The Titan Submersible Cataclysm: What we Know so Far (Special)

Introduction

On June 18, 2023, the small, privately owned submersible Titan embarked on an undersea voyage to explore the wreckage of the RMS Titanic, a world-famous ocean liner that sank in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1912. Onboard the Titan submarine were a total of five people: Stockton Rush, the pilot and chief executive of a company called OceanGate, which owned and operated the Titan; a Pakistani-British businessman named Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood; a British businessman and tourist-adventurer named Hamish Harding, and a deep-sea explorer and Titanic expert named Paul-Henri Nargeolet. The journey to the Titanic was routine; the submersible had done six such dives in 2021, seven in 2022, and one earlier in 2023.

But what happened to the Titan’s passengers on June 18 was anything but routine. A little less than two hours into their dive toward the wreck site, all communications with the Titan were lost, and in the following days, a frenzied search to find the sub and its passengers captured international headlines. Sadly, we now know that the Titan most likely suffered a catastrophic failure just hours into the dive, and that its five passengers were almost certainly killed days before the search concluded. But what much of the world still doesn’t know, are the circumstances that led to the tragedy—the many design flaws and past concerns about the Titan’s safety, the inherent risks of operating at such extreme depths, and the points of critical failure that turned the Titan’s dive from a fascinating excursion, into a catastrophe.

In today’s special episode of Megaprojects, we’ll pull back the curtain as best we can on the Titan incident—what went wrong, and what the rest of the world can learn, in order to do better.

The Titan Submersible

In order to understand the tragedy aboard the Titan, we’ve first got to understand the submarine itself. The Titan was operated by the company OceanGate Incorporated, out of the city of Everett in the US state of Washington. OceanGate was founded in 2009, with the goal of providing crewed submarines for a variety of uses from tourism to research to exploration, and after getting their start with vessels known as the Antipodes—purchased from elsewhere—and the OceanGate-designed Cyclops I, the company decided to attempt to design a third craft for their fleet.

Originally given the working name Cyclops II, OceanGate’s next submersible would be an improvement on both of their existing subs, featuring a series of design elements that set it apart from most undersea vessels. Designed in cooperation with the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab, the new sub was intended to feature a hull made of titanium and carbon-fiber. The hull would be manufactured by the same company, Spencer Composites, that had built the DeepFlight Challenger, a one-person submarine that was intended to perform the first solo manned mission to the ocean’s deepest known point, the Challenger Deep at the south end of the Mariana Trench. OceanGate’s new sub was intended to reach somewhat less extreme depths, but extreme nonetheless—up to four thousand meters, 13,000 feet, or well more than two miles beneath the surface of the ocean.

Now, this is where we’ve got to take a second and explain just why that depth matters—specifically, because of pressure. Atmospheric pressure is something that our bodies experience all the time; the air at sea level exerts a pressure of 14.7 pounds per square inch on our entire bodies, all the time. The reason we don’t feel that pressure, is because our bodies exert the same pressure outward, reaching a point of equilibrium where we don’t perceive it.

But water exerts significantly more pressure on things that go below the surface, and the deeper you go, the more extreme that pressure becomes. Imagine having a two-mile-high stack of gallon-jugs of water sitting on your chest, which, by the way, works out to a total weight of about sixty-seven tons. Now extend that to every square inch of your body, all at once, including the parts of you that are pointing toward the seafloor.

After all, those water molecules aren’t just pressing inward on you, but also on all the other water molecules around them.

These are the kinds of forces that OceanGate’s submarine, or any other deep-sea submarine, would have to contend with: six thousand, six hundred pounds per square inch of force at its maximum intended depth. To compensate, the submarine’s fuselage was built with a wall thickness of five inches, assembled from two titanium hemispheres, and a thick shell of carbon-fiber cylinder—the largest of its kind ever to be used in a crewed submersible. The craft was twenty-two feet long, a bit over nine feet wide, and a bit over eight feet tall, with an overall weight of 20,999 pounds.

It had the capacity to carry another 1,510 pounds, and could move at a top speed of just three knots, three and a half miles per hour. The sub, named Titan in 2018, utilized four electric thrusters to propel it up, down, and from side to side, and it was equipped with oxygen reserves that would allow a full load of passengers, five people, to survive for up to four days in case of emergency. Its real-time health monitoring system, long touted by OceanGate as a major innovation, used acoustic sensors to monitor hull integrity and—in theory—give enough of an early notice of problems that the Titan could get back to the surface before anything went badly wrong.

