist submersible carrying 5 disappears on trip to see wreck in North Atlantic

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An intensifying search-and-rescue mission was underway Monday after a submersible watercraft used for tourist expeditions to view the wreck of the Titanic went missing Sunday with five people aboard in the North Atlantic, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.

The Coast Guard said on Twitter that it was searching for a 21-foot submersible from the Canadian research vessel Polar Prince that lost contact about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass. The vessel “submerged Sunday morning, and the crew of the Polar Prince lost contact with them approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes into the vessel’s dive,” the Coast Guard wrote on Twitter.

A search-and-rescue mission is underway after a submersible used for tourist expeditions to view the Titanic wreck went missing in the North Atlantic.

One pilot or sub-commander operator and four mission specialists were on board, Coast Guard Rear Adm. John W. Mauger said in a Monday afternoon news conference. He declined to identify those on the missing vessel by name.

A C-130 aircraft is being used to conduct an aerial search both visually and with radar, according to Mauger. The Coast Guard has also coordinated with the Canadian coast guard and armed forces to deploy more assets. The Canadian coast guard also has committed a C-130 aircraft, as well as a submarine and sonar buoys to aid in the search.

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Why are we still so fascinated with the Titanic?

It could be the blockbuster film, the human angle or technology’s limits. Nowhere does it resonate more than in Halifax, Canada, where some of the victims are buried.

July 30, 2012

The missing vessel was designed with a 96-hour sustainment capability if there’s any emergency onboard. Mauger said officials “anticipate that there is somewhere between the 70 to full 96 hours.”

“We’re using that time, making the best use of every moment of that time to locate the vessel,” he said.

The location being searched is a “remote area” about 13,000 feet deep, making it a challenging search-and-rescue effort, he said.

The U.S. Coast Guard will continue to fly the aircraft and move additional vessels into the area over the next couple of days to help with the search.

The Guardian reported that the sub is operated by OceanGate Expeditions, a company that offers visits to the Titanic wreck .

OceanGate confirmed its vessel was missing and posted a statement on Twitter on Monday afternoon. “We are exploring and mobilizing all options to bring the crew back safely,” the company said. “Our entire focus is on the crew members in the submersible and their families.”

pic.twitter.com/JmH8e47zuI — OceanGate Expeditions (@OceanGateExped) June 19, 2023

The Joint Rescue Coordination Center in Halifax, Canada, received a call at 9:13 p.m. Sunday from the maritime rescue coordination center in Boston requesting “assistance for the search of the overdue research sub,” said Lt. Cmdr. Len Hickey. The sub had lost contact with its surface vessel, Hickey said.

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Millvina Dean dies at 97; last Titanic survivor

She was about 2 months old when she sailed on the ocean liner in 1912. She, her mother and brother were saved. Her father was among those who went down with the ship.

Sept. 16, 2014

The center provided a fixed-wing aircraft and a Canadian coast guard vessel to aid in the search.

Hickey was unable to provide more information and referred additional questions to the Coast Guard‘s Boston base, which is leading the effort.

David Concannon, an advisor to the company, said OceanGate lost contact with the sub Sunday morning. In an email to the Associated Press on Monday afternoon, he said it had a 96-hour oxygen supply. Concannon was supposed to be on the dive but had other commitments. He said officials are working to get a remotely operated vehicle that can reach a depth of about 20,000 feet to the site as soon as possible.

The Titanic , which sank in 1912, is about 13,000 feet below the surface at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean nearly 400 nautical miles off the Newfoundland coast.

According to OceanGate’s website , which worked intermittently Monday, a deep-sea voyage to view the Titanic wreck was underway.

Representatives for the Coast Guard did not immediately return repeated requests for comment, nor did OceanGate Expeditions representatives.

Titanic: For many victims, their final resting place is in Halifax, Canada

Some disaster victims’ bodies pulled from the sea came to rest in Halifax, which honors the dead.

March 27, 2013

According to its website, OceanGate is a privately owned company in Everett, Wash., established in 2009, that operates a trio of five‑person submersibles for “site survey, scientific research, film production and exploration travel.” Its vessels can reach about 13,123 feet deep, the company said.

The company offers an eight-day, seven-night voyage to the Titanic wreck, according to its website. The trip runs about $250,000, according to the site.

“Become one of the few to see the Titanic with your own eyes,” the company says on its Titanic expeditions page.

The trip sets off from and returns to the city of St. John’s in Newfoundland, and takes “intrepid travelers” aboard a submersible called the Titan to explore the site of the Titanic wreck. Dive expeditions can begin as early as Day 3, according to the website. The Titan carries up to five people, the website said.

The website states no previous dive experience is necessary but details some physical requirements for passengers, including being able to board small boats in rough seas and sit for long periods of time. Explorers must also be at least 18, the website said.

Crew Tells of Historic Mission : Ship That Found Wreck of Titanic Returns Home

Not surprisingly, they called it Operation Titanic.

Sept. 10, 1985

Those embarking on the expedition receive a vessel orientation and safety briefing after boarding, the company said on its website.

Hamish Harding, the chairman of Action Aviation, a Dubai-based company dealing in aviation sales and acquisitions, is among those on the expedition, according to Harding’s social media posts and confirmed by Action Aviation.

The expedition left from St. Johns on Friday, Harding wrote on his Facebook page . A “weather window” had opened up, allowing for a dive to the wreck Sunday. It was likely to be the only “manned mission” this year because of the harsh winter, Harding wrote.

Action Aviation also posted on Twitter about the voyage .

“4am start this morning on the RMS Titanic Expedition Mission 5 with @oceangateexped,” Action Aviation wrote on Twitter on June 18. “The sub had a successful launch and Hamish is currently diving. Stay tuned for further updates!”

Harding wrote on Instagram that the team on the sub has “legendary explorers,” including Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a veteran and accomplished diver with more than 30 trips to the wreck site .

The Titanic was a British luxury liner that made its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912, bound for New York with 2,227 passengers and crew aboard. But the vessel, then the largest in the world, rammed an iceberg and sank in the early morning hours of April 15, killing more than 1,500 people .

In September 1985, an American and French team of researchers found the liner thousands of feet down.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Here's the latest on the missing Titan submersible and the race to rescue passengers

Emily Olson

Ayana Archie

U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick speaks during a press conference about the search efforts for the submersible that went missing near the wreck of the Titanic in Boston on Tuesday. Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick speaks during a press conference about the search efforts for the submersible that went missing near the wreck of the Titanic in Boston on Tuesday.

For the latest updates on the search for the missing submersible, head here.

As of Tuesday night, five passengers aboard a submersible in the North Atlantic are the subject of an international search. The vessel is owned by OceanGate, and designed to explore the site of the Titanic.

Authorities estimate there's only enough oxygen in the submersible to last for less than two days.

Here's what we know:

When and where did the vessel go missing?

Missing submersible: Rescuers race to find Titan after detecting underwater noises

The 21-foot vessel, which is named Titan , lost communication with its control center on Sunday morning, roughly 1 hour and 45 minutes into its scheduled dive, the U.S. Coast Guard wrote on Twitter.

Titan had been deployed by a Canadian expedition ship, the Polar Prince, about 435 miles (380 nautical miles) south of St. John's in Newfoundland, not far from the site of the iconic shipwreck.

Why was the submersible diving?

The missing vessel is owned by OceanGate, a company based in Washington state that offers underwater voyages to explore the remains of the Titanic from the seafloor.

'Tiny sub, big ocean': Why the Titanic submersible search is so challenging

OceanGate is a major chronicler of the ship's decay and shared the first-ever full-size digital scan of the wreck site in May.

OceanGate is also a pioneer in the deep sea tourism economy. For $250,000 a person, the company takes adventurers on a deep sea tour lasting eight days and stretching hundreds of miles.

From St. John's in Newfoundland, Canada, explorers travel 380 miles offshore and 2.4 miles below the surface.

A remarkable new view of the Titanic shipwreck is here, thanks to deep-sea mappers

If successful, they can catch a glimpse of what's left of the 1912 iceberg-crash disaster, which took the lives of all but 700 of the Titanic's 2,200 passengers and crew. Today, the ship is slowly succumbing to a metal-eating bacteria , which may cause it to fully disintegrate in a matter of decades.

Mike Reiss , who joined OceanGate to glimpse the deteriorating wreck in 2022, said the trip is less tourism than it is true exploration — and the people who dare to try it are made well aware of the risks.

"You sign a massive waiver that lists one way after another that you could die on the trip," he told the BBC in an interview Tuesday. "They mention death three times on page one. So it's never far from your mind. As I was getting on to the sub, that was my thought: That this could be the end."

'You sign a massive waiver that you could die on the trip' As search teams race against time to find the small sub that went missing during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic, writer Mike Reiss told #BBCBreakfast about taking the same trip last year https://t.co/FNeiSyZfLl pic.twitter.com/2STvm7YDbz — BBC Breakfast (@BBCBreakfast) June 20, 2023

Who was on board?

