![]() It was an incredibly audacious thing to do.” “It’s not easy to take a white sheet of paper, come up with a new submersible design, fund it, test it and mature it. “Stockton is a real pioneer,” says Scott Parazynski, a 17-year NASA veteran, the first person to have both flown in space (five times) and summited Mount Everest, and a consultant on the Titan expeditions. ![]() The feat was the culmination of a dream for Stockton Rush, OceanGate’s maverick CEO and co-founder. Then, last December, OceanGate made history: Titan became the first privately owned sub with a human aboard to dive that deep and beyond, finally reaching 4,000 meters, or about 13,000 feet-a little deeper than where the Titanic lies. Though the average depth of the world’s oceans is 2.3 miles, or a little more than 12,000 feet, until Titan came along only a handful of active submersibles were capable of reaching that depth, and they were all owned by the governments of the United States, France, China and Japan. But Titan is the first deep-sea submersible constructed from a carbon-fiber composite, which allows the vessel to withstand enormous pressure at great depths while being far cheaper to build and operate than more traditional subs of equal abilities. The experimental submersible for those trips, named Titan, closely resembles its sibling Cyclops 1. This test “dunk,” in the words of my hosts, from a company called OceanGate, was just a taste of what will happen this summer, when OceanGate will begin taking paying customers to visit the fabled wreckage of the Titanic, which lies some two and a half miles beneath the North Atlantic. ![]() Then the pilot releases the sub from the platform. It is nothing but love and emotion it is the ‘Living Infinite.’”Īfter it’s towed offshore, Titan’s launch platform is submerged 30 feet with the sub attached. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. I was reminded, inevitably, of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Captain Nemo’s near-mystical reverie on the Nautilus over its mastery of the deep: “The sea is everything.It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. Even though visibility was only about 15 feet, thanks to storm runoff, a condition my crew mates dubbed “the milkshake,” it was still magical to be breathing underwater, an unnatural human state that has captured our imagination since antiquity, when Greek legends of Poseidon and mermen abounded. The milky green waters of Puget Sound rose over the eye of Cyclops 1 the support team blurred and vanished, followed by the leaden sky. With the submersible still resting on its metal launching platform, one end of the platform slowly rose from the dock and we slid backward into the sea. There were no seats, but with only three of us on the dive (the other was staff member Joel Perry), I could stretch out like a pasha on a black vinyl mat. Inside, the pilot Kenny Hague was checking instruments, including the modified Sony PlayStation controllers used to steer the sub underwater. “Vessel prep” had been completed at dawn, so after a pre-dive briefing, I climbed a ladder to the top hatch of the sub, took off my boots and clambered into the tube, which was sheathed in perforated stainless steel. The schedule was as rigorously timed as a rocket launch. ![]() ![]() A half-dozen men wearing thickly padded khaki jumpsuits and orange helmets gathered on the snow-covered dock ready to send me under the ice-flecked waves of Puget Sound. On the dock was a cylindrical white pod about the size of a moving van, a five-person submersible whose protruding, semi-spherical window inspired its name, after the monocular monster of myth. I learned this one freezing morning this past February, after trudging through two feet of snow to get to the marina in Everett, Washington, a small port 45 minutes north of Seattle. The world looks very different through the eye of the Cyclops. Below, read a 2019 story by magazine correspondent Tony Perrottet, who visited OceanGate headquarters and reported on the company's plans to send tourists to the Titanic. Investigations into the cause and timing of the explosion are ongoing. "The debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel" that would have killed all five crew members on board, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, said Rear Admiral John Mauger during a press conference. Coast Guard announced the identification of debris from the tourist submersible Titan, which went missing on Sunday during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic. Editor's Note, June 22, 2023: On the afternoon of June 22, the U.S. ![]()
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