Five people were in the submersible, which lost contact with a surface vessel on Sunday morning, the Coast Guard said. A search and rescue mission is underway in the North Atlantic.
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Jenny Gross, Emma Bubola and Jesus Jiménez
A submersible craft carrying five people in the area of the Titanic wreck in the North Atlantic has been missing since Sunday, setting off a search and rescue operation by the U.S. Coast Guard.
The Coast Guard confirmed Monday that it was searching for the vessel after the Canadian research ship MV Polar Prince lost contact with a submersible during a dive about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., on Sunday morning.
“It is a remote area and it is a challenge to conduct a search in that remote area, but we are deploying all available assets to make sure that we can locate the craft and rescue the people on board,” said Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard.
The submersible disappeared in a portion of the ocean with a depth of roughly 13,000 feet. Admiral Mauger said the occupants would theoretically have between 70 to 96 hours of air as of late Monday afternoon.
The submersible is operated by OceanGate Expeditions, a company that offers tours of shipwrecks and underwater canyons. “Our entire focus is on the crew members in the submersible and their families,” a statement on its website said. “We are deeply thankful for the extensive assistance we have received from several government agencies and deep sea companies in our efforts to reestablish contact with the submersible.”
Hamish Harding, the chairman of the aviation company Action Aviation, is among those aboard the missing submersible, according to Mark Butler, the company’s managing director.
In an Instagram post, Mr. Harding indicated that another member of the submersible team was Paul Henry Nargeolet, a French expert on the Titanic. On his Facebook page on Saturday, Mr. Harding wrote that a dive had been planned for Sunday: “A weather window has just opened up,” he wrote.
Here’s what to know about the search operation:
Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate, has compared its project to the booming space tourism industry. Its customers pay $250,000 to travel to the Titanic’s wreckage on the seabed, more than two miles below the ocean’s surface.
Admiral Mauger said aircraft from the United States and Canada were searching for the submersible, and sonar buoys had been deployed to help search under the surface. The Coast Guard was also coordinating with commercial vessels in the area to aid the search operation.
OceanGate chartered a vessel, the MV Polar Prince, to serve as the ship on the surface near the dive site. The company’s website outlines an eight-day itinerary for the trip out of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada.
The Titanic sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912, on its maiden voyage from England to New York after hitting an iceberg, killing more than 1,500 people. The wreckage was found in 1985, broken into two main sections, about 400 miles off Newfoundland, in eastern Canada. Read The Times’s coverage of the sinking.
John Ismay, a Pentagon reporter, served as a deep-sea diving and salvage officer in the U.S. Navy.
Numerous complications could hinder the effort to rescue the five people aboard the deep-diving submersible Titan, which failed to return from a dive on Sunday to the wreck of the Titanic on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.
For any search and rescue operation at sea, weather conditions, the lack of light at night, the state of the sea and water temperature can all play roles in whether stricken mariners can be found and rescued. For a rescue beneath the waves, the factors involved in a successful rescue are even more numerous and difficult.
The first and most important problem to solve is simply finding the Titan.
Many underwater vehicles are fitted with an acoustic device, often called a pinger, which emits sounds that can be detected underwater by rescuers. Whether Titan has one is unclear.
The submersible reportedly lost contact with its support ship an hour and 45 minutes into what is normally a two-and-a-half-hour dive to the bottom, where the Titanic lies.
There could be a problem with Titan’s communication equipment, or with the ballast system that controls its descent and ascent by flooding tanks with water to dive and pumping water out with air to come back toward the surface.
An additional possible hazard for the vessel would be becoming fouled — hung up on a piece of wreckage that could keep it from being able to return to the surface.
If the submersible is found on the bottom, the extreme depths involved limit the possible means for rescue.
Human divers wearing specialized equipment and breathing helium-rich air mixtures can safely reach depths of just a few hundred feet below the surface before having to spend long amounts of time decompressing on the way back up. A couple hundred feet deeper, light from the sun can no longer penetrate the water, and dark reigns.