The Titanic-touring vessel contained one pilot and four paid passengers called "mission specialists," according to the U.S. Coast Guard. "Mission specialists" take turns operating sonar equipment and performing the tasks necessary to complete a dive.

Among those paid passengers was British businessman Hamish Harding, according to a statement from Action Aviation , a company where Harding works as chairman.

Harding holds three Guinness World Records, including the longest duration (4 hours, 15 minutes) at a full ocean depth (2.88 miles) by a crewed vessel. He has also trekked to the South Pole, circumnavigated the Earth in less than 48 hours and visited space in Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket .

Newly released footage of a 1986 Titanic dive reveals the ship's haunting interior

Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, two members of a prominent Pakistani family known for investing, were also on board the vessel, according to a statement shared with outlets such as The Associated Press .

A fourth person on board is Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French expert on the Titanic, his agent has confirmed to several outlets, including The New York Times . Nargeolet serves as director for RMS Titanic Inc. , the U.S. company that owns the salvage rights to the Titanic site. The Times reports that Nargeolet has completed over 35 dives to the wreckage, including a previous Titan expedition.

Titan's pilot and the fifth person has been identified as OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush.

Why did the vessel go missing?

This 2004 photo shows the remains of a coat and boots in the mud on the sea bed near the Titanic's stern. Institute for Exploration, Center for Archaeological Oceanography/AP hide caption

This 2004 photo shows the remains of a coat and boots in the mud on the sea bed near the Titanic's stern.

It's still unclear why the submersible lost communication with its control crew on the expedition ship.

Ahead of its launch, OceanGate said it would rely on the satellite-based internet company Starlink for the communications necessary for carrying out the expedition. A text-message-based system relying on underwater acoustic positioning normally allows the Titan to communicate with the control ship, according to an Australian researcher writing for The Conversation.

OceanGate says its vessels are "equipped with some basic emergency medical supplies and 96 hours of life support," according to the company's website .

Pop Culture Happy Hour

'titanic' was king of the world 25 years ago for a good reason.

And for good reason: This is not the first time an OceanGate submersible has gotten lost, according to David Pogue, a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning .

Pogue, who traveled on an OceanGate expedition to see the Titanic last summer, recalled that the control room was unable to help the submersible locate the wrecked liner for roughly three hours due to technical difficulties.

James Cameron aims to finally put that 'Titanic' door debate to rest, 25 years later

"The difference this year is that it seems like they lost contact with the ship," Pogue told NPR. "They can't even reach the sub and that's really scary."

He added that factors like bad weather and mechanical issues mean the submersible vessels rarely make it to the Titanic, despite the expensive price tag. This season has seen zero successful dives, Pogue said.

What's it like inside the Titan?

Videos from Pogue's initial CBS Sunday Morning report on OceanGate show him reading from the "mission specialist" waiver, which points out that Titan has not been approved or certified "by any regulatory body."

"I couldn't help noticing how many pieces of this sub seem improvised," Pogue adds.

“Hope is quickly fading” to find the missing submersible that left for a mission to the wreckage of the Titanic, says @Pogue , who went on board the same sub last year. He says it could be impossible to rescue the passengers if the sub is still underwater. pic.twitter.com/n0NTsLYkIJ — CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) June 20, 2023

A single plastic bottle and some Ziploc bags stand in for a toilet. An Xbox game controller and an elevator-esque up/down button serve as the vessel's primary controls. The interior lighting is from Camping World, notes OceanGate founder Stockton Rush.

In whole, the space inside is about the size of a minivan, not tall enough for someone to fully stand.

In an interview with NPR's All Things Considered , Pogue said there are seven different ballast mechanisms that can help the Titan rise from great depths.

"Some of these work even if the power is out or even if everyone on board is passed out," Pogue said.

The fact that rescue crews haven't spotted the vessel on the ocean's surface might mean that the Titan is snagged or its 5-inch-thick carbon fiber hull was penetrated, Pogue said.

Either situation could be catastrophic for the people on board.

What's the latest on the search efforts?

As of Tuesday at 1 p.m. ET, the Titan had about 40 hours of oxygen left, said Capt. Jamie Frederick, a response coordinator for the U.S. Coast Guard overseeing the search.

A unified command including the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy, the Canadian Coast Guard and OceanGate are working together to steer the search efforts, but so far, has come up unsuccessful, Frederick said during a press conference.

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Robert ballard: what hidden underwater worlds are left to discover.

"We wouldn't be searching and putting all effort out there" if the submersible wasn't recoverable, Frederick said, adding that the crews contain the "nation's best experts."

Several Canadian Coast Guard vessels were en route to the scene, as were several additional private vessels.

The teams in place are continuing to use aircraft to scan the ocean, an effort that may get easier on Tuesday as Monday's heavy fog was lifting, said a Coast Guard spokesperson.

Sonar devices are also being employed to detect possible underwater sounds coming from the submersible. Crews have covered 7,600 square miles — an area bigger than the state of Connecticut.

How (and why) this man plans to live underwater for 100 days

The teams also expanded their underwater search capability on Tuesday by adding a remotely operated vehicle in order to reach lower depths. That search is ongoing.

But even if the crews can locate the vessel at a low depth, hauling it up to the surface is another task. The Titan could be at a depth of over 13,000 feet and a distance of over 900 miles offshore. Frederick said the search and rescue crews did not yet have salvage equipment in place.

David Marquet, a retired U.S. Navy submarine captain, told NPR's Morning Edition that the odds of survival are "about 1%."

A former OceanGate executive voiced safety concerns years ago

A fired OceanGate employee urged for additional testing on the hull of the Titan years earlier, according to a 2018 lawsuit. Former director of marine operations David Lochridge sent a report he authored in January 2018, which voiced concerns that the hull used carbon fiber and not a metallic composition. The Titan was being designed to travel 4,000 meters below the surface, which had never been done by an OceanGate vessel with a hull made of carbon fiber, Lochridge stated in court documents.

Furthermore, Lochridge said vessel's viewport, which allows passengers to look outside, was only certified by the manufacturer to withstand pressures at 1,300 meters below the surface. That was due to OceanGate's design of the vessel, which did not meet federal standards, according to the complaint.

Lochridge said he encouraged a nondestructive scan of the hull to check for any defects, rather than solely relying on acoustic monitoring. According to Lochridge, acoustic monitoring only detects a problem in the hull right before it fails.

Lochridge said his concerns were ignored and he was told equipment did not exist for the type of test he was asking for. "The paying passengers would not be aware, and would not be informed, of this experimental design, the lack of non-destructive testing of the hull, or that hazardous flammable materials were being used within the submersible," court documents state. Lochridge was fired in January 2018. In its lawsuit against Lochridge, OceanGate said they did not hire him to do engineering work. However, Lochridge says he made the report at the request of CEO Stockton Rush because the plans for the Titan were being passed from the engineering team to his operations department. Lochridge, who has experience as a submersible pilot and diver, was hired by OceanGate in May 2015 as an independent contractor and later became an employee, according to documents. OceanGate sued Lochridge for fraud, breach of contract, misappropriation of trade secrets and nearly $24,000, claiming that he repeatedly violated the nondisclosure agreement he signed by talking to at least two people about plans for the Titan.

The agreement stated he would not disparage the company and would "hold [OceanGate's] confidential information in strict confidence, and not disclose or use it except as authorized by [OceanGate] and for [OceanGate's] benefit." Lochridge denied violating the NDA, saying it was not properly executed and that his report was not critical of the company. He countersued for wrongful termination, though the parties ultimately reached a settlement.

NPR's Juliana Kim and Tovia Smith contributed reporting.

Correction June 20, 2023

A previous version of this story stated that the submersible has a 5-foot-thick carbon fiber hull. In fact, the hull is 5 inches thick.

• deep sea exploration

Missing Submersible Rescuers Detect ‘Underwater Noise’ in Search Area and Redirect Efforts

The Coast Guard said in a brief statement on Twitter that some of the remote-operated vehicles involved in the search had been relocated in an attempt to determine the origin of the sounds.

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This blog has ended. Follow Thursday’s live coverage of the missing submersible.

Mike Ives ,  Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs ,  Jenny Gross ,  Jenna Russell and Jesus Jiménez

Here’s the latest on the missing submersible.

A Canadian surveillance aircraft looking for the missing Titan submersible and the five people on board in the North Atlantic has “detected underwater noises in the search area,” the U.S. Coast Guard said early Wednesday.

The Coast Guard said in a brief statement on Twitter that remote-operated vehicles were still searching for the Titan. Officials in the United States and Canada did not immediately respond to requests for further comment late Tuesday.

