High-pressure undertaking — Inside the Titan submersible disaster OceanGate CEO cut corners, ignored warnings, and flat-out lied, leaving five dead.
Mark Harris, wired.com – Jun 12, 2024 10:00 am UTC Enlarge / A logo on equipment stored near the OceanGate Inc. offices in Everett, Washington, US, on Thursday, June 22, 2023.Bloomberg via Getty Images reader comments 10
The Ocean Sciences Building at the University of Washington in Seattle is a brightly modern, four-story structure, with large glass windows reflecting the bay across the street.
On the afternoon of July 7, 2016, it was being slowly locked down.
Red lights began flashing at the entrances as students and faculty filed out under overcast skies. Eventually, just a handful of people remained inside, preparing to unleash one of the most destructive forces in the natural world: the crushing weight of about 2 miles of ocean water.
In the buildings high-pressure testing facility, a black, pill-shaped capsule hung from a hoist on the ceiling. About 3 feet long, it was a scale model of a submersible called Cyclops 2, developed by a local startup called OceanGate. The companys CEO, Stockton Rush, had cofounded the company in 2009 as a sort of submarine charter service, anticipating a growing need for commercial and research trips to the ocean floor. At first, Rush acquired older, steel-hulled subs for expeditions, but in 2013, OceanGate had begun designing what the company called a revolutionary new manned submersible. Among the subs innovations were its lightweight hull, which was built from carbon fiber and could accommodate more passengers than the spherical cabins traditionally used in deep-sea diving. By 2016, Rushs dream was to take paying customers down to the most famous shipwreck of them all: the Titanic, 3,800 meters below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
Engineers carefully lowered the Cyclops 2 model into the testing tank nose-first, like a bomb being loaded into a silo, and then screwed on the tanks 3,600-pound lid. Then they began pumping in water, increasing the pressure to mimic a submersibles dive. If youre hanging out at sea level, the weight of the atmosphere above you exerts 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi). The deeper you go, the stronger that pressure; at the Titanics depth, the pressure is about 6,500 psi. Soon, the pressure gauge on UWs test tank read 1,000 psi, and it kept ticking up2,000 psi, 5,000 psi. At about the 73-minute mark, as the pressure in the tank reached 6,500 psi, there was a sudden roar, and the tank shuddered violently. Advertisement
I felt it in my body, an OceanGate employee wrote in an email later that night. The building rocked, and my ears rang for a long time.
Scared the shit out of everyone, he added.
The model had imploded thousands of meters short of the safety margin OceanGate had designed for.
In the high-stakes, high-cost world of crewed submersibles, most engineering teams would have gone back to the drawing board, or at least ordered more models to test. Rushs company didnt do either of those things. Instead, within months, OceanGate began building a full-scale Cyclops 2 based on the imploded model. This submersible design, later renamed Titan, eventually made it down to the Titanic in 2021. It even returned to the site for expeditions the next two years. But nearly one year ago, on June 18, 2023, Titan dove to the infamous wreck and imploded, instantly killing all five people onboard, including Rush himself.
The disaster captivated and horrified the world. Deep-sea experts criticized OceanGates choices, from Titans carbon-fiber construction to Rushs public disdain for industry regulations, which he believed stifled innovation. Organizations that had worked with OceanGate, including the University of Washington as well as the Boeing Company, released statements denying that they contributed to Titan.
A trove of tens of thousands of internal OceanGate emails, documents, and photographs provided exclusively to WIRED by anonymous sources sheds new light on Titans development, from its initial design and manufacture through its first deep-sea operations. The documents, validated by interviews with two third-party suppliers and several former OceanGate employees with intimate knowledge of Titan, reveal never-before-reported details about the design and testing of the submersible. They show that Boeing and the University of Washington were both involved in the early stages of OceanGates carbon-fiber sub project, although their work did not make it into the final Titan design.
The trove also reveals a company culture in which employees who questioned their bosses high-speed approach and decisions were dismissed as overly cautious or even fired. (The former employees who spoke to WIRED have asked not to be named for fear of being sued by the families of those who died aboard the vessel.) Most of all, the documents show how Rush, blinkered by his own ambition to be the Elon Musk of the deep seas, repeatedly overstated OceanGates progress and, on at least one occasion, outright lied about significant problems with Titans hull, which has not been previously reported.
A representative for OceanGate, which ceased all operations last summer, declined to comment on WIREDs findings. Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next → reader comments 10 WIRED Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture. Advertisement Channel Ars Technica ← Previous story Related Stories Today on Ars