The Titanic lies in about 14,000 feet of water in the North Atlantic, a depth that humans can reach only while inside specialized submersibles that keep their occupants warm, dry and supplied with breathable air.
The only likely rescue would come from an uncrewed vehicle — essentially an underwater drone. The U.S. Navy has one submarine rescue vehicle, although it can reportedly reach depths of just 2,000 feet. For recovering objects off the sea floor in deeper water, the Navy relies on what it calls remote-operated vehicles, such as the one it used to salvage a crashed F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in about 12,400 feet in the South China Sea in early 2022. That vehicle, called CURV-21, can reach depths of 20,000 feet.
Getting the right kind of equipment — such as a remote vehicle like the CURV-21 — to the site takes time, starting with getting it to a ship capable of delivering it to the site.
The Titanic’s wreck lies approximately 370 miles south of Newfoundland, and the kinds of ships that can carry a vehicle like the Navy’s deepest-diving robot normally move no faster than about 20 miles per hour.
According to OceanGate’s website, the Titan can keep its five occupants alive for approximately 96 hours. In many submersibles, the air inside is recycled — carbon dioxide is removed and oxygen is added — but on a long enough timeline, the vessel will lose the ability to scrub enough carbon dioxide, and the air inside will no longer sustain life.
If the Titan’s batteries run down and are no longer able to run heaters that keep the occupants warm in the freezing deep, the people inside can become hypothermic and the situation eventually becomes unsurvivable. Should the submersible’s pressure hull fail, the end for those inside would be certain and quick.
By The New York Times
OceanGate Expeditions, the owner of the missing submersible, is a privately owned company headquartered in Everett, Wash., that, since its founding in 2009, has focused on increasing access to deep-ocean exploration.
The company has made headlines in recent years for organizing expeditions for paying tourists to travel in submersibles to shipwrecks, including the Titanic, and to underwater canyons. According to the company’s website, OceanGate also provides crewed submersibles for commercial projects and scientific research.
“Our team of qualified pilots, expedition leaders, mission professionals and client-service staff ensure accountability throughout the entire mission and expedition process with a focus on safety, proactive communication and client satisfaction,” the website reads.
OceanGate was founded by Stockton Rush, an aerospace engineer and pilot, who currently serves as its chief executive officer.
At just 19 years old, in 1981, Mr. Rush became the youngest jet transport rated pilot in the world, and obtained a degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton University three years later, according to the OceanGate website. He later earned an M.B.A. from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989.
OceanGate currently owns and operates three five-person submersibles.
The first submersible acquired by OceanGate, Antipodes, could travel to a depth of 1,000 feet.
In 2012, the company acquired another submersible, and rebuilt it into Cyclops 1, a vessel that could travel to a depth of up to 1,640 feet. It served as a prototype for the newest submersible, the Titan. That vessel, made of carbon fiber and titanium, is engineered to reach depths of more than 13,000 feet, or more than two miles. The Titan, which has been used to explore the Titanic’s wreckage, is now missing.
OceanGate has provided tours of the Titanic since 2021, in which guests have paid up to $250,000 to travel to the wreckage, which lies about 12,500 feet below the ocean’s surface.
Last year, Mr. Rush described the business to CBS News as “very unusual,” providing “a new type of travel.”
The company first planned a voyage to the Titanic in 2018, according to the technology news site GeekWire, but the Titan sustained damage to its electronics from lightning. Then, in 2019, the voyage was postponed again because of a problem with complying with Canadian maritime law limitations on foreign flag vessels, according to GeekWire.
Before the first successful trip to the Titanic in 2021, the Titan was “rebuilt,” according to GeekWire, after tests showed signs of “cyclic fatigue” that reduced the hull’s depth rating to 3,000 meters.
In 2020, OceanGate announced that it was working with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center to assure that the submersible was strong enough to survive in the ocean’s depths.
According to the company’s website, OceanGate has successfully completed more than 14 expeditions and more than 200 dives in the Pacific, Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.
OceanGate’s board members include Mr. Rush, along with a physician and astronaut, a software consultant, a retired U.S. Coast Guard, and a C.E.O. of an investment advisory firm.