An international team of rescuers has been racing to search for the Titan in an area of the ocean larger than Connecticut. Aircraft from the United States and Canada have been scanning the surface, and sonar buoys have been pinging the depths. The Titan was thought to have less than two days of oxygen remaining as of Tuesday.

Even if the Titan can be located — in a remote patch of ocean where the seafloor lies more than two miles below the choppy surface — retrieving it might not be easy . To recover objects off the seafloor, the U.S. Navy uses a remote-operated vehicle that can reach depths of 20,000 feet. But ships that carry such a vehicle normally move no faster than about 20 miles per hour, and the Titanic wreck lies about 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.

The submersible was more than halfway into what should have been a two-and-a-half-hour dive to the ruins of the Titanic when it lost contact with a chartered research ship on Sunday morning. Leaders in the submersible craft industry had warned for years of possible “catastrophic” problems with the craft’s design and worried that the Titan had not followed standard certification procedures.

Here’s what to know:

The vessel was operated by OceanGate Expeditions , which has provided tours of the Titanic wreck since 2021. Spots in the tours go for a price of up to $250,000 as part of a booming high-risk travel industry .

In 2018, more than three dozen people, including oceanographers, submersible company executives and deep-sea explorers, warned that they had “unanimous concern” about the craft’s design and worried that the Titan had not followed standard certification procedures. In a 2019 blog post, the company said that “bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.”

Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate Expeditions, was piloting the submersible, according to the company. The other four occupants are Hamish Harding , a British businessman and explorer; the British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman ; and Paul-Henri Nargeolet , a French maritime expert who has been on over 35 dives to the Titanic wreck site.

Victoria Kim , Salman Masood and Yonette Joseph contributed reporting.

Mike Ives and Yonette Joseph

A Canadian plane searching for the Titan ‘detected underwater noises,’ the U.S. Coast Guard says.

A Canadian surveillance aircraft looking for the missing Titan submersible in the North Atlantic “detected underwater noises in the search area,” the United States Coast Guard said early Wednesday.

The Coast Guard said in a brief statement on Twitter that some of the remote-operated vehicles involved in the search had been relocated in an attempt to determine the origin of the sounds. Those searches had so far “yielded negative results” but were continuing, the statement said.

Canadian P-3 aircraft detected underwater noises in the search area. As a result, ROV operations were relocated in an attempt to explore the origin of the noises. Those ROV searches have yielded negative results but continue. 1/2 — USCGNortheast (@USCGNortheast) June 21, 2023

The Coast Guard said the Canadian aircraft was a P-3 surveillance plane, a model that is used for maritime patrol and support operations around the world. Data from the aircraft has been shared with the U.S. Navy for further analysis, it said.

The Coast Guard, the Department of Homeland Security and the Canadian military did not immediately respond to requests for comment. News of underwater noises in the search area was reported earlier by Rolling Stone magazine and CNN .

An international team of rescuers has been looking for the Titan in area of water larger than Connecticut. Aircraft from the United States and Canada have been scanning the surface, and sonar buoys have been deployed in the water. The Titan was thought to have less than a day of oxygen remaining as of Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the president of the Explorers Club, a New York-based organization, sent club members a letter that said sonar in the search area had “detected potential ‘tapping sounds’ implying that the crew may be alive and signaling” at 2 a.m. local time. The club’s president, Richard Garriott de Cayeux, did not elaborate.

In a statement posted to Twitter later on Tuesday, he said that “likely signs of life have been detected at the site.” He added that the club was working for approval to deploy a remote-operated vehicle in the search area that was capable of descending to depths of 6,000 meters, or nearly 20,000 feet.

Trevor Hale, a spokesman for the club, declined to comment on the record in a brief phone interview early Wednesday morning. One of the five people aboard the Titan, the British explorer Hamish Harding , is a board member of the club.

Search Vessels Around the Titanic Wreckage

Polar Prince

newfoundland

North Atlantic

the Titanic

Skandi Vinland

Deep Energy

The Canadian vessel

Horizon Arctic deployed

a remote-operated vehicle

that discovered a debris field.

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.

Advertisement

The New York Times

Titan by the numbers: 22 feet long with room for five.

The Titan submersible that went missing over the weekend in the remote North Atlantic is the most lightweight and cost-efficient deep-sea submersible ever made, according to OceanGate Expeditions , the Everett, Wash.-based company that developed it.

Here are details that the company has shared about the vessel.

Capacity: Five people (one pilot and four crew members)

Maximum depth: 13,123 feet

Dimensions: 22 feet long, 9.2 feet wide, 8.3 feet high

Weight: 21,000 pounds

Pressure vessel materials: Carbon fiber and titanium

Speed: 3 knots (about 3.45 miles per hour), with propulsion by four electric thrusters

Life support: 96 hours for five people

The doomed ocean liner Titanic continues to intrigue the public after more than a century.

The five people aboard the missing deep-sea submersible Titan are not the first to risk their lives for a chance to glimpse one of history’s most famous shipwrecks.

More than a century after the R.M.S. Titanic struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic during its first voyage from Britain to New York, the disaster continues to fascinate people like few other episodes in history.

The Titanic, the world’s largest steamship at the time, made headlines when it went down in the early hours of April 15, 1912, killing 1,500 people. It had been packed with glamorous guests and was called “unsinkable” by officials of the company that operated it.

For decades afterward, it was the holy grail of undiscovered shipwrecks and the subject of much storytelling, including “A Night to Remember,” Walter Lord’s best-selling 1955 book.

The mystique endured even after the wreck of the Titanic was found on the sea floor in 1985. Two years later, Mr. Lord was a speaker at a Titanic tribute event aboard a chartered yacht in New York that included a five-piece band like the one that had played for doomed passengers on the Titanic’s stern. In 1997, the James Cameron film “ Titanic ,” starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, introduced the tragedy to a new generation.

Today, young people are watching conversations about the Titanic unfold on social media — including on the short-form video app TikTok, where established facts about the disaster merge with misinformation and manipulated content .

Advances in deep-sea submersible technology have made it possible to travel to the wreck itself. With tickets for the Titan voyage priced at $250,000, the trip is not for everyone, and some critics object to the very idea of visiting an underwater gravesite. Even so, the trips are popular enough to sustain a booming mini-industry.

The company that owns the Titan submersible, OceanGate, has been taking tourists to the Titanic wreck since 2021. It said in a 2019 news release that slots were being booked by “citizen explorers seeking an adventurous, scientific and meaningful experience.”

This year, the company announced that five expeditions, each lasting eight days , were planned for 2023, and another five for 2024.

“This is your chance to step outside of everyday life and discover something truly extraordinary,” the company said. “Become one of the few to see the Titanic with your own eyes.”

Shawn Hubler

Aboard a submersible, you’re a ‘long way’ from help, a former Navy pilot says.

A former national security official who operated deep-dive submersibles for the U.S. Navy said on Tuesday that piloting a vessel like the one that rescuers are searching for in the North Atlantic was like navigating in outer space.

“You are a long way from anything that can give you help,” said Jeff Eggers, a former Navy commander who spent four years piloting military mini-submarines that were similar in size to the missing submersible, called the Titan, but more technologically sophisticated. “You’re incredibly reliant on the integrity of the vessel. And you’re dependent on the resources you’ve built into the craft.”

In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Eggers, who retired from the military in 2013 after two decades of service and served as special assistant for national security affairs in the Obama administration, said the public tended to underappreciate the perils inherent in excursions like the one undertaken by Titan, which went missing on Sunday en route to the ruins of the Titanic.

Among other things, he said, the civilian-operated submersible appeared to lack significant safeguards that the Navy requires, including an escape hatch, so that even if the Titan managed to surface, its occupants would be unable to exit the craft on their own.

Other risks are a constant concern in submersibles, he added, including potential malfunctions with the ballast systems; failures in the vessel’s inner pressure hull, which is shaped like a hot dog and can crack catastrophically under the extreme weight of the ocean; and electrical fires and failures, which tend to knock out the ability to communicate and maneuver.

“We had a lot of redundancy and safety engineered into our submersibles,” he said of the Navy submersibles that he operated. “There’s much less oversight in the civilian context.”

Leaders in the submersible craft industry have long warned that the Titan’s design posed potentially serious problems.

“The conditions at those depths are unforgiving,” Mr. Eggers said. “It’s like operating a small spacecraft.”

William J. Broad

Some experts fear an innovative submersible maker was ‘cutting corners.’

Many vessels that descend into the sunless depths of the sea for scientific exploration are sturdy behemoths with proven engineering and track records for safety.

But Titan , the lost submersible from the company OceanGate , is a technological maverick based on novel concepts that differ from standard designs. Moreover, unlike most deep-sea craft, Titan has undergone no certification by a reputable marine group that does such licensing work for other craft, including one built by OceanGate that dives to shallower depths.

