The Titan’s implosion: the latest news on the Titanic wreckage tourist sub

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By Wes Davis, a weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020.

On June 18th, 2023, a small sub called the Titan was lost about an hour and forty-five minutes into its voyage carrying five people on a tourist visit to the wreckage of the Titanic. After days of searching in the North Atlantic, the Coast Guard confirmed it found debris showing the sub suffered a “catastrophic implosion.”

The US Coast Guard had been searching beneath the ocean floor with remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs) while sonar — from planes overhead, buoys on the surface, and expedition ships — pinged the bottom of the ocean looking for signs of the sub.

However, on June 22nd, the Coast Guard reported an ROV found debris from the Titan about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic. This led search crews to believe that the sub imploded shortly after its departure, killing all five passengers.

The sub carried 58-year-old British billionaire Hamish Harding, who flew on a Blue Origin suborbital flight in June 2022, Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman Dawood, a 77-year-old French explorer named Paul-Henry Nargeolet, and the CEO of OceanGate, Stockton Rush, who was 61 years old.

The Titan was a small, five-person submersible that is designed to reach depths of 4,000 meters “for site survey and inspection, research and data collection, film and media production, and deep sea testing of hardware and software,” according to its operator OceanGate.

On the inside, it was little more than a tube with a single viewport, a small toilet, touchscreens for viewing sonar and controlling the sub, as well as a screen for viewing the external 8K camera’s feed. The “experimental vessel” was also controlled by a Logitech game controller. Eight-day trips, including the submersible dive to the Titanic, cost a reported $250,000 per seat.

Jun 22

Emma Roth

The Titan submersible, which disappeared after setting off to tour the wreckage of the Titanic on Sunday, experienced a “catastrophic implosion,” US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger announced during a press conference on Thursday 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 seafloor,” Mauger stated. “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.”

Jul 6

Richard Lawler

Yeah, that seems like a logical next move for OceanGate after the Titan vessel’s implosion killed five people, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, as they traveled to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to visit the remains of the Titanic (via CNN).

The company’s website still advertises $250,000 trips to the Titanic or hydrothermal vents in the Azores.

Jun 28

Emma Roth

Photos published by CBS give us our first look at what remains of the Titan as crews work to bring debris from the sub to land. The tourist sub imploded last week during a journey to the Titanic’s wreckage, killing all five people on board.

Jun 26

Richard Lawler

Over the weekend, YouTuber and burger entrepreneur Mr. Beast tweeted that he had been invited to take a ride on the doomed Titanic tour submersible. However, one weird thing about his tweet was that while it clearly showed a screen capture from iMessage, it was a text from the sender, not the receiver.

He explained it later, saying it was a screenshot taken by the friend who originally invited him, who is probably also glad they didn’t take that particular trip.

Jun 25

Wes Davis

CBS published a video today with more video from David Pogue’s November 2022 story about the Titan submersible, along with damning expert analysis of the flaws that likely led to the sub’s implosion.

The video shows a stark contrast between that analysis and the apparent overconfidence of OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who frequently pushed back on criticism and calls to seek safety certification of the sub.

Jun 25

Wes Davis

YouTube creator MrBeast claimed in a tweet today that he was invited to join the Titan trip that disappeared on June 18th and was later determined to have imploded.

Curiously, the included screenshot of the invitation shows what appears to be a blue iMessage bubble. (Sent iMessages show as blue on the sender’s phone, not the receiver’s).

Update June 26, 8:25AM ET: He later tweeted that the screenshot was from the friend who invited him.

Jun 24

Wes Davis

Travel Weekly EIC Arnie Weissman wrote a series of articles about a May trip he almost took aboard the OceanGate Titan (via Insider).

He says OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush told him the sub’s hull used discounted Boeing carbon fiber that was “past its shelf life for use in airplanes” and claimed Boeing, NASA, and the University of Washington (UW) were involved in Titan’s design and testing.

Boeing and UW have both denied involvement, and NASA says it only served in a consulting capacity, per Insider.

[www.travelweekly.com]

Jun 24

Wes Davis

The texts, which Bloom posted to Facebook, show Rush offering a cut-rate deal at just $150,000 per seat for a trip on the Titan. Bloom said he wasn’t able to go because of a scheduling conflict, and the slots went to Shahzada Dawood and his son, Sulemon, who were on the sub when it imploded.

In the texts, Bloom said his son was concerned about danger, but Rush waved him off:

“While there’s obviously risk it’s way safer than flying in a helicopter or even scuba divind. There hasn’t been even an injury in 35 years in a non-miltary sub.”