In addition to OceanGate, Mr. Rush is also a co-founder and member of the board of trustees of OceanGate Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in 2012 which aims to “fuel underwater discoveries in nautical archaeology, marine sciences and subsea technology” through public outreach and financial support.
The nonprofit’s website features OceanGate’s Titanic expedition, along with other global exploration expeditions.
OceanGate is based on the backside of a marina facility in Everett, Wash., tucked between several boat maintenance companies, where some workers were washing, inspecting and relocating yachts on Monday. No sign or logo marks its location, and the windows at the OceanGate doors were covered on Monday, one with a Titanic expedition logo. The entrance door was locked, and nobody responded to knocking. A nearby marina worker said OceanGate employees packed up and left for the Titanic expedition several weeks ago.
An Instagram post from Hamish Harding, who was aboard the submersible that went missing on Sunday, indicated that another member of the submersible team was Paul Henry Nargeolet, a French expert on the Titanic.
Emma Bubola, Salman Masood and Victoria Kim
Five people were on board the Titan submersible when it lost contact with its support ship during a dive to the Titanic wreckage site in the North Atlantic on Sunday. On Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard and the company that operated the submersible, OceanGate Expeditions, said that all five people on board were believed to be dead.
Here are the passengers who were aboard the craft.
Stockton Rush was the founder and chief executive of OceanGate Expeditions, the company that operated the submersible. He was piloting the vessel.
In an interview that aired on CBS in November, Mr. Rush said he grew up wanting to be an astronaut and, after earning an aerospace engineering degree from Princeton in 1984, a fighter pilot.
“I had this epiphany that I didn’t want — it wasn’t about going to space,” Mr. Rush said. “It was about exploring. It was about finding new life-forms. I wanted to be sort of the Captain Kirk. I didn’t want to be the passenger in the back. And I realized that the ocean is the universe.” He founded OceanGate, a private company that is based in Everett, Wash., near Seattle, in 2009.
Hamish Harding, a British businessman and explorer, holds several Guinness World Records, including one for the longest time spent traversing the deepest part of the ocean on a single dive. He wrote on his Facebook page on Saturday that he was proud to announce that he had joined OceanGate’s mission “on the sub going down to the Titanic.”
Mr. Harding, 58, was the chairman of Action Aviation, a sales and air operations company based in Dubai. He had previously flown to space on a mission by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket company.
Mr. Harding also took part in an effort to reintroduce cheetahs to India, and holds a world record for the fastest circumnavigation of Earth via both the geographic poles by plane.
Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French maritime expert, had been on more than 35 dives to the Titanic wreck site.
Mr. Nargeolet was the director of underwater research for RMS Titanic, Inc., an American company that owns the salvage rights to the famous wreck and displays many of the artifacts in Titanic exhibitions. The company conducted eight research and recovery expeditions between 1987 and 2010, according to its website.
The British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son, Suleman, 19, were members of one of Pakistan’s wealthiest families.
Mr. Dawood had a background in textiles and fertilizer manufacturing. His son was a business student at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, a spokesman for the school confirmed in a statement on Thursday.
Mr. Dawood and his son had “embarked on a journey to visit the remnants of the Titanic” when contact with the vessel was lost, the statement said, asking for privacy for the family.
Mr. Dawood was also on the board of trustees for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute. The organization said on its website that he was a resident of Britain, and a father of two children.
An ambitious digital imaging project has produced what researchers describe as a “digital twin” of the R.M.S. Titanic, showing the wreckage of the doomed ocean liner with a level of detail that has never been captured before.
The project, undertaken by Magellan Ltd., a deepwater seabed mapping company, yielded more than 16 terabytes of data, 715,000 still images and a high-resolution video. The visuals were captured over the course of a six-week expedition in the summer of 2022, nearly 2.4 miles below the surface of the North Atlantic, Atlantic Productions, which is working on a documentary about the project, said in a news release.
The researchers used two submersibles, named Romeo and Juliet, to map “every millimeter” of the wreckage as well as the entire three-mile debris field. Creating the model, which shows the ship lying on the ocean floor and the area around it, took about eight months, said Anthony Geffen, the chief executive and creative director of Atlantic Productions.