“It suggests they were cutting corners,” said Bruce H. Robison, a senior marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, who has explored the ocean’s depths with more than a dozen different kinds of submersibles.

Alfred S. McLaren, a retired Navy submariner and president emeritus of the Explorers Club of New York City, agreed. “I’ve had three people ask me about making a dive on it,” he said in reference to the lost submersible. “And I said, ‘Don’t do it.’ I wouldn’t do it in a million years.”

When asked to respond to questions about the certification of Titan, a spokesman for OceanGate said in an email, “We are unable to provide any additional information at this time.”

As a class, submersibles go down for hours, not days or months, and rely on a mother ship for support, communications, sustenance for the crew, as well as sleeping bunks and proper toilets.

Whether dependable old designs or innovative newer models, all the craft face the crushing pressures of the abyss — at the level of the Titanic’s resting place, three tons per square inch. They thus face strict requirements for risk avoidance, if not the flat-out assurance of crew and equipment safety.

Private vessels — those used on superyachts, exploratory craft, tourists jaunts — are not formally regulated by any governmental or intergovernmental agency. Nor do they meet the rigorous standards that are applied to deep-sea craft used by the United States Navy and other government agencies.

Even so, the best of the private submersible class undergo extensive testing, certification and ratings for particular depths by such organizations as Lloyd’s Register , a British company that specializes in assessing the quality of oceangoing equipment for the maritime industry. In the industry this is known as classing.

Titan — the 22-foot long submersible that disappeared on Sunday while diving to the Titanic — is unlike most submersibles in that its passenger hull is made of two very different materials. It’s composed of a mix of carbon fiber and titanium, producing a craft significantly lighter than submersibles made primarily of steel or titanium, a lightweight, high-strength metal.

The dissimilar types of materials used in the craft’s hull construction “raise structural concerns,” said Dr. McLaren, who has twice dived on submersibles to the Titanic. “They have different coefficients of expansion and compression, and that works against keeping a watertight bond.”

On its website, the submersible’s owner, OceanGate, a private company in Everett, Wash., says the vessel’s light weight and its launch and recovery platform significantly cut transport and operating costs, making Titan “a more financially viable option for individuals interested in exploring the deep.” Even so, the passenger cost on the current Titanic dive was $250,000.

Titan’s novel construction features also make it incapable of being certified, according to the company . OceanGate explains the craft’s unlicensed (what the industry calls unclassed or uncertified) status on its website as reflecting the vessel’s cutting-edge technologies, rather than a sign of shortcuts or inadequacies that could jeopardize safety.

“The vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure,” the company said on its website. “As a result, simply focusing on classing the vessel does not address the operational risks. Maintaining high-level operational safety requires constant, committed effort and a focused corporate culture — two things that OceanGate takes very seriously and that are not assessed during classification.”

The company did, however, say that one of its other submersibles has completed a safety certification. Antipodes goes down 1,000 feet, a tiny fraction of the Titanic’s depth, which is some two and a half miles. Like Titan, it has been used for tourist dives. Its certification was performed by the American Bureau of Shipping , a marine industry giant based in Houston.

In an interview, Jennifer Mire, a spokesperson for the American Bureau of Shipping, said the company had done no evaluation of the larger submersible. “We don’t have any connection to the Titan,” she said.

OceanGate, in explaining Titan’s lack of certification on its website, said that groups like Lloyd’s Register and the American Bureau of Shipping “often have a multi-year approval cycle due to a lack of pre-existing standards, especially, for example, in the case of many of OceanGate’s innovations, such as carbon-fiber pressure vessels and a real-time hull health monitoring system.”

Dr. McLaren said the company’s line of reasoning was unpersuasive and that the innovative nature of the craft made certification even more important. Knowing that it was uncertified, he said, was enough to make him “run in the opposite direction.”

Triton Submarines , an American company that makes innovative submersibles with transparent hulls to give passengers a panoramic view of the abyss, calls vehicle certification one of the company’s founding principles.

“We are proud that every submersible delivered remains in active service and certified to its original design depth,” it says on the company’s website . “Every Triton ever completed has passed certification.”

Christine Chung

Extreme travel rescue operations are vast in scale and cost. Who foots the bill is murky.

The ongoing search and rescue effort for the missing Titan submersible with five people on board, involving a huge response from American, Canadian and French authorities, is vast in scale, including both the U.S. Navy and the Coast Guard.

The expense for such an endeavor is likely to be equally great, and it is unclear whether taxpayers in the countries involved, ultimately, will be required to pay it. The passengers aboard the submersible paid $250,000 each for the experience of diving to the Titanic.

“These people paid a lot of money to do something extraordinarily risky and hard to recover from,” said Chris Boyer, the executive director of the National Association for Search and Rescue , a nonprofit that focuses on wilderness rescues. The rescue mission, he said, would “probably cost millions.”

In the United States, search and rescue efforts — who conducts them and who pays for them — depend on where you get lost , Mr. Boyer said. Some states, like New Hampshire, charge individuals for rescues if the people are determined to have been reckless.

Cynthia Hernandez, a spokeswoman for the National Park Service , said in a statement that the agency does not charge for search and rescue operations that occur within its parks because it considers them a public service. The park service conducted 3,428 search and rescues last year.

But, she said, when the cost of search and rescue efforts “crosses a certain threshold, funds may be diverted from N.P.S. funds for other types of programs or projects.”

It is unknown whether OceanGate Expeditions, the company that provided the excursion to the Titanic ruins, required its participants to sign up for any trip insurance.

The organizers of risky and adventurous expeditions, including operators like Abercrombie & Kent and Black Tomato , said that they require extensive insurance policies. Peter Anderson, managing director of the luxury concierge service Knightsbridge Circle , said the company works with services like Covac Global that can “evacuate and repatriate our members for medical emergencies.” But even the minimum policy, $100,000, would not come close to paying for the current efforts.

The Coast Guard did not immediately respond to questions about the expense of past extensive search and rescue efforts.

In 2021, it rescued Cyril Derreumaux , an experienced kayaker who was about a week into an attempt to paddle 2,400 nautical miles from the California coast to Hawaii. The Coast Guard estimated his rescue, which involved a helicopter and at least one diver, cost $42,000, according to The San Francisco Chronicle .

Mr. Derreumaux, who lives in Marin County, Calif., and is now 46, emphasized in an interview that his goal was to fulfill a dream and that he was not a tourist who had undertaken the venture with minimal training. He received backlash after being rescued, he said, with some people saying that the effort was costly and unnecessary. A stranger even sent him a Venmo request for tens of thousands of dollars, Mr. Derreumaux said.

Mr. Derreumaux said he was thankful to the Coast Guard for saving his life, along with the lives of many others in need of its help.

“I would not have called the Coast Guard if it weren’t a life-threatening situation,” he said.

He attempted the trip again the following year. This time, he was successful.

“I knew I had what it takes to do it,” he said. “I think it’s part of the human spirit of trying to do things that are really hard for what it teaches us about human resilience, determination and to do things that maybe don’t make sense.”

Of the Titan’s passengers, Mr. Derreumaux said: “Their lives are worth saving.”

Claire Fahy contributed reporting.

Anushka Patil and Jacey Fortin

Inside the Titan: Quiet and cramped, with a single porthole.

Passengers seeking a glimpse of the R.M.S. Titanic aboard the submersible that disappeared in the North Atlantic this week have endured hours in a dangerous drop to the ocean floor aboard a cramped craft with a single porthole.

Mike Reiss, a producer and writer for “The Simpsons,” boarded the vessel, known as the Titan, last summer. He said that passengers were required to sign a waiver that mentioned death three times on the first page.

Passengers on his 10-hour journey — a trip that can cost up to $250,000 — were composed but excited, he said. Sandwiches and water were available on the vessel, but he recalled being told that many passengers did not eat during the journey because of excitement, and that the rudimentary toilet on board had never been used.

OceanGate Expeditions, which operates the vessel, has described the trip on its website as a “thrilling and unique travel experience.” The company did not immediately respond to a request for more information on Tuesday.

The Titan is a tight fit. David Pogue, a CBS reporter and former New York Times tech columnist who has been on board, described the cylinder as “about the size of a minivan.”

Images from OceanGate show a vessel with an interior like a metal tube , where passengers can sit on the flat floor with their backs to the curved walls. There is some overhead lighting but no chairs, and little room to move or stand upright.

Still, Mr. Reiss, who had previously traveled with OceanGate Expeditions to see Hudson Canyon off the shores of New York City, described the journey to the Titanic as “very comfortable” and said he fell asleep during the quiet, dimly lit descent. “You just drop like a stone for two and a half hours,” he said.

As the submersible made its way to the Titanic, Mr. Reiss said, it was carried off course by underwater currents. The compass was “acting very weird,” he recalled, and the team knew only that they were about 500 yards from where they should have been.

