4 months ago
21 ARTICLE AD
We’re just coming up on one year since the OceanGate Titan submersible tragedy, which makes the timing of this new announcement a touch callous. Last June, five passengers (including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush) took a fatal trip to visit the Titanic wreckage site on the Atlantic ocean floor. The submersible, which some experts later likened to a tin can, imploded, and days later the Coast Guard confirmed sighting of debris and that all the men had perished. And this week’s news is… an Ohio billionaire is partnering with Triton Submarines to build a sub that can safely take people 12,500 feet (2,100 fathoms!) below sea level. What could go wrong?
The Titanic wreckage will have visitors once again.
Nearly one year after the OceanGate submersible imploded, billionaire real estate investor Larry Connor and Triton Submarines co-founder Patrick Lahey are developing a new vessel to visit the shipwreck.
“I want to show people worldwide that while the ocean is extremely powerful,” Connor told The Wall Street Journal in an interview published May 26, “it can be wonderful and enjoyable and really kind of life-changing if you go about it the right way.”
After the harrowing search for the Titan submersible last June captivated the world — which faced a tragic ending when the wreckage indicated none of the five passengers aboard had survived the implosion — the personal-sub industry took a major hit.
“This tragedy had a chilling effect on people’s interest in these vehicles,” Lahey explained. “It reignited old myths that only a crazy person would dive in one of these things.”
So, it surprised Lahey when Connor reached out with a business proposition.
“We had a client, a wonderful man,” Lahey recalled of Connor. “He called me up and said, ‘You know, what we need to do is build a sub that can dive to [Titanic-level depths] repeatedly and safely and demonstrate to the world that you guys can do that, and that Titan was a contraption.’”
The pair are planning a journey to the Titanic in a two-person submersible, which they named the Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer. The vessel, which is listed on the company’s website for $20 million, can dive up to 4,000 meters — 200 meters deeper than the Titanic’s site.
“Patrick has been thinking about and designing this for over a decade,” Connor noted. “But we didn’t have the materials and technology. You couldn’t have built this sub five years ago.”
The OceanGate implosion — which took the lives of Hamish Harding, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood, as well as the company’s CEO Stockton Rush — rattled the industry. But experts didn’t see the company’s problems as broader submersible problems.
Instead, Lahey took aim at Rush for his experimental designs and materials, such as carbon fiber, which was used in the Titan.
“He could even convince someone who knew and understood the risks,” he told The Times in June, “it was really quite predatory.”
Am I really out of the loop (don’t answer that), or is there actually a big “personal-sub industry” for $20 million, two-person ships? If so, then yes of course that industry must be saved! Look, I wholeheartedly support scientific research. (Sidenote: did you see the video last week of a giant, deep sea squid going after the camera? I inked myself a little watching it, eeks!) But this venture, as described by the billionaires spearheading it, is for recreation, not study. At the very least, I’m holding out for a comment from filmmaker-cum-deep sea explorer James Cameron. He certainly didn’t mince his words about the quality of OceanGate’s machinery (or lack thereof). I know everyone has to have a hobby, but is this the best way a billionaire like Larry Connor could be spending his wealth? There’s so much work to be done at ground level.
