From the very beginning, the plan was to push boundaries – go where no one has been before, as Richard Stockton Rush III puts it. A partner who has experience in the field of startups and is passionate about “making humanity a multi-planetary species”. The other, Mr. Rush, is an aerospace engineer and wealthy investor. Both of them dreamed of going to space.
Guillermo Sohnlein recalls: “We were frustrated astronauts. In 2009, he and Mr. Rush founded OceanGate Expeditions, the company whose submersible allegedly blew up during the Titanic expedition, kill Mr. Rush, 61, and four others.
The goal of the OceanGate founders is to make deep-sea voyages as accessible to tourists and wealthy researchers as entrepreneurs like Elon Musk have made, said Mr. Sohnlein. Astronaut.
“Internally,” he said, “we call ourselves SpaceX for the ocean.”
As authorities mapped the remains of a submersible called Titan on the ocean floor near the wreck of the Titanic, focus shifted to the company at the heart of the expedition. The tragedy that stunned the world and mesmerized the nation this week came as no surprise to veteran deep-sea explorers, many of them warned that Titan’s novel design is a disaster waiting to happen and need to go through rigorous testing.
“I first heard this story,” said Adam Wright, a businessman in Berkeley, California who spent many years running a company specializing in submersibles and once considered working with Mr. Rush, ““ I was shocked to learn that he made everyone pay. to go into his side.
In some respects, confidence has been built into Mr. Rush’s DNA. He is the heir to an oil fortune in San Francisco and can trace his ancestry to the two signers of the Declaration of Independence. The San Francisco Symphony Hall was named after his grandmother, Louise Davies, a prominent West Coast art patron.
Apollo 12 commander Charles Conrad Jr., known as Pete, is one of his family’s best friends. As a young man, Mr. Rush asked Mr. Conrad how he too could become an astronaut, and was advised to consider enlisting and getting a pilot’s license. Mr. Rush once said. When I was in college, according to his company biohe flew planes in and out of Saudi Arabia during his summer at Princeton, where he earned a degree in aerospace engineering in 1984.
But his eyesight wasn’t up to fighter pilot standards, he said, so he became a flight test engineer at McDonnell Douglas in the Pacific Northwest. In 1986, he married Wendy Weil, a pilot and great-grandson of retail magnate Isidor Straus, co-owner of Macy’s, and his wife, Ida, both died on the Titanic in 1912.
In later interviews, Mr. Rush joked that he made money the “classic way” – “I was born in it and grew up in it”. Likeable and quick-witted, he was invited to join the elite Bohemian Club of San Francisco, of which his father was a member, and acted in stand-up comedy at the group’s famous secret gatherings, proudly that I never tell the same joke twice, Mr. Sohnlein said.
He invested part of his inheritance in a variety of tech and engineering projects, and by the early 2000s he was wealthy enough to consider space travel on one of the names. Private fire is being developed.
However, while attending the successful launch of SpaceShipOne in the Mojave Desert in 2004, the first privately funded manned spacecraft launched into space, he suddenly lost interest in the just being a passenger. told Smithsonian magazine: “I don’t want to go into space as a tourist. I want to be Captain Kirk on the Enterprise.”
A certified scuba diver since the age of 14, Mr. Rush later tracked his marine shaft while taking a dip in Puget Sound, where it was so cold that he began to explore the possibility of securing a boat. small submarine to explore the water in a more comfortable way. When he discovered that there were very few submarines in the private market, he said, he built a 12-foot mini-submarine with glass windows from blueprints given by a Navy submarine commander. Retired US created, completed it in 2006.
The project has become a passion. Two years later, Mr. Sohnlein and Mr. Rush met through Graham Hawkes, an engineer and longtime submersible expert. On Thursday, Mr Hawkes recalled Mr Rush as an entrepreneur intent on creating a niche in the stark travel market. For a time, Mr. Rush appeared interested in buying Mr. Hawkes’ submersible company, but no deal was reached.
Instead, in 2009, Mr. Rush teamed up with Mr. Sohnlein, then a serial entrepreneur and angel investor focused on expanding human civilization to other planets.
“We think going under the sea is as close as you can get to space without leaving Earth,” said Mr Sohnlein.
