Image of OceanGate Titan submersible via OceanGate.
The company behind the disastrous implosion of the deep-water submersible that left five dead during an attempted expedition to the Titanic has ceased operations.
“OceanGate has suspended all exploration and commercial operations,” a banner on the company’s website said Thursday. OceanGate’s Titan submersible lost contact with its support ship after around 100 minutes at sea as it was headed toward the wreckage of the Titanic on June 18. Four days later, officials had determined that the Titan had suffered a “catastrophic implosion” and that all five people on board, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, had perished.
Although the landing page of OceanGate’s website appeared functional Thursday, the links to other sections of the site were largely broken or non-functional.
As Law&Crime previously reported, former director of marine operations David Lochridge said in a 2018 whistleblower lawsuit that he was fired for raising concerns about the Titan. Indeed, since the disaster, reports highlighting Rush’s responses to questions about the Titan’s safety have emerged.
In a 2022 interview with CBS News, Rush told reporter David Pogue that there is a “limit” to safety precautions. Pogue had been invited to join an expedition to the Titanic, and in his piece, he had expressed concerns over the fact that the Titan used construction pipes for ballast and was steered using a video game controller.
“You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste,” Rush said. “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. At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk/reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”
In late June, a Las Vegas family told reporters that Rush had pressured them to join the Titan expedition, but they didn’t feel that it was safe.
Jay Bloom and his 20-year-old son Sean said that Rush called them “The Misinformed” when they raised safety concerns to the CEO.
“I think what happened is he was so passionate about this project that it clouded his judgment,” Jay Bloom said about Rush, according to Las Vegas Fox affiliate KVVU. “He was making emotional decisions, not rational decisions. Anybody who brought any safety concerns to him, he would just rationalize away. It was just a differing opinion and he’s doing things different, and the industry’s just kind of set in its ways.”
A 2018 video from OceanGate shows Rush overseeing the construction of another submersible called the Cyclops 2. Rush said that it would go 4,000 meters deep — roughly the depth of the Titanic — predicting that it would be the “deepest diving carbon fiber sub ever built.”
Of the construction, Rush said: “It’s pretty simple, but if we mess it up, there’s not a lot of recovery.”
He also compared the thickness of the glue holding the vessel together to a childhood sandwich staple.
“The glue’s very thick, so it’s not like Elmer’s Glue,” Rush said on the video. “It’s like peanut butter.”
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