By air and sea, rescue crews on Monday were racing to find five people in a submersible that went missing on Sunday just hours into a dive about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., officials said.
At a news conference in Boston on Monday afternoon, Rear Adm. John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said that rescue crews were searching in a “remote area” in water roughly 13,000 feet deep, and that they were up against the clock to find those on board the vessel.
Admiral Mauger said that Coast Guard officials understood from OceanGate Expeditions, the operator of the submersible, which offers tours of shipwrecks and underwater canyons, that the vessel was designed to have 96 hours of “emergency capability.” He did not provide specifics about what that capability meant for those on board, though it was believed to indicate that they would have breathable air for four days.
“We’re using that time, making the best use of every moment of that time,” he said.
The five people on board the submersible were not identified at the news conference “out of respect for the families,” Admiral Mauger said, noting that one person on board was a pilot, or operator, and that the other four were “mission specialists.” He did not share what role the specialists served on the vessel, referring that question to the operator of the submersible.
The United States deployed two C-130 aircraft, with another aircraft expected to join the search later on Monday from the New York National Guard, and Canada has sent a C-130 and a P-8 submarine search aircraft, Admiral Mauger said.
“On the surface we have the commercial operator that’s been on site, and we’re bringing additional surface assets into play,” he said, adding that they will provide some “subsurface” search ability.
Admiral Mauger said that rescue teams had also deployed sonar buoys on the surface of the waters to try to locate the submersible, which had sent out its last reported communication about an hour and 45 minutes into its dive. Exactly when that was on Sunday morning was unclear.
In an interview with Fox News earlier on Monday, Admiral Mauger said that the Coast Guard did not have the right equipment in the search area to do a “comprehensive sonar survey of the bottom.”
“Right now, we’re really just focused on trying to locate the vessel again by saturating the air with aerial assets,” he said.
Plunging to the depths of the ocean in a submersible to explore the remains of the Titanic is just one of many extreme excursions on offer for travelers willing to pay a hefty price tag — and accept a substantial dose of peril.
There’s also swimming with great white sharks in Mexico, sailing by an active volcano in New Zealand and rocketing to space. These types of singular and dangerous adventures are becoming increasingly popular with deep-pocketed leisure travelers in search of novel experiences, several travel experts said.
“There are a lot of incredibly well-traveled folks out there who constantly push the boundaries of their travels to chase thrills and claim bragging rights,” said Peter Anderson, managing director of Knightsbridge Circle, a luxury concierge service with offices in London, New York and Dubai. “They’re so accustomed to what they consider to be typical vacations that they begin to seek out more unique experiences, many of which involve a degree of risk.”
Mr. Anderson said he had recently planned a trip for a client to visit the pyramids in South Sudan, the site of one of the world’s biggest refugee crises, which has a “Do Not Travel” advisory from the U.S. State Department. The planning process, he said, involved consultations with security experts on how to best mitigate potential dangers.
Another client wanted to voyage to the geographic South Pole — the southernmost point on Earth — which required chartering an icebreaker, a large vessel that can pass through ice-covered waters, and two helicopters for sightseeing. The trip, which cost about $100,000 per person, required a week of various health screenings and weather preparedness training.
Physically demanding expeditions to some of the world’s most remote destinations are a growing business for the luxury travel company Abercrombie & Kent, said Geoffrey Kent, its founder. He said the company uses expert guides to eliminate as much risk as possible.
“These are thrilling adventures for top-tier clients who have done pretty much everything,” Mr. Kent said in a statement, adding that the challenges left guests “with a sense of accomplishment.”
Perhaps the priciest ticket, and biggest possible risk, is space travel, which has been dominated by a trio of billionaire-led rocket companies: Blue Origin, owned by Jeff Bezos, whose passengers have included the “Star Trek” television star William Shatner; Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, where tickets for a suborbital spaceflight start at $450,000; and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which in 2022 launched an all-civilian spaceflight, with no trained astronauts on board.