“They decided to build and lease submersibles that could dive at least 4,000 meters – more than 13,000 feet – below the surface of the ocean,” Sohnlein said. and using private capital to build deep-sea submersibles, we can make them available to anyone who needs them — researchers, filmmakers, explorers — at a fraction of the cost.”
The company started with a used yellow submersible and shallow dives, then evolved into a steel-cased cylinder, the Cyclops 1, that could dive deeper. But steel-hulled ships are extremely expensive to operate and transport.
Mr. Sohnlein resigned in 2013, feeling that OceanGate had moved from the startup stage to Mr. Rush’s technical expertise. Mr. Sohnlein said that shortly after leaving, Mr. Rush began talking publicly about building a Cyclops 1 prototype with a lightweight carbon fiber titanium cap, a common material in the aerospace industry that he feels found to significantly reduce operating costs.
Looking back, Mr Hawkes said this week that he wished he had warned Mr Rush that carbon fiber was too unreliable for use in the hulls of submersibles, which are subject to enormous pressure. One day, he said, it could safely dive to 10,000 feet, but it could suffer undetectable damage and explode the next day at 9,000 feet.
In 2017, OceanGate advertised 12,500-foot expeditions down to the Titanic ruins at Titan, a submersible that could sit five and dive eight times deeper than Cyclops. Early reports said travelers would pay about $105,000 per person, a price OceanGate set because it was the inflation-adjusted cost of a first-class ticket on the Titanic in 1912.
In the deep sea exploration community, alarm bells are ringing. By January 2018, OceanGate’s chief maritime officer, David Lochridge, was compiling a report warning of potential dangers to passengers.
Weeks later, several experts had a tense exchange with Mr. Rush at a conference of experts on manned underwater vehicles in New Orleans, according to Karl Stanley, who operated the cruise submersible. calendar in Honduras for decades. Mr. Stanley said: “Essentially, everyone gathered with him in that room.
Soon after, in March, more than three dozen industry leaders, deep-sea explorers and oceanographers alerted Mr. letter that the company’s “experimental” approach could lead to potentially “catastrophic” problems with the Titanic mission.
“We suggest, ‘Look, you’re going too fast, and the idea of bypassing the existing classification process could have dire consequences,’” said Will Kohnen, head of the committee on methods marine technology association’s underwater manned vehicle, recalled Thursday. . “You don’t know what you don’t know.”
Mr. Rush made a phone call threatening to leave the industry group altogether, he said. On its website in 2019, OceanGate said the certification process was too slow to keep up with the company’s rapid pace of innovation. Mr. Rush called submersibles in general “confusingly safe” and complained that the industry was too cautious.
Mr. Stanley said in April 2019 he and Mr. Rush took Titan for a 12,000-foot dive in the Bahamas. The ship made a terrifying creaking sound as it plunged down Mr. Stanley begged Mr. Rush to cancel expeditions to the Titanic advertised in June.
OceanGate canceled the Titanic dive that year, saying it had failed to secure a permit for a research support vessel. But Mr. Rush continued. Mr Sohnlein, who now lives in Barcelona, Spain, said critics had unfairly assessed Mr. Rush’s decisions.
“These people don’t work at OceanGate, they’re not in the technology development program, they’re certainly not in the pilot program, and despite everyone’s opinions,” Mr Sohnlein said. me. “Stockton is very risk averse.”
The company declined to comment or respond to a list of questions on Friday. “We are unable to provide any additional information at this time,” Andrew Von Kerens, a spokesman for OceanGate, wrote in an email.
By 2020, OceanGate submitted documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission said it had raised about $18 million by selling equity to investors. Mr. Sohnlein said Mr. Rush “probably lost money,” having participated in every investment round and provided most of the seed capital.
By 2021, after a few false starts, OceanGate had completed expeditions to the Titanic with fares that had more than doubled to $250,000. Over the course of 2022, 28 people have ridden the Titan, according to legal documents filed by the company.
“It was an amazing experience,” said Alan Stern, 65, a planetary scientist who joined the Titan dive to the Titanic last year. Mr. Rush is “smart” and “can do”.
However, “they are very outspoken in their paperwork and in their conversations,” he added of OceanGate. “This is not a Disneyland ride.”
William J. Broad And Jenny General contribution report. Kitty Bennett Contributing research.
