Munedawg Communications

As has been covered extensively on the news, on June 8, 2023 the submersible Titan imploded on its mission to the Titanic wreck in the North Atlantic killing all aboard, including the sub’s owner, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, Paul Henri Nargeolet, a French deep sea and Titanic expert, Hamish Harding, a British billionaire, Shazhada Dagwood, a Pakastani-British billionaire, and his son Suleman.

Unfortunately Rush had cut corners on the design of the Titan, even using a wireless (!) Logitech F170 game controller to pilot the sub. And as James Cameron (among others) has explained, a carbon composite pressure vessel is the wrong choice for a submersible since the external high pressure ocean water can delaminate it, causing catastrophic failure, which is of course what happened (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XIyin68vEE). Rush also hadn’t got a seaworthy certification from such accepted organizations such as DNV (Det Norske Veritas).

As usual in these incidents, there is the usual finger pointing and people coming out of the woodwork saying “I told you so” but such claims do seem to be founded in the real history of the endeavor. OceanGate’s former Director of Marine Operations David Lochridge had created a report outlining the many safety flaws in Titan‘s design back in 2018. Later that year, the Marine Technology Society wrote a letter to OceanGate which stated that the company’s “current experimental approach … could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry”. Also deep sea specialist Rob McCallum had emailed Rush the same year voicing the same concerns.

It is a shame that reckless people like Rush put other people’s lives in danger because of his callous lack of safety concerns. And he also took advantage of people’s natural curiosity about the Titanic. Actually in 2018, I had seen an actual piece of the Titanic‘s hull (“Sculpture In Rust”) in a temporary exhibit showing undersea wonders at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

Also, amazingly, a treasure hunter and scuba diver named Jake with the YouTube moniker DALLMYD had been on a previous Titan expedition just weeks prior to the disaster in which he and his girlfriend were slated to travel down to the wreck but the main dive was cancelled due to bad weather and sea conditions, although Jake himself was able to go on a test dive which only went down to 30 feet (9 meters): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-8U08yJlb8. It is true because of all the legal ramifications of this incident, Jake may be forced to remove this video from YouTube so view it while it is still available.

By the looks of it this disaster could have been avoided and my condolences go out to the families of the people involved.