A spokesman for the U.S. Coast Guard, speaking to reporters, said that the last reported communication from the submersible was about an hour and 45 minutes into its dive.
The spokesman said that the sea conditions in the search area right now are “fairly normal,” with three to six foot waves, with low visibility and fog.
Mauger said that the United States has deployed two C130 aircraft, with an additional on the way from the New York National Guard, and that the Canadians have sent a C130 and a P8 submarine search aircraft. “On the surface we have the commercial operator that’s been on site, and we’re bringing additional surface assets into play,” he said, adding that they will provide some “subsurface” search ability.
Mauger said that one submersible pilot was on board. “And there were four mission specialists, is the term that the operator uses,” he said. “You’ll have to ask the operator what that means.”
Mauger said it is believed the vessel was designed to sustain an emergency for 96 hours and estimated that the people inside would theoretically have between 70 to 96 hours of air. “We’re using that time making the best use of every moment of that time,” Mauger said.
Mauger said the location of the search is approximately 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., in a water depth of roughly 13,000 feet. “It is a remote area and is a challenge to conduct a search in that remote area, but we are deploying all available assets to make sure that we can locate the craft and rescue the people on board.”
Mauger said that the search is being conducted both under the water, with sonar buoys and sonar on the expedition ship, and over the water, in case the submersible surfaced and lost communications, with the help of aircraft and surface vessels. He said the Coast Guard was coordinating both with the Canadian authorities and commercial vessels in the area for help.
Mauger said the Coast Guard was notified on Sunday afternoon by the operator of the submersible that it was “overdue” and that it had five people on board.
Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said at a news conference that “we are doing everything we can do” to find the submersible and rescue the five people inside. United States and Canadian aircraft are being used in the search, he said. Mauger said that the Coast Guard has put sonar buoys in the water to try to locate the submersible.
We’re standing by for Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard to provide updates on the missing submersible at a news conference in Boston.
The Titan, the vessel that went missing in the area of the Titanic wreck in the North Atlantic on Monday, is classified as a submersible, not a submarine, because it does not function as an autonomous craft, instead relying on a support platform to deploy and return.
According to the website for the tourism company operating the Titan, OceanGate Expeditions of Everett, Wash., the missing vessel is a submersible capable of taking five people — one pilot and four crew members — to depths of 4,000 meters, or more than 13,100 feet — for “site survey and inspection, research and data collection, film and media production, and deep sea testing of hardware and software.”
Made of titanium and carbon fiber, it weighs about 21,000 pounds and is listed as measuring 22 feet by 9.2 feet by 8.3 feet, with 96 hours of “life support” for five people.
The Titan, one of three types of crewed submersibles operated by OceanGate, is equipped with a platform similar to the dry dock of a ship that launches and recovers the vessel, the website said.
“The platform is used to launch and recover manned submersibles by flooding its flotation tanks with water for a controlled descent to a depths of 9.1 meters (30 feet) to avoid any surface turbulence,” according to the website.
“Once submerged, the platform uses a patented motion-dampening flotation system to remain coupled to the surface yet still provide a stable underwater platform from which our manned submersibles lift off of and return to after each dive,” the site continues. “At the conclusion of each dive, the sub lands on the submerged platform and the entire system is brought to the surface in approximately two minutes by filling the ballast tanks with air.”
OceanGate calls the Titan the only crewed submersible in the world that can take five people as deep as 4,000 meters — or more than 13,100 feet — enabling it to reach almost 50 percent of the world’s oceans. Unlike other submersibles, the Titan, the website said, employs a system that can analyze how pressure changes affect the vessel as it dives deeper, providing “early warning detection for the pilot with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface.”
The Titan began deep-sea ventures related to the Titanic in 2021. According to the tech news site GeekWire, the vessel was “rebuilt” after OceanGate determined through testing that the vessel could not withstand the pressure of a 4,000-meter dive.
In a Fox News interview, Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said that the agency did not have the right equipment in the search area to do a “comprehensive sonar survey of the bottom.” He said,“Right now, we’re really just focused on trying to locate the vessel again by saturating the air with aerial assets, by tasking surface assets in the area, and then using the underwater sonar.”