Still, the Titan, which could spend only three hours on the ocean floor, managed to arrive at the wreck with roughly 20 minutes to spare for what Mr. Reiss called a quick “photo op.” He was able to see the sunken ship through the porthole, which he described as the size of a washing machine window.

The wreck was “the biggest thing in the world,” he said, “but you’re in such darkness, you just don’t know where it is going to be.”

Here’s how to search for the missing craft underwater.

The hunt for a deep-diving submersible last seen slipping beneath the waves to visit the wreckage of the R.M.S. Titanic on Sunday now involves the coast guards of both the United States and Canada. But finding a single object on the bottom of the ocean is no easy task.

The U.S. Coast Guard is facing extreme logistical challenges as it races to find and reach the Titan. The five people inside the submersible were believed to have roughly 40 hours of breathable air left as of early Tuesday afternoon, Coast Guard officials said.

While the U.S. and Canadian militaries have deployed rescue craft by both air and sea, the job of locating the Titan may ultimately fall to civilian undersea explorers, who typically use technologies in tandem to search the seafloor and identify objects.

To scan large areas of water, devices called autonomous underwater vehicles are often used. Before being placed into the water, these torpedo-like robots are programmed with the boundaries of a search area. They then dive and propel themselves at a preset altitude above the bottom, radiating sonar waves.

The emitters, called side-scan sonars, have evolved to produce fairly detailed imagery of objects on the bottom that can be analyzed once the vehicles are brought back aboard a mother ship and their data is downloaded. Those missions can take hours to complete, depending on the size of the area being searched.

Using the analysis of those sonar images, explorers may find areas of interest, often based on features like straight lines and right angles that indicate a man-made object.

The extreme depths involved pose a challenge. Divers wearing specialized equipment can safely reach depths of just a few hundred feet below the surface before having to spend long amounts of time decompressing on the way back up. A couple hundred feet deeper, and darkness reigns.

The Titanic lies at a depth in the North Atlantic that humans can reach only while inside specialized submersibles that keep their occupants warm, dry and supplied with breathable air.

Searchers can send down a type of uncrewed device called a remote-operated vehicle, which is controlled by a human operator on the surface and has optical cameras that send a constant video feed through an umbilical line to the mother ship. Such vehicles often have gripper arms that can pick up objects on the seafloor.

Advanced vehicles like the U.S. Navy’s CURV-21 can dive to 20,000 feet underwater and can use gripper arms to delicately thread straps and lifting lines to objects so they can be winched to the surface by cranes aboard a salvage ship.

But getting that kind of equipment to the site takes time. The Titanic’s wreck is about 370 miles south of Newfoundland, and the kinds of ships that can carry a vehicle like the Navy’s deepest-diving robot normally move no faster than about 20 miles per hour.

In many submersibles, the air inside is recycled — carbon dioxide is removed and oxygen is added — but on a long enough timeline, the vessel will lose the ability to scrub enough carbon dioxide, and the air inside will no longer sustain life.

If the Titan’s batteries run down and are no longer able to run heaters that keep the occupants warm in the freezing deep, the people inside can become hypothermic. Should the submersible’s pressure hull fail, the end for those inside would be certain and quick.

Daniel Victor

Stockton Rush, pilot of the Titan, is a booster of deep-seas tourism.

Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate Expeditions and one of the five occupants of the submersible missing this week in the North Atlantic, has advocated for deep-seas tourism in the face of criticism.

His company proceeded with its tours despite the “unanimous concern” expressed by three dozen industry leaders in 2018. In an interview last year , he told The New York Times that high-resolution footage gathered on the Titanic tours could benefit researchers.

“No public entity is going to fund going back to the Titanic,” Mr. Rush said. “There are other sites that are newer and probably of greater scientific value.”

In the interview, he defended the price tag — seats in the Titan cost up to $250,000.

“For those who think it’s expensive, it’s a fraction of the cost of going to space, and it’s very expensive for us to get these ships and go out there,” said Mr. Rush, who founded OceanGate in 2009. “And the folks who don’t like anybody making money sort of miss the fact that that’s the only way anything gets done in this world.”

By some accounts, Mr. Rush has been a charismatic booster of submersible trips. Mike Reiss, a writer and producer of “The Simpsons,” who took a trip in a different OceanGate submersible that was piloted by Mr. Rush, compared him on Tuesday to Henry Ford and the Wright brothers, describing him as “a magnetic man” who is “the last of the great American dreamers.”

Craig Howard, a longtime friend of Mr. Rush’s, said on Tuesday that just before he left Newfoundland for the Titanic site, Mr. Rush told him he was excited for this year’s dives.

“And there was always a ‘next dive,’” he said.

Mr. Rush is a descendant of two signers of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton. He graduated from Princeton with a degree in aerospace engineering in 1984, according to his company biography. In 1989, he personally built an experimental aircraft that he continues to fly, the company said.

In a segment on “CBS Sunday Morning” that aired in November 2022, Mr. Rush told the interviewer, David Pogue, that he grew up wanting to be an astronaut and, after he earned his degree, a fighter pilot.

“I had this epiphany that I didn’t want — it wasn’t about going to space,” Mr. Rush said. “It was about exploring. It was about finding new life forms. I wanted to be sort of the Captain Kirk. I didn’t want to be the passenger in the back. And I realized that the ocean is the universe.”

Anushka Patil and Emma Bubola contributed reporting.

Matthew Bloch ,  Keith Collins and Scott Reinhard

Multiple vessels assisted in the search Tuesday, with more on the way.

The Sycamore was

approximately 975 miles

from the wreckage

at 10:54 a.m. Wednesday.

Ann Harvey and

Terry Fox at

around 11:00 a.m.

Newfoundland

The Polar Prince , John Cabot

and three other vessels

were within 26 miles

of the wreckage by around

11:00 a.m. Wednesday.

at 10:50 p.m.

Atalante at

Glace Bay at

10:50 p.m. Tuesday

Sources: United States Coast Guard, MarineTraffic, GEBCO

Note: All times are in Eastern. Data as of 11:30 a.m.

The U.S. Coast Guard said on Tuesday that several more vessels were on their way to assist in the search for the Titan submersible, including its ship the Sycamore and a Canadian Coast Guard vessel, John Cabot. The French government said on Tuesday that it was also sending a research vessel, the Atalante, which is equipped with an exploration robot, to help with the search. They will join the M.V. Polar Prince and Deep Energy, a pipe-laying vessel flagged in the Bahamas.

The Polar Prince deployed the Titan submersible on Sunday and has been searching the area since losing contact with it less than two hours later. Deep Energy arrived at the scene earlier on Tuesday and launched a remotely-operated vehicle, or R.O.V., to aid in the search, the Coast Guard said. American and Canadian aircraft have also been scanning the search area by sight and radar, and have deployed sonar buoys.

Highlights from Day One as the search for the missing Titanic submersible continues

Coverage on this live blog has ended. Please click here for the latest updates. 

The CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, Stockton Rush, was on board and piloting the missing submersible that vanished during a mission to explore the wreckage of the Titanic , the company said Tuesday.

There is less than 40 hours of oxygen supply left on the missing vessel, named Titan, which is carrying five people, a U.S. Coast Guard official said Tuesday as the search continues.

The submersible is part of an OceanGate Expeditions tour that offers passengers a once-in-a-lifetime experience to explore the Titanic wreckage. It went missing Sunday after it lost contact with the research vessel Polar Prince.

What to know about the missing vessel, Titan

• The U.S. Coast Guard is searching for the missing research submersible, named Titan, that disappeared Sunday.
• The wreckage of the Titanic, the iconic ocean liner that sank more than a century ago, is 900 nautical miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
• The sub had up to 96 hours of oxygen supply and by 1 p.m. ET Tuesday was down to 41 hours, the U.S. Coast Guard said.
• Canadian aircraft detected “underwater noises” in the search area, the U.S. Coast Guard said early Wednesday. It said searches “yielded negative results but continue.”
• The price of a spot on the submersible was $250,000. It was on only its third trip since OceanGate Expeditions began offering trips in 2021.

British billionaire Hamish Harding, owner of Action Aviation, was also among the five people on the vessel , along with French dive expert Paul Henry Nargeolet and prominent Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

Aircraft detect 'underwater noises' in the search for missing submersible

Phil Helsel

Valeriya Antonshchuk

Canadian aircraft searching for signs of the submersible detected “underwater noises” in the search area, the U.S. Coast Guard said early Wednesday.

The underwater noises, detected by Canadian P-3 aircraft, prompted searches by remotely operated vehicles, the Coast Guard tweeted shortly before 12:30 a.m. ET.

"Those ROV searches have yielded negative results but continue," the message read. "Additionally, the data from the P-3 aircraft has been shared with our U.S. Navy experts for further analysis which will be considered in future search plans."

