The hubris of the Titan submersible's dangerous, luxurious exploration

The ocean doesn't care about money.

I can’t stop reading about, thinking about, talking about, and now writing about the privately-owned submersible named Titan that has gone missing two-and-a-half miles underneath the sea, somewhere near the resting place of the Titanic. For those of you unfamiliar with the developing news story — if that’s even possible at this point, no offense — The New York Times has good updates.

The basic facts are that a guy named Stockton Rush “innovated” himself and four other passengers to the bottom of the ocean. Each guest paid 250,000 dollars for the unique privilege of seeing the wreckage of the Titanic up close. As the CEO of a company called OceanGate, Rush decided that he was above third-party regulators and refused to have his vessel classified, meaning that it was not up the standards a vehicle must meet if it’s going to go 12,000-feet under the ocean. Here’s the blog post from OceanGate arguing that safety slows down innovation.

via OceanGate

The Titan was built to be “low cost.” Even the window on the thing was allegedly only classified to withstand pressure up to 1,300 feet below sea level, not more than 12-times that. A bunch of experts in the submersible industry wrote Rush a letter saying that he was being reckless. The Titan doesn’t have an escape hatch, so even if it were to surface, the people inside couldn’t get out on their own. It also has no GPS and no safety beacon to send out signals. Whoever wrote the OceanGate blog post in 2019 even said, “The vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure.”

It was presented as an argument against classification: We are so good at this that we don’t need to follow the rules.

There were so many regulations skirted here, so many safety features simply ignored, that it seems like the Titan was basically built under the assumption that nothing would ever go wrong. Which is — and I can’t stress this enough — the WASPiest kind of hubris. It was the tech-bro mantra of, “move fast and break shit,” but applied to deep-sea diving.

Rush is from a wealthy family with deep, generational ties to Princeton and the founding of this country. His father — Stockton Rush Jr. — was on the board of an oil company, and started a “luxury Feng-Shui lodge” in New Zealand. I don’t know Rush personally, and I don’t want anyone to think I’m minimizing the search-and-rescue effort, or the pain the passengers and their families are going through. I cannot imagine the horror of being stuck in there or loving someone who is, and I hope they can be found.