Uniquely for a submarine, the Titan was controlled with a modified game controller, a system that had also been used on the Cyclops I. It featured a single porthole, as well as camera equipment, LED lights, and a toilet, just in case. A single ticket on the Titan would cost a client about $250,000, and as its owner described, its passengers generally consisted of the very wealthy, and a small subset of people who happened to be extremely passionate about the Titanic and willing to spend massively to witness it.

The Flaws in the Machine

But along with the Titan’s unique features, it came with a rather long list of unique challenges. We want to note, before we get too deep into this section, that at no point do we wish to disparage or speak ill of the people who genuinely attempted to make the Titan into an innovative submersible, least of all the submarine’s owner Stockton Rush, who was killed in the tragedy on June 18. But setting OceanGate’s good intentions aside, the Titan had a number of flaws and safety concerns that were well-known in the years prior to its last dive, many of which are believed to have contributed directly to the submarine’s eventual failure.

First, and perhaps most outwardly shocking for a person just learning about the submarine, was that it was steered using a repurposed Xbox game controller. In fact, it wasn’t even a newer controller design; the one Rush revealed during prior interviews was a Logitech F710, first made available for sale in 2010. Whether that device was modified, and how, remains unclear, but it’s a far cry from the video-game-like, but purpose-built control devices used for drone aircraft and other sea vessels.

According to Professor Steve Wright of the University of the West of England, who was interviewed by CBS about the Titan’s controller, the use of an actual video-game controller would be extremely unreliable, and there would almost definitely be a better mechanism of control aboard the craft. As Wright put it, “I would expect the ‘real’ submersible controller to have a reliability of about one thousand times that of the games handset”. But unfortunately, there is no evidence to suggest that any real controller existed on the Titan.

The submersible also used some, shall we say, creative ways of providing ballast, using rusted, old construction pipes that weighed it down, and could be detached in order to help the Titan return to the surface. Its viewport, at least in 2018, was only certified to work at depths of up to 1,300 meters, a mere fraction of what it would have to survive in order to visit the Titanic. And OceanGate’s practices for checking the Titan for wear and tear, including the very normal, minor damage that a submarine is likely to sustain during any deep-sea voyage, are virtually impossible to confirm. OceanGate also took direct precautions to ensure that their submarine wouldn’t be regulated, deploying it only in international waters, where it did not need to register with any country or follow any pre-established rules of operation.

Past OceanGate employees had warned that the Titan’s hull was too thin to be reliable at extreme depths, a claim that one former employee, David Lochridge, claimed in court that he’d been fired for bringing to OceanGate’s attention. Also important is that while the submarine’s carbon-fiber exterior affords it resiliency against shearing forces, carbon fiber is nowhere near as resilient against forces that compress it inward—by example, the extreme pressures found at the depths of the Titanic. Lastly, the submarine was built to have its hatch lock from the outside using a series of seventeen deadbolts, meaning that in the event of emergency, the crew would have to rely on outside assistance to be able to escape the craft—even if they were able to bring it to the surface of the ocean. If water were to start leaking into the compartment, or a fire broke out, or someone suffered a medical emergency, there would be no way out unless someone was nearby to help.

And even despite the risks in the Titan’s design, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush himself had a history of outright dismissing safety concerns around the craft. In a November 2022 episode of the podcast “Unsung Science”, hosted by journalist David Pogue, Rush said of his craft, “You know, at some point, safety is just pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed, don’t get in your car, don’t do anything.

At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk-reward question.” This echoed sentiments Rush had expressed years earlier, when he told Smithsonian magazine that the US Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993 “needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation”. Pogue had taken a trip aboard the submarine, but even at that time, he’d expressed his own safety concerns and a hesitancy to even board the craft, partly because of how clearly improvised some of its components seemed to be.

This, too, was a concern Rush had plenty of answers for: “It doesn’t matter. Your thrusters can go. Your lights can go.

All these things can fail. You’re still going to be safe. And so, that allows you to do what you call MacGyver stuff”.