A representative said OceanGate was unable to provide any additional information at this time.

Coast Guard image shows search patterns for Titan

The U.S. Coast Guard released an image showing the search patterns for Titan.

It said that 10,000 square miles had been searched as of Tuesday and that the searches are ongoing.

Canadian coast guard, navy and private research and commercial vessels with remotely operated vehicles have responded or were en route to help Tuesday, officials said. The U.S. and Canada also have planes searching.

Coast Guard establishes unified command in search for Titan

The U.S. Coast Guard said Tuesday night that it and other agencies and searchers are operating under a unified command as the search for the Titan continues.

More than 10,000 square miles had been searched by Tuesday morning, the Coast Guard said, and weather and visibility have improved.

Three Canadian coast guard ships, as well as a commercial vessel and a French research vessel with remote-operated vehicles, and a Canadian navy ship with a mobile decompression chamber were on the way, the Coast Guard said.

The Bahamian research vessel Deep Energy and a U.S. Air National Guard C-130 are also searching, the Coast Guard said.

Friend of man on submersible says he and Hamish Harding's family are hopeful

Tom Costello

Titan submersible passenger Hamish Harding was excited for the voyage down to the ocean’s depths to see the wreckage of the Titanic, friend and business partner Terry Virts said Tuesday.

“He was excited. The text I got was ‘hey, we’re headed down to Titanic today, exclamation point,” Virts, a former NASA astronaut and Air Force F-16 pilot, told NBC News. Harding sent the text early Sunday.

Harding, the owner of Action Aviation, is one of five people aboard the missing Titan submersible, which is the focus of a search in the North Atlantic. He was not worried about the risks but was aware of them, Virts said.

Virts said he and Harding’s family are hopeful.

"The really good news that we have is that we haven’t heard bad news — they haven’t found a wreckage, they haven’t found debris floating, the sonar didn’t pick up any kind of crushing or exploding noise," he said. "So there’s definitely hope that the crew is alive in the submersible."

Search for missing submersible is a ‘monumental task,’ expert says

One of the best-case scenarios that might have happened to the Titan would be if it has been entangled in the wreckage of the Titanic, an ocean explorer and expert said Tuesday.

If that's the case, it could make the submersible with five people aboard easier to find, Tim Taylor, an ocean explorer and the CEO of Tiburon Subsea, said on NBC News Now.

“Lifting the submarine off the bottom is not as hard or difficult as one may think if it’s still intact,” Taylor said.

It’s unclear what happened to the submersible, and searches are ongoing.

“You’re really fighting a clock here,” Taylor said. “They don’t have a lot of options. Every hour that goes by, their options get less and less.”

Getting assets to the area takes time, he said, and when equipment arrives, searchers will have to decide where to look with the time they have.

“This is a monumental task,” he said.

Canada sending ship specializing in dive medicine

A Canadian plane with sonar flew above the area around the Titan, and Canada is sending rescue ships and a vessel equipped with a mobile hyperbaric recompression chamber, officials said.

The Royal Canadian Air Force CP-140 Aurora has been providing sonar searches, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

The Royal Canadian Navy ship HMCS Glace Bay has also been dispatched, Canada’s military said.

“HMCS Glace Bay provides a medical team specializing in dive medicine and a six person mobile hyperbaric recompression chamber,” it said in a statement.

A hyperbaric recompression chamber is used to treat or prevent decompression sickness. When divers are exposed to rapid decreases in pressure, nitrogen forms bubbles in tissue and blood.

Two other Canadian coast guard ships were either there or on the way.

U.S. Navy and Air Force sending support to search efforts

Doha Madani

The U.S. Coast Guard is getting help in its search efforts from two other branches of the military.

A spokesperson for the Navy said it was deploying its Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System to assist the Coast Guard. The equipment is specifically designed for the "recovery of large, bulky, and heavy undersea objects," and it has deep ocean lifting capacity.

The Air Force will also provide aid by transporting "rescue-related" cargo from Buffalo, New York, to St. Johns, Newfoundland, it said.

King Charles asks to be updated on Titan passengers

Andrew Jones

David K. Li

King Charles III "has been asked to be kept up to date, and his thoughts and prayers are with the families and all those involved in the rescue operation," a royal source told NBC News.

Two of those on the submersible, Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son , Suleman, are British citizens.

OceanGate CEO was piloting the sub when it disappeared

Stockton Rush, OceanGate's chief executive, was piloting the submersible, the company confirmed Tuesday.

A spokesperson previously said Rush was on board as a member of the crew.

Pilot said in lawsuit he was fired for warning Titan wasn't safe for deep dives

Corky Siemaszko

The pilot OceanGate hired to run manned tests of submersibles claimed five years ago in court papers that he was fired after he warned that the Titan’s carbon shell was not properly tested to make sure it could descend safely to 4,000 meters.

David Lochridge also claimed OceanGate refused to pay extra for a viewport that could be used safely at a depth of 4,000 meters.

When he complained that OceanGate would be endangering customers, Lochridge said in the court papers, he was given “10 minutes to immediately clear out his desk.”

Lochridge’s claims, which were first reported by The New Republic , were in his counterclaim to a 2018 breach of contract lawsuit OceanGate filed saying he was not an engineer. The two sides settled a few months later.

Titan's depth capabilities were downgraded short of the Titanic

The hull of the Titan vessel "showed signs of cyclic fatigue," according to a January 2020 interview with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who is aboard the missing vessel. Rush told GeekWire that due to that stress, the hull rating was downgraded to a depth of 3,000 meters, 800 meters short of the Titanic's depth.

In a December 2019 slideshow that appears to have been presented to the Deep Submergence Science Committee of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System, OceanGate listed the depth capability of the Titan as 3,000 meters.

At the time, the CEO was announcing a new round of funding for the company, which he said would go toward funding new vessels that could go deeper than the Titan.

But in 2021, OceanGate announced that Titan, not another vessel, had completed a trip to the Titanic.

There had been no public update about Titan's depth rating since it was downgraded.

On the company’s current webpage , it says the ship is designed for a 4,000-meter depth, despite previous statements made about the vessel's capabilities.

Titan's tiny space includes some bathroom privacy

Despite the Titan's close quarters, passengers do have access to semiprivate bathroom privileges.

"But because our sub is carbon fiber and we have so much space, we actually have a bathroom that is bigger than most private jets’ (bathrooms)," OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush told German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle in 2019 .

"You can put up a little curtain and you have some privacy. Most of our clients and I think even the researchers say that’s a huge thing, because nobody really looks forward to the idea of sitting next to two strangers, shoulder to shoulder, while you go to the bathroom."

Rescue operation faces extreme environment in search for missing sub

Denise Chow

Rescuers trying to find a submersible that disappeared on a dive to the wreckage of the Titanic are not only racing the clock as the sub’s oxygen supplies dwindle — they are also battling a harsh and unforgiving environment more akin to outer space than most places on Earth.

“It’s pitch black down there. It’s freezing cold. The seabed is mud, and it’s undulating. You can’t see your hand in front of your face,” historian and Titanic expert Tim Maltin said in an interview with NBC News Now . “It’s really a bit like being an astronaut going into space.”

The deep-diving 22-foot submersible, operated by OceanGate Expeditions, vanished Sunday with five passengers on board, setting off a frantic rescue mission over a stretch of the North Atlantic Ocean roughly 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

But unlike space, humanity’s presence deep in the world’s oceans is minimal, and the technology for search-and-recovery missions is limited.

Read the full story here.

OceanGate CEO called Titan's 2018 christening 'one of the great moments of submersibles'

When it was launched five years ago, the submersible Titan was hailed as a technological wonder of its time.

"This will be one of the great moments of submersibles in that this technology is what we need to explore the ocean depth," OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush said at Titan's 2018 christening in Everett, Washington .

Rush insisted that day that private industry would be the great driving force of ocean exploration with little help from government agencies.

"The days of government funding are gone," he said. "It really needs to be a private enterprise, just as exploration was at the turn of the last century where people with means make the exploration possible."

Promotional documents illustrate tight quarters

Promotional documents for the Titan craft found on OceanGate’s website reveal the tight quarters that the five passengers are currently in.

In a diagram of the manned ship, which is 22 feet by 9.2 feet by 8.3 feet according to the documents, only one of the passengers is able to fully extend their legs. The diagram calls the arrangement the "Typical seating configuration."

In a photograph published on a separate document, a similar configuration was depicted, with a caption saying, "Mission Specialists onboard Titan."

Visibility conditions have improved today for aerial search

Marlene Lenthang

Visibility conditions have significantly improved today for aircraft scouring the surface of the Atlantic Ocean for signs of the missing OceanGate submersible, the Coast Guard said.

“Visibility was very foggy yesterday with very little to no visibility, but was increasing today and they were expecting much better conditions from an aerial search perspective,” Chief Petty Officer Robert Simpson, with the 1st Coast Guard District Public Affairs Office, said Tuesday.

