This week, search crews have been scouring an area of the ocean roughly twice the size of Connecticut in a frantic effort to locate a submersible that disappeared on Sunday while carrying five men to the ruins of the Titanic.
As of this writing, the Coast Guard estimates that the vessel — if it's still intact — may have less than a day's worth of oxygen left. (For the latest on the search, click here.)
On board are five people: a British adventurer, a French diver, a Pakistani father and son, and a pilot — the man primarily responsible for the vessel that is now lost in the North Atlantic.
Zoom in: The pilot, Stockton Rush, is also the founder and CEO of OceanGate, which operates the Titanic tour. Rush, who is 61, has approached his dream of deep-sea exploration with child-like zeal, while making no secret of his antipathy toward regulations.
His past comments on the subject have begun to seem tragically misguided.
- Last year, Rush declared the commercial sub industry "obscenely safe," while complaining that regulations have stifled innovation.
- He also told a reporter that "at some point, safety just is pure waste... If you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed."
- "I think it was General MacArthur who said you're remembered for the rules you break," Rush told Mexican YouTuber Alan Estrada last year. "And I've broken some rules to make this. I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind me."
Rush founded OceanGate in 2009, with a stated mission of "increasing access to the deep ocean through innovation."
He believes deeply that the sea, rather than the sky, offers humanity the best shot at survival when the Earth's surface becomes uninhabitable.
"The future of mankind is underwater, it's not on Mars," he told Estrada. "We will have a base underwater ... If we trash this planet, the best life boat for mankind is underwater."
But even within OceanGate, warnings from employees about safety appear to have been ignored or disregarded, as my colleague Celina Tebor reported.
It's not just Rush's disdain for regulations that has raised eyebrows. Several aspects of the vessel's design and on-board technology — such as a videogame controller that the pilot uses to steer it — have come under renewed scrutiny.
When David Pogue, a CBS correspondent, took a trip on the Titan last year, he reported that communications broke down and the sub was lost at sea for more than two hours. He later asked Rush about the vessel's "MacGyvery" components — like the plastic PlayStation controller and LED lights that Rush bought from an RV retailer.
Rush pushed back against Pogue's description in that interview, arguing that some elements could be less sophisticated as long as the key parts, like the pressure vessel, is sound. Rush said the pressure vessel had been built in coordination with Boeing, NASA and the University of Washington. Once you're certain that the pressure vessel is not going to collapse on everybody, he said, "everything else can fail."
'The deep sick'
Extreme tourism is a lucrative, high-risk industry, my colleague Sam Delouya writes.
With enough money, tourists can summit Everest, take a rocket into space, run multi-day ultramarathons catered by Michelin-rated chefs, or plumb the oceans depths that have largely been off-limits for humankind.
"What I've seen with the ultra-rich — money is no object when it comes to experiences," said Nick D'Annunzio, the owner of public relations firm TARA, Ink. "They want something they they'll never forget."
In that respect, Rush shares something in common with his clients. In his interview with Smithsonian in 2019, he relayed his almost-spiritual attraction to the deep sea. He called it "the deep disease."
"I went to 75 feet. I saw cool stuff. I went 100 feet and saw more cool stuff. And I was like, 'Wow, what's it gonna be like at the end of this thing?'"
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