It was as though we were watching a horror movie unfold in slow motion, knowing that whatever happened next wouldn’t be pretty. Everyone watched in disbelief as Rush built a five-person cylindrical pressure hull out of filament-wound carbon fiber, an unpredictable material that is known to fail suddenly and catastrophically under pressure. I had my own troubling encounter with OceanGate in 2018 and had been watching it with concern ever since.Įveryone I met in the small, tight-knit world of manned submersibles was aware of the Titan. I heard discussions about the Titan as a tragedy-in-waiting on research ships, during deep-sea expeditions, in submersible hangars, at marine science conferences. He and the Titan had been a topic of conversation talked about with real fear, on many occasions, by numerous people I met over the course of five years while reporting my book The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean. Unfortunately, June 18, 2023, wasn’t the first time I’d heard of Rush, or his company OceanGate, or his monstrosity of a sub. Stockton Rush in front of his Antipodes submersible EyePress News/Shutterstock. It means a safety plan, a rescue plan, an acute situational awareness at all times. That means redundancy upon redundancy, with no single point of failure. That means adding crush-resistant syntactic foam around the sphere for buoyancy and protection, to offset the weight of the titanium. In the abyss, that means passengers typically sit inside a titanium (or steel) pressure hull, forged into a perfect sphere-the only shape that distributes pressure symmetrically. Deep-sea submersibles are constructed of the strongest and most predictable materials, as determined by the laws of physics. This assurance of safety is known as “classing” a sub. Every component is checked for flaws in a pressure chamber and checked again-and every step of this process is certified by an independent marine classification society. The subs that dive into this realm (there aren’t many) are tested and tested and tested. To descend into the ocean’s abyssal zone-the waters from 10,000 to 20,000 feet-is a serious affair, and because of the annihilating pressures, far more challenging than rocketing into space. If you want to go down into her world, she sets the rules.Īnd her rules are strict, befitting the gravitas of the realm. The abyss doesn’t care if you went to Princeton, or that your ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence. But in the deep ocean, the price of admission is humility-and it’s nonnegotiable. In a culture that has adopted the ridiculous mantra “ move fast and break things,” that type of arrogance can get a person far.

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