Warning: This article includes spoilers for Titan: The OceanGate Disaster!As highlighted in Netflix’sTitan: The OceanGate Disaster,Stockton Rush’s OceanGate had big plans for the Titan submersible, but his costly and dangerous goal ended in disaster. One of the most memorable world events from 2023 is the implosion of the Titan, a submarine on its way to see the Titanic wreckage.Netflix’s excellent documentaryexplores the story behind the story. Not everything was as it seemed from the outside when it came to OceanGate.
The documentary lifts up the voices of employees, experts, and family members who were involved with the company before Titan’s implosion. Many of these individuals resisted Stockton Rush’s careless approach to building and testing the submarine. Based on the sheer number of warnings about the vessel,the 2023 Titan disasterwas entirely preventable, leading many to believe that Rush’s greed was a driving factor in his OceanGate plan.
The Purpose Of OceanGate’s Titan Submersible Explained
OceanGate’s Previous Submersibles Couldn’t Reach The Titanic
According to a 2019Smithsonian Magazinefeature on Stockton Rush, the idea to travel to the Titanic was a marketing approach to gain more public attention. After taking the Cyclops 1 to the Andrea Doria,Rush realized that travel to shipwrecks, especially the Titanic, would appeal to the public. He said, “There’s only one wreck that everyone knows.” Additionally, a trip to the Titanic would also allow them to conduct sonar and laser scanning and capture photogrammetric images of the shipwreck.
AsTitan: The OceanGate Disasterexplains,the Titan submersible was created specifically with the Titanic wreckage in mind. The company already had two other submersibles – the Antipodes, which could only go down to 300 meters (984 feet), and the Cyclops 1, which could reach 500 meters (1640 feet). While they worked for other expeditions, neither would be suitable to go to the Titanic, which sits at 3,810 meters (12,500 feet).
The OceanGate Titan implosion is also dissected in the 2025 Max documentaryImplosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster.
The Titan, which was originally called the Cyclops 2, used the same basic frame, controls, and thrusters as Cyclops 1. However, the semi-spherical window was replaced with a titanium dome and a small window. Additionally, the hull of Titan was made of composite carbon fiber while the Cyclops 1 had a steel hull. The changes were intended to make the Titan suitable for dives deep into the ocean.
How Much OceanGate’s Titan Submersible Cost To Make & Who Funded The Project
The Cost Of OceanGate’s Titan Is Unknown
Despite my best efforts, I could not find any reliable sources to answer the question of how much it cost to build OceanGate’s Titan submersible, let alone design it, test it, and maintain it. In January 2020,OceanGate reported raising $18.1 million to expand the company’s fleet and get the Titan readyfor dives to the Titanic (viaGeekWire). It’s unknown how much of that went to the vessel, and Stockton Rush refused to divulge the names of any investors. Additionally, OceanGate received a PPP loan in April 2020 for $447,000, all of which was forgiven (viaProPublica).
However, even if all $18.574 million went to the doomed vessel, testing on the submersible started in June 2018, meaning 2 years oftesting and repairs on the Titanisn’t accounted for. On top of that, no information is available on the cost of model tests and research and development prior to 2018. What is known is thatOceanGate allegedly skirted safety recommendations and bought off-the-shelf materials to cut costs, as asserted inTitan: The OceanGate Disaster.
How Much OceanGate Charged For The Titanic Expeditions
Passengers Forked Over A Quarter Million Dollars For The Expedition
According to the now-defunct OceanGate website, which was saved on theInternet Archive Wayback Machine,expeditions to the Titanic in 2023 started at $250,000 per person.This included an eight-day and seven-night trip with just one dive down to the Titanic wreckage, a private room on the ship, all meals, dive training, and expedition gear. Anyone 18 years or older could take the dives. Before going on an expedition, all passengers need to sign a 4-page waive that mentions the possibility of death 9 times.
Each expedition includes up to six people, three of whom could be inside the sub alongside the two operators at a time. On days when passengers (referred to by the company as “mission specialists”) aren’t diving, they serve as dive ops for the other dive team, review footage from the dive, and drive dingys in the Atlantic. The archived website reveals that they had five missions planned for the summer of 2024, but those would never happen because of the implosion disaster. Similarly, the company would cancel their planned expeditions in 2024 to the Azores when it shut down operations altogether.
Stockton Rush’s Views On Tourism Explained
Stockton Rush Didn’t Want To Call The Tourists By That Name
Although OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Sohnlein left the company in 2013, he provided insight into his and Stockton Rush’s goals with the company when speaking toSky News. They wanted to “create a small fleet of work submersibles that could take five people down at least four thousand, maybe six thousand, meters and make them available to anybody who needed them” and “open the oceans for all of humanity.” It was originally less about the tourism and more about the accessibility to a largely unexplored part of the Earth. However, that changed over time.
His personal motivation for making the submersibles and offering the dives ties back to his childhood dream of exploring space. He toldFast Company,“I realized that what I really wanted to do was explore. I wanted to be Captain Kirk and in our lifetime, the final frontier is the ocean,” This matches up with the revelation shared inTitan: The OceanGate Disasterthat Stockton Rush aspired to be like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, whose companies pioneered space tourism.
Despite clearly promoting extreme tourism, Rush didn’t want to call his passengers by that name.In 2019, he toldPrinceton Alumni Weeklythat they didn’t take tourists on their expeditions. He explains, “We like to refer to them as explorers, because we go with a mission…The difference between an explorer and an adventurer is an explorer documents what he does, and an adventurer just goes, pounds their chest and tells their friends.”
Similarly,Popular Sciencequotes him as saying, “We call [passengers] mission specialists. most people envision tourists as someone who just shows up, does something, and then heads home with a bunch of pictures.” This perspective sounds noble, butTitan: The OceanGate Disasterpoints to a less honorable motivation for giving the tourists a different name. Rob McCallum, a former expedition leader, revealed that it was Rush’s way to get around US laws since rules about operating at sea differ for crew members and paying passengers.