OceanGate had already clarified years earlier that the Titan had never been evaluated to ensure that it met safety standards, which they claimed was due to the submarine’s innovative design giving it features that those standards did not account for. But despite OceanGate’s claims that Titan had met the standards that were applicable to it, those claims were never formally verified. Stockton Rush had previously asserted that regulations around submarine design and use were keeping sub operators from pushing the bounds of what was possible, even describing the process as “obscenely safe”. Even the Titan’s waiver clearly advertised that it had never been approved or certified by any regulating body, and while it’s not unusual for waivers to include a disclaimer that participating in an activity could result in physical injury, disability, or death, it’s certainly poignant in light of recent events.

The Titan had a history of accidents prior to June 18, 2023, including an incident that took place during the aforementioned journalist David Pogue’s trip to see it in action. Though he wasn’t on the Titan at the time, Pogue witnessed firsthand from the control room of the surface ship the sub was attached to, as contact was lost with the Titan for five full hours. As was explained to Pogue during the incident, there was no way to track the submarine, not even an Emergency Locator Transmitter, as would be standard for an aircraft.

According to Pogue, the personnel on the surface ship shut off the ship’s Internet service, to prevent Pogue from tweeting about the incident in real-time. During the Titan’s maiden voyage, too, it suffered external damage and had some problems with its batteries, which would only come out when OceanGate was brought to court over the incident. And in 2022, a thruster was accidentally attached backwards, causing the Titan to spin in circles when it neared the seafloor.

And in 2018, a full five years before the catastrophe that brought us to this point, OceanGate was publicly cautioned by a collection of three dozen industry experts, who expressed their serious concern that the experimental approach the company was taking with Titan had the potential for disaster—not just the sort of disaster that might cause some property damage, but the kind that would end people’s lives and tarnish the reputation of the entire submarining industry. Those experts’ call for third-party inspection would go unheeded, and now, five years later, we find ourselves here. When Will Kohnen, Chair of the Marine Technology Society’s Submarine Committee and the person who drafted that 2018 letter, was asked about the Titan’s disappearance, he put it bluntly: “It hasn’t surprised us.”

Disappearance, Search, and Devastation

The Titan and its five passengers set out on their voyage two days before the dive, on June 16, 2023, from the port at St. John’s, in Newfoundland, Canada. They traveled aboard the privately owned icebreaking vessel, the Polar Prince, which is generally used for education and research purposes. A day later, it reached the dive site, and the following morning, at 9:30 AM, the Titan began its dive operation.

By all accounts, the dive went smoothly for over an hour and a half, but after a last scheduled check-in at 11:15, the sub went quiet.

At first, the incident wasn’t reported to any external agencies, as the OceanGate personnel aboard the Polar Prince wanted to give the submarine time to resurface and check back in on its own. But when the Titan didn’t return at the time its voyage was scheduled to conclude, 4:30 PM, the situation started to look less like a simple comms failure and more like a budding catastrophe. Forty minutes after the Titan’s scheduled time to resurface, the Polar Prince notified the US Coast Guard that the sub was missing.

Now, there’s no point burying the lead here; all indications are that by this point, the Titan had already been lost, and all of its passengers killed. Days following the Titan’s disappearance, the US Navy disclosed that its undersea acoustic monitoring systems had picked up a large acoustic signal, basically a loud noise, that its analysts had found when combing through data and trying to assist with the search-and-rescue mission. The signal they found was large and distinctive enough that it could only be one of two things—an underwater seismic event like an earthquake, or a catastrophic implosion of a man-made vessel. Given the lack of seismic events in the vicinity at that time, the answer was clear; although the world wouldn’t know it for another several days, the passengers aboard the Titan had already perished.

At the outset of this video, we mentioned the four other people who’d been aboard the vessel in addition to Stockton Rush, but we’ll take a moment and discuss each of them at slightly more length here. Rush, age sixty-one at the time of the accident, was an aerospace engineer who’d long cultivated his love for deep-sea exploration, as well as experimental aircraft. The trip’s guide, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, was seventy-seven; he had been a world-renowned expert on the Titanic wreck who had visited it at least thirty-five times prior, and was the director of RMS Titanic Incorporated, which is the sole organization responsible for salvaging artifacts from the sunken ship.

