One year after the OceanGate Titan submersible disaster, it’s announcement time! Yes, we’re diving back into the deep end. Last June, five adventurous souls, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, embarked on a doomed voyage to the Titanic wreck. Spoiler alert: the submersible, which some experts kindly compared to a soda can, imploded. The Coast Guard confirmed days later that the men had perished. Fast forward to today, and guess what? An Ohio billionaire and Triton Submarines are teaming up to build a sub that can safely dive 12,500 feet (that’s 2,100 fathoms for all you nautical nerds) below sea level. What could possibly go wrong?
So, here we go again – the Titanic wreckage will have visitors once more.
Just shy of the one-year anniversary of the OceanGate disaster, billionaire real estate mogul Larry Connor and Triton Submarines co-founder Patrick Lahey are crafting a new vessel to visit the infamous shipwreck.
“I want to show people worldwide that while the ocean is extremely powerful,” Connor told The Wall Street Journal on May 26, “it can be wonderful, enjoyable, and kind of life-changing if you don’t implode.”
After last June’s riveting search for the Titan submersible, which ended tragically with no survivors, the personal-sub industry (yes, that’s a thing) took a nosedive.
“This tragedy had a chilling effect on people’s interest in these vehicles,” Lahey noted. “It reignited old myths that only a crazy person would dive in one of these things.”
So, it was a surprise when Connor called up Lahey with a bright idea.
“We had a client, a wonderful man,” Lahey reminisced about Connor. “He called me and said, ‘Let’s build a sub that can dive to Titanic depths repeatedly and safely, and show the world that you guys can do that, unlike that Titan contraption.’”
The dynamic duo plans to journey to the Titanic in a snazzy two-person submersible named the Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer. This bad boy, listed for a cool $20 million, can dive up to 4,000 meters – that’s 200 meters deeper than the Titanic’s final resting place.
“Patrick has been dreaming about and designing this for over a decade,” Connor said. “But we lacked the materials and technology. You couldn’t have built this sub five years ago.”
The OceanGate disaster, which claimed the lives of Hamish Harding, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Shahzada Dawood, his 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood, and CEO Stockton Rush, shook the industry. But experts didn’t see it as a blanket indictment of submersibles.
Lahey threw some shade at Rush for his experimental designs and materials, particularly carbon fiber, used in the ill-fated Titan.
“He could even convince someone who knew and understood the risks,” Lahey told The Times in June, “it was really quite predatory.”
Am I totally out of the loop (don’t answer that), or is there really a “personal-sub industry” for $20 million two-person subs? If so, then yes, this industry must be saved! Look, I’m all for scientific research. (Side note: did you see that video of a giant deep-sea squid attacking a camera? I practically inked myself watching it!) But this venture, as the billionaires describe it, is more about recreation than research. At the very least, I’m holding out for a comment from filmmaker and deep-sea explorer James Cameron. He certainly didn’t hold back on his thoughts about OceanGate’s dubious engineering.
I get it, everyone needs a hobby, but is this really the best way for billionaire Larry Connor to spend his fortune? There’s plenty of work to be done here on dry land!