During the summer of 2023, the Titan submersible owned and operated by OceanGate suffered a catastrophic loss. What started as a windfall emergency rescue mission soon shifted to a grinding and painful recovery operation. Sadly, the disaster occurred during a commercial expedition. That mission sought to illuminate the Titanic wreck, lying over two miles down in the North Atlantic. Five passengers died instantly when the submersible imploded, including Stockton Rush, the company’s founder and CEO.
OceanGate’s Titan submersible was designed to withstand the crushing pressures of deep-sea exploration. Yet it was its carbon-fiber hull that raised the most serious red flags related to safety. Critics worried the new material wouldn’t hold up. They cautioned that it had never been pressure tested at such depths, presenting a considerable risk for deployment in the submersible. Though costly, Rush soldiered on her efforts to promote the viability of commercial voyages. This led to questions about how much protection was being provided to the passengers on OceanGate’s trips.
The Titan’s near 80 successful dives, even 13 of them reaching the Titanic depth, in 2021-2022. Safety experts had raised alarm bells over an untested design and material selection for the doomed submersible. David Lochridge, a submersible pilot for over three decades. He was the operations director at OceanGate where he raised several safety concerns about the Titan. His dissent was allegedly brushed aside by Rush, painting a shocking picture of an environment where opposition was intolerable.
The documentary “Titan: The OceanGate Disaster” reveals that the submersible’s implosion was virtually guaranteed due to its design flaws. Video from OceanGate’s test period brought to mind several different carbon fiber designs bombed in tests under conditions mimicking extreme depths. One of the deeper insights that emerged from the documentary’s key film subject, Mark Monroe. A whistleblower had warned years before that the sub’s hull would collapse under pressure, calling it a mathematical certainty.
As the Titan descended to approximately 3,300 meters, a mere 90 minutes into its dive intended for a depth of 3,800 meters, it encountered catastrophic failure. All five passengers aboard were killed instantly. This awful disaster has raised new discussions around safety practices within commercial deep-sea exploration. It underscores the importance of strong regulatory oversight in these risky ventures.
OceanGate was established in 2009 outside Seattle by Stockton Rush, an entrepreneur with a distinguished background in engineering and a vision for revolutionizing ocean exploration. His approach has been rightly criticized for favoring flammable, dangerous innovations at the cost of safety measures.
Mark Monroe remarked on Rush’s mindset: “He believed in the ethos of move fast and break things. Rules don’t apply when you want to change the way things work.” When lives are in the balance, this philosophy is a cause for concern. Monroe emphasized that “there are certain rules that do apply, like the rules of physics, the rules of science – these rules do apply to all of us.”
The film captures behind-the-scenes perspective on the political decision-making process in the years leading up to the disaster. As Monroe noted, just knowing these decisions exist is deeply disturbing. Perhaps more importantly, it reveals how these kinds of risks became normalized at OceanGate.
Lochridge’s escape from OceanGate spotlights an atmosphere where anyone who challenged the status quo was punished. As Monroe remembers, Lochridge thought that if you didn’t support Rush’s vision, then “there were going to be repercussions.” This culture may have played a role in allowing serious safety issues to fall through the cracks.
One of the main criticisms is the extensive use of carbon fiber in the Titan’s construction. Monroe explained that “there is a fatigue aspect to carbon fiber – once you use it, it won’t be as good the next time you use it, by increments.” This question is leading us into how many deep dives the material can take before a catastrophic failure occurs.
A Boeing engineer had raised red flags on the Titan’s capacity to safely get to such depths. The engineer warned: “We think you are at high risk of a significant failure at or before you reach 4,000 meters. We do not think you have any safety margin.” These warnings make even clearer the dangerous tightrope of innovation over safety that OceanGate was walking.