Mauger said that one of the aircraft being used in the search could detect underwater noises.“But it is a large area of water, and it’s complicated by local weather conditions as well,” he said.
The U.S. Coast Guard said in statement that it was searching for five people after the Canadian research vessel MV Polar Prince lost contact with a submersible during a dive about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., on Sunday morning. The Coast Guard scheduled a news conference for 4:30 p.m. Eastern time.
The Marine Institute at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, which partnered with OceanGate on the trip, said in a statement that it became aware on Monday morning that OceanGate had lost contact with its Titan submersible. One Marine Institute student who was on a summer employment contract with OceanGate was safe, the statement said. “We have no further information on the status of the submersible or personnel,” the statement said.
Rory Golden, an Irish diver who has previously visited the Titanic wreckage and is part of the OceanGate expedition, said in a Facebook post on Monday that a “major search and rescue operation” was underway. The focus on board the ship is “our friends,” he wrote. Communications were being limited to preserve bandwidth to coordinate operations, he added. (Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this update misstated Rory Golden’s nationality. He is Irish, not Scottish.)
Hamish Harding, the chairman of a Dubai-based sales and air operations company, Action Aviation, is among those aboard the missing submersible, according to Mark Butler, the company’s managing director. Harding, who holds several Guinness World Records, including for the longest time spent traversing the deepest part of the ocean on a single dive, wrote on his Facebook page on Saturday that a dive had been planned for Sunday: “A weather window has just opened up,” he wrote.
For decades after the Titanic sank, searchers scanned the dark waters of the North Atlantic for the ship’s final resting place.
Since the wreck was found, in 1985, it has drawn hundreds of filmmakers, salvagers, explorers and tourists, using robots and submersibles.
First there was the team that took undersea robots to depths of more than 12,000 feet, verifying that the broken hulk it found at the bottom was in fact the Titanic. Then came many others, including James Cameron, the director who reinvigorated interest in the ship with his 1997 film, “Titanic.”
The ship had long garnered intense interest among researchers and treasure hunters captivated by the tragic history of the wreck: the horror of the accident, the supposed hubris of the ship’s builders, the enormous wealth of many and the poverty of others on the luxury liner juxtaposed with the cold facts of the iceberg and the sea.
But Mr. Cameron’s hit imbued the wreck with a new story of romance and tragedy, renewing interest far beyond those with an interest in famous accidents at sea.
By the early 2000s, scientists were warning that visitors were a threat to the wreck, saying that gaping holes had opened up in the decks, walls had crumpled, and that rusticles — icicle-shaped structures of rust — were spreading all over the ship.
Tourists were paying up to $36,000 per dive by submersible. Salvage crews hunted for artifacts to bring back up, over the objections of preservationists who said the wreck should be honored as the graveyard for more than 1,500 people. Wreckage from a submersible accident was found on one of the Titanic’s decks. Researchers said the site was littered with beer and soda bottles and the remains of salvage efforts, including weights, chains and cargo nets.
Mr. Cameron, who has repeatedly visited the wreck, was among those calling for care around the site. In 2003, he took 3D cameras there for his 2003 documentary, “Ghosts of the Abyss.”
OceanGate Expeditions, the private company operating the submersible that went missing on Monday, was founded in 2009. By the time it began offering tours to paying customers, researchers said that the Titanic had little scientific value compared to other sites.
But cultural interest in the Titanic remains extraordinarily high: OceanGate charges $250,000 for a submersible tour of the wreck, and the disaster continues to command a fascination online, sometimes at the expense of facts.
A spokeswoman for Canada's Coast Guard said that a military aircraft and a Coast Guard ship had been deployed to help search for the missing submersible. The ship, Kopit Hopson 1752, was off eastern Newfoundland, and headed for the search area.
John Lockwood, a longtime OceanGate board member, has been in the company’s submersibles, though not the Titan, the one that he said takes people to the Titanic. He said the submersibles have a viewing port and external cameras. “But it’s not like going down in a submarine at a very shallow depth, where there are multiple viewing ports,” he said.
