How Stockton Rush and the Titan sub disaster destroyed lives and dreams of deep-sea exploration
The images were almost hauntingly romantic — underwater windows to one of history’s most famous shipwrecks, captured more than a century after RMS Titanic and the 1,517 souls aboard sank tragically to a deep-sea North Atlantic grave.
The new 2022 pictures were the highest resolution ever taken of the doomed ship; its sinking 110 years earlier had quickly become a global fascination that has endured for generations. The ship’s victims were among the richest and poorest on the planet at the time, the circumstances of their deaths among the most terrifying imaginable.
OceanGate Expeditions, the Washington-based companyresponsible for the photos, had shrewdly tapped into that public obsession. Founded in 2009 to make “deep-sea exploration possible for commercial, scientific, and exploration travel expeditions,” the company recorded the 8,000 pixels footage on a submersible dive and then publicly released them. They promptly and unsurprisingly went viral.
OceanGate was sleek and media savvy, helmed by a swashbuckling CEO who’d once aspired to be anwreck as the ultimate exploration destination. The company pumped out press releases and held “scientific research media briefings” about its efforts to chronicle the wreck’s decay and its surrounding ecosystem – while dangling trips for civilians who could cough up six figures for a place as “mission specialists” on OceanGate’s submersible, Titan.
