similar to the one used (in modified form) on
Titan for steering Formerly known as
Cyclops 2,
Titan was a five-person submersible vessel operated by
OceanGate Inc. The , vessel was constructed from
carbon fibre and
titanium. The entire pressure vessel consisted of two titanium hemispheres (domes) with matching titanium interface rings bonded to the internal diameter, carbon fibre-wound cylinder. One of the titanium hemispherical end caps was detachable to provide the hatch In 2020, Rush said that the hull, originally designed to reach below sea level, had been downgraded to a depth rating of after demonstrating signs of
cyclic fatigue. In 2020 and 2021, the hull was repaired or rebuilt. Boeing stated they have no records of any sale to Rush or to OceanGate. OceanGate had initially not sought certification for
Titan, arguing that excessive safety protocols hindered innovation.
Titan could move at as much as using four electric thrusters, arrayed two horizontal and two vertical. Its steering controls consisted of a
Logitech F710 wireless
game controller with modified longer
analog sticks resembling traditional
joysticks. The University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory assisted with the control design on the
Cyclops 1 using a
DualShock 3 video game controller, which was carried over to
Titan, substituting with the Logitech controller. The use of
commercial off-the-shelf game controllers is common for remote-controlled vehicles such as
unmanned aerial vehicles or
bomb disposal robots, while the
United States Navy uses
Xbox 360 controllers to control
periscopes in s. OceanGate claimed on its website that
Titan was "designed and engineered by OceanGate Inc. in collaboration [with] experts from
NASA,
Boeing, and the
University of Washington" (UW). After the disappearance of
Titan in 2023, earlier associates disclaimed involvement with the Titan project. UW claimed the APL had no involvement in the "design, engineering, or testing of the
Titan submersible". A Boeing spokesperson also claimed Boeing "was not a partner on
Titan and did not design or build it". A NASA spokesperson said that NASA's
Marshall Space Flight Center had a
Space Act Agreement with OceanGate, but "did not conduct testing and manufacturing via its workforce or facilities". It was designed and developed originally in partnership with UW and Boeing, both of which put forth numerous design recommendations and rigorous testing requirements, which Rush ignored, despite prior tests at lower depths resulting in implosions at the UW lab. These partnerships dissolved as Rush refused to work within quality standards. According to OceanGate, the vessel contained monitoring systems to continuously monitor the strength of the
hull. An OceanGate investor explained that if the vessel did not ascend automatically after the elapsed time, those inside could help release the ballast either by tilting the ship back and forth to dislodge it or by using a pneumatic pump to loosen the weights.
Dives to wreck of Titanic Dives by
Titan to the wreck of
Titanic occurred as part of multi-day excursions organized by OceanGate, which the company referred to as "missions". Five missions per year occurred in the middle of 2021 and 2022.
Titan imploded during the fifth mission of 2023; none of the four earlier that year got close to
Titanic, largely because of rough weather. YouTuber
Jake Koehler was invited to vlog the submersible's Mission III, which did not dive due to poor weather, a
ghost net wrapping around and destroying some of the submersible's parts, and the motor controllers malfunctioning. Following the submersible's implosion, Koehler uploaded a YouTube video documenting his experience. Passengers would sail to and from the wreckage site aboard a support ship and spend approximately five days on the ocean above the
Titanic wreckage site. Two dives were usually attempted during each excursion, though dives were often cancelled or aborted due to weather or technical malfunctions. Once they were inside the submersible, the hatch would be bolted shut and could only be reopened from the outside. The descent from the surface to the
Titanic wreck typically took two hours, with the full dive taking about eight hours. paid () each for the eight-day expedition.
Safety Because
Titan operated in
international waters and did not carry passengers from a port, it was not subject to safety regulations. The vessel was not certified as seaworthy by any regulatory agency or third-party organization. Reporter
David Pogue, who completed the expedition in 2022 as part of a
CBS News Sunday Morning feature, said that all passengers who enter
Titan sign a waiver confirming their knowledge that it is an "experimental" vessel "that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body, and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma or death". Television producer
Mike Reiss, who also completed the expedition, said the waiver "mention[s] death three times on page one". A 2019 article published in
Smithsonian magazine referred to Rush as a "daredevil inventor". In the article, Rush is described as having said that the U.S. Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993 "needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation". In a 2022 interview, Rush told
CBS News, "At some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed. Don't get in your car. Don't do anything." Rush said in a 2021 interview, "I've broken some rules to make [
Titan]. I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind me. The carbon fibre and titanium, there's a rule you don't do that. Well, I did." OceanGate claimed that
Titan was the only crewed submersible that used an integrated real-time monitoring system (RTM) for safety. used acoustic sensors and strain gauges at the pressure boundary to analyse the effects of increasing pressure as the watercraft ventured deeper into the ocean and to monitor the hull's integrity in real time. This would supposedly give early warning of problems and allow enough time to abort the descent and return to the surface.