He said the weather at the scene today included 5- to 6-foot waves and 15-knot winds.

In addition to assets from the Coast Guard, Navy and Canadian partners already deployed, civilian research vessels are also volunteering to aid in the search.

OceanGate's CEO is aboard missing submersible

Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, is aboard the missing submersible, the company confirmed Tuesday afternoon.

He is on board as a member of the crew, the company said.

So far search has yielded 'no results'

The extensive search for the missing tourist submersible near the Titanic wreck has yielded "no results," Capt. Jamie Frederick with the 1st Coast Guard District said in a briefing Tuesday.

He said so far the search has been on the surface and under the water using sonar buoys over an area the size of the state of Connecticut. 

The search is ongoing with additional assets on the way to rescue the five people on board the Titan. There’s 41 hours of oxygen supply left on the vessel, "about 40 hours of breathable air," Frederick said.

France sends ship and robot to aid search for missing submersible

France is sending a ship called the Atalante to aid in the search for the missing OceanGate submersible, the French maritime ministry said Tuesday.

The ship was sent out in response to a request from American authorities Monday evening, the ministry said.

The ship, managed by the Ifremer research institute, was on a mission in the area, about a 48-hour drive from the Titanic wreckage. It'll arrive at the search site by 8 p.m. local time Wednesday.

A team from Ifremer will also arrive in Newfoundland on Wednesday morning to operate an exploration robot aboard the ship called Victor6000 that can dive to a depth of 4,000 meters.

Titan got ‘lost’ underwater last summer, CBS correspondent says

David Pogue, a CBS News correspondent, said that last year the submersible got “lost on the sea floor for a few hours,” when he was on an OceanGate expedition to visit the Titanic’s resting place.

“On my expedition last summer, they did indeed get lost for about 5 hours,” Pogue tweeted Monday. A segment on the trip aired in November . 

Pogue wasn’t in the submersible, but was in a control room on a ship at the surface at the time.

He noted the submersible never lost communication with its mother ship. He said the Titan didn’t have a beacon similar to an aircraft’s emergency locator transmitter, but “such a beacon was discussed.” 

“They could still send short texts to the sub, but did not know where it was. It was quiet and very tense, and they shut off the ship’s internet to prevent us from tweeting,” he said Monday. The company claimed it was to keep all channels open in case of a serious emergency, Pogue said.

Why the Titan wasn't safety classed

The missing submersible Titan wasn’t classed by an independent group that sets safety standards, as most chartered vessels are. 

OceanGate said in a blog post in February 2019 that Titan wasn’t classed because its technology was so new and their innovation “falls outside of the existing industry paradigm.”

It said there’d be a “multi-year approval cycle due to a lack of pre-existing standards.”

Classing usually checks if vessels meet standards in buoyancy, number of life rafts and hull materials, the blog post said. OceanGate said that while classing has a safety value, it is “not sufficient to ensure safety.”

'No signal is very bad news,' expert says

Mithil Aggarwal

As a sweeping effort to locate the missing submersible continued, Pengfei Liu, professor of marine hydrodynamics at Britain's Newcastle University, told NBC News that the apparent lack of signal from the vessel is “very worrying.”

Ideally, a submersible should send a signal out every few minutes, he said, but it was not known if OceanGate had detected any recent signals after research vessel Polar Prince lost contact with the sub Sunday. OceanGate did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NBC News.

“No signal is very bad news,” the marine hydrodynamics professor said. An equipment failure due to an existing defect, depleted power or external damage could cause a signal outage, he said.

“If the submersible’s hull collapses under the enormous pressure, then survival chances are zero,” he said, adding that locating it in the first place would also be complicated had the vessel gotten stuck at the wreckage, since sonar systems would need to differentiate between the two.

Missing father and son Suleman and Shahzada Dawood pictured

Chantal Da Silva

Shahzada Dawood and son Suleman can be seen in the photo below.

The father, a prominent Pakistani businessman, and his son were identified as being onboard the vessel by family and colleagues.

The father and son, both British citizens, belong to one of Pakistan’s most prominent families, according to The Associated Press.

Their firm invests in agriculture, industries and the health sector, while Shahzada Dawood is also on the board of trustees for the California-based SETI Institute, which searches for extraterrestrial intelligence, according to the news agency.

Submersible was operated with a video game controller

Titan, the missing tourist submersible, was operated by a video game controller and had parts that were described as “off-the-shelf components.”

During a tour of the vessel in a CBS News segment that aired in November, OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush pointed out some of these unexpected features, including a light fixture from CamperWorld and a makeshift toilet with a plastic bottle.

He brought out a Logitech game controller, saying that “we run the whole thing with this.” It was not immediately clear whether the submersible was operated with such a controller during the latest mission.

Game controllers can have a wide range of uses, including by pilots controlling drones, as well as in medical training.

OceanGate’s website describes the five-person submersible as a combination of “ground-breaking engineering and off-the-shelf technology,” the latter of which “helped to streamline the construction, and makes it simple to operate and replace parts in the field.” 

Thoughts of crew and their families driving search efforts

In the desperate search for the missing vessel touring the shipwreck of the Titanic deep in the Atlantic, crews are thinking of the lives of the five people on board first and foremost. 

“The thoughts of the crew members and their families really drive our crews forward and all of the partners that have been working this complex case to make sure we can continue to find them,” Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said Tuesday morning on NBC's "TODAY" show.

Factors such as oxygen levels, intense water pressure, and the remoteness of the area make the search difficult. 

The ship went down Sunday with four days worth of oxygen. The wreckage of the Titanic is also at a depth of 13,000 feet — too deep for typical U.S. Navy subs, which typically go down to 2,000 or 3,000 feet, to descend to. 

Canadian aircraft dropped a sonar buoy into the ocean listening for tapping or talking in an effort to pinpoint the submersible.  

OceanGate Expeditions leading underwater search

OceanGate Expeditions is leading the underwater search for the missing Titanic tourist submersible because the deep-water exploration company “know[s] that site better than anybody else,” Rear Adm. John Mauger with the Coast Guard said on NBC's “TODAY” show Tuesday morning. 

As the search for the 21-foot submersible entered the third day, Mauger said search crews have an “understanding” of where the submersible was operating and searches are being prioritized in those areas. 

The wreckage of the Titanic sits 900 nautical miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Searches are underway with equipment the Coast Guard has brought to the area. The agency's current focus is on getting more assets and technical experts to the scene as fast as possible.

What did the Titanic expedition set out to achieve?

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

On its website , the company said the expeditions are intended to "further document the Titanic and its rate of decay."

"Given the massive scale of the wreck and the debris field, multiple missions performed over several years will be required to fully document and model the wreck site," it says. "This longitudinal survey to collect images, videos, laser, and sonar data will allow objective assessment of the rate of decay and documentation of the process."

"Qualified explorers have the opportunity to join the expedition as Mission Specialist crewmembers whose Training and Mission Support Fees underwrite the mission, the participation of the science team, and their own training," the company states.

'You just rely on the thing being well made,' past survivor says

For Roger Mallinson, one of two people rescued in the deepest underwater rescue ever, according to Guinness World Records, the search for the missing Titanic tour sub has evoked difficult memories.

Almost 50 years ago, while working on laying a transatlantic telephone cable, Mallinson's submersible hurled toward the sea floor after the rope connecting it with the mothership snapped. Mallinson’s crew of two was trapped for over 80 hours on Aug. 29, 1973, at more than 1,500 feet below sea level as rescuers scrambled to locate his sub around 150 miles off Cork, Ireland.

“You just rely on the thing being well made,” he told NBC News. As hours passed and temperatures dropped, the crew struggled to keep the carbon dioxide levels low, relying on the extra oxygen tank that Mallinson said he had snuck in before the dive.

Locating a submersible is the first challenge he said, which could be done by sonar, but he added it could be difficult to locate if the sonar is obstructed. Bringing the crew back up is another challenge. “What complicates a rescue mission is, whether they lift it from the surface or they do it from the bottom by adding buoyancy to the submersible."

Regardless, the crew inside has little options at their disposal, he said. They could be transmitting via the sea telephone but if they haven't already, "something very drastic must have happened by now," he said.

Behind the U.S. Coast Guard's search

Phil McCausland

U.S. Coast Guard officials said they have "brought all assets that we have available" to the search to find the missing sub.

Speaking at a news conference on Monday afternoon, Rear Adm. John Mauger, who is leading the search, said the Coast Guard had brought in technical experts, dropped sonar buoys to listen for underwater noise and reached out to other government agencies and private contractors for aid and “to really better understand what an undersea search and rescue effort would look like."

