"We signed waivers that would curl your toes" "All of the challenges" inherent in submersibles "are exacerbated" in a vehicle, such as Titan, built for extreme depths.
There's a huge difference in the pressure loads put on an ordinary tourism submersible, which might dive to a depth of around 1,500 feet vs. Not only is the price tag for its Titanic expedition reportedly a whopping $250,000, no other company has attempted to take customers down nearly as far as the Titanic wreck, which lies about 13,000 feet, or 2.4 miles, under the surface. However, Jon Council, a submersible expert and president of the Historical Diving Society, cautions that "there are just a multitude of things that can go wrong."Ĭouncil says that while submersible tourism has been around for decades, taking thousands of paying customers into the depths of the ocean in piloted underwater vessels, OceanGate is in a league of its own.
OceanGate on its website touts its "innovative use of materials and state-of-the-art technology" and its "patented launch and recovery platform" as making the deep ocean "more accessible for human exploration than ever before." OceanGate, the company whose Titan submersible went missing Sunday with five people aboard somewhere near the wreck of the Titanic, is on the cutting - and potentially dangerous - edge of this new tourism. In the past few years, commercial space tourism companies owned by billionaires Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk have been making headlines for sending paying customers into space.īut until this week, few people were aware of another extreme adventure industry that is just getting started: deep-ocean exploration.
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