Prior concerns In 2018, OceanGate's director of marine operations, David Lochridge, composed a report documenting safety concerns he had about
Titan. In court documents, Lochridge said that he had urged the company to have
Titan assessed and certified by the
American Bureau of Shipping, but OceanGate had refused to do so, instead seeking classification from
Lloyd's Register. He also said that the transparent viewport on its forward end, due to its nonstandard and therefore experimental design, was only certified to a depth of , only a third of the depth required to reach the
Titanic wreck. Lochridge was also concerned that OceanGate would not perform
nondestructive testing on the vessel's hull before undertaking crewed dives and alleged that he was "repeatedly told that no scan of the hull or Bond Line could be done to check for
delaminations,
porosity and
voids of sufficient adhesion of the glue being used due to the thickness of the hull". The viewport was rated to only , and the engineer of the viewport also prepared an analysis from an independent expert that concluded the design would fail after only a few dives. OceanGate sued Lochridge for allegedly breaching his confidentiality contract and making fraudulent statements. Lochridge counter-sued, stating that his employment had been wrongfully terminated as a
whistleblower for stating concerns about
Titan ability to operate safely. The two parties
settled the case a few months later, before it came to court. Lochridge also filed a whistleblower complaint with
Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but withdrew it after the lawsuit was filed. to Rush expressing "unanimous concern regarding the development of 'TITAN' and the planned
Titanic Expedition", indicating that the "current experimental approach ... could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry". The letter said that OceanGate's marketing of the Titan was misleading because it claimed that the submersible would meet or exceed the safety standards of classification society
DNV, even though the company had no plans to have the craft certified formally by the society. While the letter was never sent officially by the Marine Technology Society, it did result in a conversation with OceanGate that resulted in some changes, but in the end Rush "agreed to disagree" with the rest of the civilian submarine community. Kohnen told
The New York Times that Rush had telephoned him after reading it to tell him that he believed industry standards were stifling innovation. Another signatory, engineer Bart Kemper, agreed to sign the letter because of OceanGate's decision not to use established engineering standards like ASME
Pressure Vessels for Human Occupancy (PVHO) or design validation. Kemper said the submersible was "experimental, with no oversight". Kohnen and Kemper stated OceanGate's methods were not representative of the industry. Kohnen and Kemper are both members of the ASME Codes and Standards committee for PVHOs, which develops and maintains the engineering safety standards for submarines, commercial diving systems, hyperbaric systems, and related equipment. Kemper is an engineering researcher who has published a number of technical papers on submarine windows, including the need to innovate. In March 2018, one of Boeing's engineers involved in the preliminary designs, Mark Negley, carried out an analysis of the hull and emailed Rush directly stating, "We think you are at high risk of a significant failure at or before you reach 4,000 meters. We do not think you have any safety margin." He included a graph of the strain of the design with a
skull and crossbones at a red line of 4,000 metres. In 2022, the British actor and television presenter
Ross Kemp, who had participated previously with deep sea dives for the television channel
Sky History, had planned to mark the 110th anniversary of the sinking of the
Titanic by recording a documentary in which he would undertake a dive to the wreck using
Titan. Kemp's agent
Jonathan Shalit said that the project was cancelled after checks by production company
Atlantic Productions deemed the submersible to be unsafe and not "fit for purpose".
Previous incidents In 2021, a new hull was constructed after a previous hull had cracked after 50 submersion dives, only three of which were to 4,000 m. Scale models of the new hull imploded when tested at the UW lab, so a different method of curing the hull was developed and passed a full-sized pressure test at a facility in
Maryland. Rush refused to construct new domes and their interface rings, instead instructing engineers to salvage and reuse those parts from the previous hull. Anonymous former employees told
Wired that damage to the rings could have weakened the joints between the domes and the new hull. The new submersible also included lifting rings, which had previously been warned against by engineers, who feared that even very small deformations at the interface between the titanium rings and the hull could jeopardize the integrity of the pressure vessel. Pogue's November 2022 report for
CBS News Sunday Morning, which questioned
Titan safety,
went viral on social media after the submersible lost contact with its support ship in June 2023. In the report, Pogue commented to Rush that "it seems like this submersible has some elements of
MacGyvery jerry-rigged-ness". He said that a $30
Logitech F710 wireless game controller with modified
control sticks was used to steer and
pitch the submersible and that construction pipes were used as
ballast. In another 2022 dive to the wreck, one of
Titan thrusters was accidentally installed backwards and the submersible started spinning in circles when trying to move forward near the sea floor. According to the
BBC documentary
Take Me to Titanic, the issue was bypassed by steering while holding the game controller sideways. According to November 2022 court filings, OceanGate reported that in a 2022 dive, the submersible suffered from battery problems and as a result had to be attached manually to a lifting platform, causing damage to external components. On 15 July 2022 (dive 80),
Titan experienced a "loud acoustic event" as it was ascending, which was heard by the passengers aboard and picked up by
Titan real-time monitoring system (RTM). Data from
Titan strain gauges later revealed that the hull's strain response had permanently shifted following this event. The US Coast Guard investigation found that the loud acoustic event was the carbon fibre delaminating; the BBC described every dive after this one as "a disaster waiting to happen". ==Incident==