OceanGate Expeditions, the operator of the submersible that disappeared during a voyage to the wreckage of the Titanic, has led previous tourist trips to the site at a cost of $250,000 per person.
Stockton Rush, the president of OceanGate, told The New York Times last summer that private exploration was needed to continue feeding public fascination with the wreck site.
“No public entity is going to fund going back to the Titanic,” Mr. Rush said. “There are other sites that are newer and probably of greater scientific value.”
OceanGate takes paying tourists in submersibles to underwater canyons and shipwrecks, including the Titanic. Last year, it shared a one-minute clip of video obtained during one of its trips to the wreck site, which was discovered in 1985, less than 400 miles off Newfoundland.
The dives last about eight hours, including the estimated 2.5 hours each way it takes to descend and ascend. Scientists and historians provide context on the trip and some conduct research at the site, which has become a reef that is home to many organisms. The team also documents the wreckage with high-definition cameras to monitor its decay and capture it in detail.
Mr. Rush said that the high quality of the footage allowed researchers to get an even closer look at the site without having to go underwater. He compared the OceanGate trips to space tourism, saying the commercial voyages were the first step to expanding the use of the submersibles for industrial activities, such as inspecting and maintaining underwater oil rigs.
“For those who think it’s expensive, it’s a fraction of the cost of going to space and it’s very expensive for us to get these ships and go out there,” Mr. Rush said. “And the folks who don’t like anybody making money sort of miss the fact that that’s the only way anything gets done in this world is if there is profit or military need.”
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the day that the expedition’s research vessel lost contact with the submersible. It was Sunday, not Monday.
Trevor Munroe, a Canadian Coast Guard spokesman, said his country is involved in the rescue mission, but the U.S. Coast Guard is leading it from Boston. “It’s technically in their waters,” he said.
The news of the missing submersible recalls an OceanGate trip last year that was the subject of a CBS story. During the trip, the CBS correspondent David Pogue reported that “communication somehow broke down”and that the submersible was briefly lost for a couple of hours.
You may remember that the @OceanGateExped sub to the #Titanic got lost for a few hours LAST summer, too, when I was aboard…Here’s the relevant part of that story. https://t.co/7FhcMs0oeH pic.twitter.com/ClaNg5nzj8
The Titanic was en route to New York on its maiden voyage when it struck an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912. The sinking was front-page news around the world, including in The New York Times. Here is a portion of The Times’s coverage, as it was written that day. The digital version of the paper from that day can be viewed here.
The admission that the Titanic, the biggest steamship in the world, had been sunk by an iceberg and had gone to the bottom of the Atlantic, probably carrying more than 1,400 of her passengers and crew with her, was made at the White Star Line offices, 9 Broadway, at 8:20 o’clock last night.
Then P.A.S. Franklin, Vice President and General Manager of the International Mercantile Marine, conceded that probably only those passengers who were picked up by the Cunarder Carpathia had been saved. Advices received early this morning tended to increase the number of survivers by 200.
The admission followed a day in which the White Star Line officials had been optimistic in the extreme. At no time was the admission made that every one aboard the huge steamer was not safe. The ship itself, it was confidently asserted, was unsinkable, and inquirers were informed that she would reach port, under her own steam probably, but surely with the help of the Allan liner Virginian, which was reported to be towing her.
As the day passed, however, with no new authentic reports from the Titanic or any of the ships were known to have responded to her wireless call for help, it became apparent that authentic news of the disaster probably could come only from the Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic.
The wireless range of the Olympic is 500 miles. That of the Carpathia, the Parisian, and the Virginian is much less, and as they neared the position of the Titanic they drew further and further out of shore range. From the Titanic’s position at the time of the disaster it is doubtful if any of the ships except the Olympic could establish communication with shore.
Polyurethane Braided Hose Miawpukek Horizon Maritime Services, of St. John’s, Canada, said it was supporting OceanGate Expeditions, a client. “We are working closely with authorities on the search and rescue effort,” they said in a statement.