Jun 24

Wes Davis

In 2019, after taking a trip on the ill-fated OceanGate Titan, submersible expert Karl Stanley said he heard an increasingly loud cracking sound over the two-hour trip down, according to The New York Times. He tried to warn Rush:

In the April 2019 email to Mr. Rush, Mr. Stanley said the loud cracking sounds that they had heard during their dive “sounded like a flaw/defect in one area being acted on by the tremendous pressures and being crushed/damaged.” He wrote that the loud, cracking noise signaled there was “an area of the hull that is breaking down.”

Stanley said experts confronted Rush about the safety of his sub at a 2018 crewed submersible conference, but he was “determined” to build it anyway. Shortly after, over three dozen industry experts wrote Rush, urging him to put his sub through certification.

[The New York Times]

Jun 23

Richard Lawler

Director James Cameron has given another interview, had a lot to say to CNN about the Titan, including that there’s an indication the sub dumped ballast and started to ascend before ever reaching the sea floor. He also apparently knew of the implosion sounds picked up by Navy listening devices as early as Monday.

However, despite OceanGate’s claims that they could detect any problems in the carbon fiber-based hull using “real-time (RTM) hull health monitoring,” Cameron said that well-known issues with composite materials and the risks of progressive degradation made it the wrong choice for constructing a submersible.

Jun 23

Emma Roth

After the Titan lost contact with the surface, the WSJ reports that the US Navy “conducted an analysis of acoustic data” from a top-secret detection system.

It later found what it believes was the sound of the Titan’s implosion near the Titanic’s wreckage on Sunday, but officials decided to continue the search and rescue mission to “make every effort to save the lives on board.”

[WSJ]

Jun 22

Emma Roth

The Titanic director, who visited the remains of the 1912 shipwreck several times, responded to the news of the Titan tourist sub’s “catastrophic implosion” during an interview with ABC News:

A number of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company [OceanGate], saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that needed to be certified.

So I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself. The captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night.

Jun 22

Emma Roth

The Coast Guard will hold a press briefing at 3PM ET to discuss its findings from the debris field that a remote-operated vehicle (ROV) uncovered at the bottom of the ocean near the Titanic.

The Titan tourist submersible began its journey toward the shipwreck on Sunday before losing contact with its support ship. The sub’s 96 hours supply of oxygen was expected to run out this morning.

Jun 21

Emma Roth

Iron Lung, an $5.99 indie game for the PC and Switch, puts you inside a compact submarine where you must navigate an eerie ocean of blood using only the grainy pictures taken from outside the vessel.

The game’s developer, David Szymanski, saw sales spike on June 20th — just a couple of days after OceanGate’s tourist submersible lost contact with the surface. The sub, which is controlled using a simple Logitech gamepad, was supposed to journey toward the Titanic’s shipwreck that lies about 13,000 feet at the bottom of the ocean.

[Polygon]

Jun 21

Wes Davis

A Canadian search aircraft with underwater detection capabilities picked up “banging” sounds coming from the depths around the HMS Titanic wreckage about every 30 minutes, per a US government memo obtained by CNN.

Rolling Stone, who first reported it, said an email to the Department of Homeland Security from the research group Explorers Society read:

“It is being reported that at 2 a.m. local time on site that sonar detected potential ‘tapping sounds’ at the location, implying crew may be alive and signaling.”

Knocking was heard 4 hours later when “additional sonar was deployed.”

[CNN]

Jun 20

Richard Lawler

On Sunday morning, an OceanGate submarine vessel with five people aboard went missing in the Atlantic about an hour and forty-five minutes into a planned trip to explore the wreckage of the RMS Titanic. Made of carbon fiber and titanium, the vessel has enough air for 96 hours; however, as word of the emergency has spread, there’s also shock at the wireless Logitech F710 gamepad used for steering.

The Titan advertises “state-of-the-art lighting and sonar navigation systems plus internally and externally mounted 4K video and photographic equipment,” and this CBS News Sunday Morning segment from David Pogue, taken last summer, showed the reporter laughing as he was shown its controls. OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush holds up the F710, saying, “We run the whole thing... with this game controller.” The reporter refers to the “MacGyver jury-riggedness” of the whole thing, using many off-the-shelf parts, as Rush said, “certain things, you want to be button down,” noting work with Boeing and NASA.

Jun 19

Monica Chin

The vessel lost contact with its research vessel an hour and 45 minutes into its descent on Sunday morning. A search is underway approximately 900 miles east of Cape Cod.

The five occupants have between 70 and 96 hours of oxygen available, Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said at a press conference earlier today.

[Washington Post]

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