In addition, Coast Guard officials said they had deployed two C-130 aircraft for an aerial search and that the sonar buoys can listen to a depth of 13,000 feet. The New York National Guard is providing a third C-130, and the Canadian Coast Guard provided a C-130, as well as a P8 Poseidon aircraft that has underwater detection capabilities.

The U.S. Coast Guard said it is also relying on commercial boat operators that were already in the nearby waters, as well as OceanGate’s mother ship, Polar Prince, for help.

Mauger added at the news conference that the Coast Guard is working to expand its capabilities to include an underwater search, as well.

Sub had up to 96 hours of oxygen supply, Coast Guard says

The search to find the missing submersible has become a race against time, with Coast Guard officials saying the sub had a 96-hour oxygen "reserve capacity."

“We really brought all assets that we have available to us to bear on finding the submersible and the people in it,” Rear Adm. John Mauger said at a news conference on Monday. “When something happens on the high seas, it gets complicated quickly," he added.

On a website page for the missing vessel, Titan, OceanGate Expeditions also describes the sub as having a “life support” of 96 hours for five crew members.

Asked how much of the 96 hours were left, Mauger said on Monday that officials anticipated there were somewhere between 70 to the full 96 hours available.

Map: Where is the Titanic located?

Max Butterworth

The Titanic wreck is located around 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada in the North Atlantic Ocean. It sits on the ocean floor in two main sections at a depth of about 12,500 feet.

The luxury liner sank in 1912 on its maiden voyage to New York from Southampton, England after it hit an iceberg, taking the lives of over 1,500 passengers. 

Since it’s discovery in 1985, the wreck has been the site of numerous expeditions, including a recent full-size digital scan , revealing the remains in never before seen detail. 

The RMS Titanic Expedition Mission 5 submersible in the early hours of Sunday morning.

‘This could be the end’: NY writer describes trip on missing sub

Mike Reiss, a New York-based writer and producer who has worked on The Simpsons, says he was among the explorers to take a trip on the Titan sub last year.

"Yes, the sub that’s gone missing is the same one I took down to the Titanic. I wish everyone involved the best of luck," Reiss said in a Twitter post .

Speaking with BBC Breakfast in the U.K., Reiss said: “You sign a massive waiver that lists one way after another that you could die on the trip. They mention death three times on page one so it’s never far from your mind.”

“As I was getting onto the sub my thought was this could be the end," he said. “So nobody who’s in this situation was caught off guard. You all know what you are getting into."

What is a submersible?

The vessel that has gone missing is a submersible — not to be confused with a submarine.

Unlike a submarine, which is a fully autonomous craft "capable of renewing its own power and breathing air," a submersible relies on outside support, such as a surface vessel, a team onshore or sometimes even a larger submarine, according to OceanGate Expeditions, the company behind the Titanic tour dive.

The vessel that went missing is named Titan, according to The Associated Press . NBC News was not immediately able to confirm this. On its website, OceanGate describes its Titan vessel as a "revolutionary carbon fiber and titanium submersible with a depth range of 4,000 meters (13,123 feet) that provides access to almost 50% of the world’s oceans."

"Titan ushers in a new era of crewed submersible exploration and is the only sub in the world that can take five crewmembers to these depths," it says.

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

David Ingram

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. 

First full-size scan showed Titanic wreck as never seen before

Henry Austin

Few people will ever get the opportunity to survey the wreckage of the Titanic up close — a bid that was at the heart of Sunday's mission when the Titan vessel went missing.

The first first full-size digital scan of the  Titanic  recently revealed the world’s most famous shipwreck as never seen before, however, and experts are hopeful it will provide more insight into how the liner came to sink in 1912. 

What we know about missing billionaire Hamish Harding

Hamish Harding, a billionaire and the owner and chairman of Action Aviation, is among the five people onboard the missing vessel.

Action Aviation, established in 2004, is described on its website as a global sales company in business aviation.

A post Sunday on Harding’s Instagram account said he was joining OceanGate’s expedition “as a mission specialist” — typically a one-time crew member who pays a fee to join the effort.

"Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023," Harding said in his post. He said that a "weather window" had just opened up and that the team was going to attempt a dive the following day.

"Until then we have a lot of preparations and briefings to do," he said.

Pakistani businessman and son were onboard sub, family says

A prominent Pakistani businessman, Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman, were among the five people onboard the vessel when it went missing, family and colleagues said.

“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 family said in a statement provided by Engro, a company where Dawood serves as vice chairman of the board.

"We, at Engro, remain in prayer for their swift and safe return, and will share any updates we may have as and when they come," the company said.

Hamish Harding , the billionaire owner and chairman of Action Aviation, was previously identified as one of the missing crew members. The other two people who were onboard the vessel have yet to be identified.

Search continues for missing Titanic tour submersible

The U.S. Coast Guard continues its search on Tuesday for the missing submersible that disappeared Sunday after it departed for a mission to explore the wreck of the Titanic.

The 21-foot submersible and its five-person crew started a dive Sunday morning from the Canadian research vessel Polar Prince, the Coast Guard said. But the Polar Prince lost contact with the vessel after an hour and 45 minutes and it remains missing.

The missing submersible  —  named Titan,  according to The Associated Press   —  is part of a tour offered by private company OceanGate Expeditions exploring the Titanic wreckage, 900 nautical miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Billionaire explains why he's planning voyage to Titanic site nearly year after submersible implosion

Entrepreneur Larry Connor said he wants to show certified submersibles are safe.

Nearly a year after five people died aboard the OceanGate "Titan" submersible while on a deep-sea voyage to the site of the Titanic, a billionaire has announced plans to go to the infamous wreck.

Entrepreneur and real estate investor Larry Connor said this week that he and Triton Submarines CEO Patrick Lahey are planning their own deep-sea expedition in a submersible.

Asked why, Connor told "Good Morning America" correspondent Will Reeve that the purpose of the voyage is to "demonstrate safety" of certified submersibles.

"If you look at submersibles that have been DNV certified ... there's never been an accident," he said. "The OceanGate vessel was not certified and never would have been."

While on a tour of the Titanic wreckage off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, in June 2023, the OceanGate submersible imploded underwater, killing all five people on board, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush. Following a dayslong search, the remnants of the missing submersible were found on the ocean floor about 1,600 feet from the bow of the wrecked Titanic.

Experts called the carbon fiber construction of the Titan fundamentally flawed and a whistleblower who worked on a predecessor to the Titan vessel raised concerns about the inefficiency of the hull design. Rush had previously defended the decision to manufacture the submersible with carbon fiber, saying he believed it would have a better strength-to-buoyancy ratio than titanium. The exact cause of the implosion remains under investigation by federal authorities.

MORE: James Cameron compares submersible tragedy to Titanic sinking: 'I'm struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster'

OceanGate, which suspended all exploration and commercial operations after the deadly implosion, could not be reached for comment.

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Connor said he and Lahey are designing a new, safer and certified submersible, known as the Explorer, that could take two people to the Titanic site. The submersible will cost $13 million to $15 million and have an acrylic hull and offer a near-panoramic view.

Connor said he is "very confident" about the plan and would not do a dive if he was not "100% convinced" that the submersible was safe.

"The moment we don't meet one standard, the project is done," he said. "We will not compromise safety."

In addition to proving safety, he said continued deep-sea dives carry scientific benefits.

"Almost three-quarters of the earth is covered in water. Isn't doing research important and worthwhile, given that fact?" he said.

MORE: Why Titanic continues to captivate more than 100 years after its sinking

Hakeem Oluseyi, a physicist and ABC News contributor, said he doesn't think deep-sea submersibles "should be abandoned for a single accident."

"If you think about the early days of space travel, we lost an entire crew," he said. "But that tells us what we've done wrong in the past and how to get it right in the future."

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Another billionaire plans to visit the Titanic in a submersible to prove it can be done safely, reports say

(Gray News) – Another billionaire is planning a trip to the Titanic wreckage in a submersible after five people were killed in the OceanGate Titan disaster last June.

Billionaire real estate mogul Larry Connor is teaming up with Patrick Lahey, co-founder and president of Triton Submarines , for the next trip to the Titanic, according to multiple outlets.

Lahey has spent years working to make submersibles safe for deep dives and has visited the deepest parts of the ocean.

Lahey told the Wall Street Journal that a few days after the OceanGate tragedy, he got a call from Connor, who was determined to create another expedition to the Titanic that would prove it could be done safely.

Connor, who is worth about $2 billion according to Forbes , is the head of The Connor Group , a luxury apartment building investor. He has also previously visited deep parts of the ocean and outer space.

According to BBC , Connor and Lahey plan to use a two-person submersible made of acrylic that can safely reach 13,000 feet. The Titanic wreckage sits 12,500 feet under the ocean. The OceanGate Titan submersible only had a range of just under 4,300 feet, according to CBS News .

Connor and Lahey have not said when they plan to take their trip to the Titanic.

Copyright 2024 Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

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