Hamish Harding, age fifty-eight, was a British billionaire who’d visited the South Pole with Buzz Aldrin, gone to the edge of space on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin spacecraft, held a world record for a four-hour dive at Challenger Deep, and was an inductee to the Living Legends of Aviation. Shahzada Dawood, forty-eight, was a Pakistani-British businessman and philanthropist, as well as a board member for the SETI institute, which searches for extraterrestrial life across the universe. His son, Suleman, was just nineteen, a student at the University of Strathclyde who played volleyball, solved Rubik’s cubes, and loved science-fiction literature.

According to his aunt, Suleman didn’t even want to go on the journey; he’d been dreading the trip, but went as a gift to his dad, for Father’s Day.

With those obituaries in mind, we’re going to hold off on describing the specific physical characteristics of the implosion in which these five people lost their lives. At this point, the effects of catastrophic implosion on the human body at such extreme deaths are well-documented, and if you’d like to learn about that, we trust that you can find your way. Suffice it to say that at a depth where the surrounding pressure was nearly 350 times as severe as the air pressure at sea level, a catastrophic implosion would have been the quickest and most painless way for the Titan’s passengers to die—some small consolation, in such a tragic incident. In all likelihood, they’d never have even known that there was a problem.

In the days immediately following the Titan’s disappearance, the US Coast Guard led a massive search effort by sea and by air, using sonar buoys to map and monitor depths as low as nearly 4,000 meters. Manned and unmanned deep-sea diving vessels were deployed to the area, helping to comb a search area twice as large as the US state of Connecticut. The search operation briefly got a glimmer of hope on Tuesday, June 20, when a Lockheed P-3 Orion aircraft, operated by Canada, was able to pick up banging noises coming from under the sea at intervals of 30 minutes.

But although the world held out hope for days that this might be the Titan’s passengers, trying to send some signal that they’d survived the accident and needed help, it wasn’t to be. The ninety-six estimated hours that the crew might have had left, based on the air available onboard the Titan, ticked by with no good news, and just shortly after that clock would have run out, the US Navy publicly announced the implosion they’d detected days earlier. Movie director and deep-sea explorer James Cameron later confirmed that his own associates had recorded a similar signal: “We got confirmation within an hour that there had been a loud bang at the same time that the sub comms were lost.

A loud bang on the hydrophone. Loss of transponder. Loss of comms.

I knew what happened. The sub imploded.”

That afternoon, on Thursday, June 22, the US Coast Guard confirmed that they had discovered a debris field near the Titanic, one that included five major pieces of the Titan submersible, including its tail cone. Although there is no way to know whether the Titan’s passengers were able to reach the Titanic before implosion, the tail cone was discovered just 1,600 feet from the mighty ship’s bow. If it gives you some small solace to imagine that the five people on board might have sighted the Titanic before they died, you aren’t alone, and frankly, there’s no harm in choosing to believe it.

Conclusion

The people aboard the Titan have now become the first fatalities in the history of the commercial deep-sea diving industry, a stark, and devastating reminder of the dangers in pushing too hard, too fast in the name of innovation, while being all too willing to compromise the well-being of people for whom a simple design misstep means death. At the time of writing, we don’t know for sure what the critical system failure was for the Titan, and we might never know. But in the face of such a tragic, and tragically avoidable accident, the specific engineering failure is almost irrelevant.

A thousand small, wrong choices lay between the Titan and its fate, and at every turn, the people responsible for the Titan appear to have made those small, wrong choices. Now, five people have paid the price, in what should be a dire warning to others who might be willing to play fast and loose with the idea of commercialized extreme exploration.

Today, we’re going to relinquish our claim to the last word in this video. Instead, we’ll cede it to James Cameron, and the statement he made to Reuters in the hours after the Titan’s destruction was confirmed. “Here we are again, and at the same place. Now, there’s one wreck lying next to the other wreck, for the same damn reason.”

Key Takeaways

• The Titan submersible, operated by OceanGate, suffered a catastrophic failure during a dive to the Titanic wreckage.
• The Titan had numerous design flaws and safety concerns, including an unreliable game controller for steering.
• OceanGate prioritized innovation over safety, leading to the first fatalities in commercial deep-sea diving history.
• The Titan’s passengers included wealthy adventurers and a deep-sea expert, all of whom perished in the implosion.
• Industry experts had warned OceanGate about the risks of the Titan’s experimental design years before the tragedy.

Sources

• Original MegaProjects video: The Titan Submersible Cataclysm: What we Know so Far (Special)
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• Hero image source by Gordon Leggett / openverse, by-sa.

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