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OceanGate’s Titan exploded almost a year ago, killing all 5 passengers, including the company’s CEO.
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Company co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein told BI he thinks about the incident every day.
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Söhnlein said the fatal explosion motivated him to continue his exploration attempts.
The co-founder of OceanGate said he thinks about Titan’s deadly undersea voyage every day, and that the incident pushed him to pursue his vision of attainable deep-sea exploration.
Nearly a year ago, on June 18, 2023, Titan made its final plunge into the Atlantic, where five passengers, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, ventured into the area where the Titanic wreckage was found.
US Coast Guard officials said the ship suffered a “catastrophic explosion” and all passengers died instantly.
The incident attracted national attention and was seen as a manifestation of Rush’s hubris and relentless drive to explore the deep sea – even if it meant bending a few rules.
“Very few of us have a fatal flaw, and Rush had one,” Travel Weekly editor-in-chief Arnie Weissmann told Business Insider last year. “He thought he was right or he wouldn’t get in [the submersible] and I piloted it, but that was a fatal flaw.”
But for Guillermo Söhnlein, who co-founded OceanGate with Rush in 2009, death is an unfortunate element of innovation that explorers can only hope to avoid.
“We always know that setbacks are almost part of the discovery experience. It’s almost in the definition of discovery,” he told BI in a recent interview. “You’re going to have setbacks, and you hope those setbacks don’t include deaths, but you know it’s a possibility.”
And when death becomes a “setback,” Söhnlein said, then you have to push harder.
“I think, paradoxically, the urge to keep going is getting stronger,” he said. “And I think in large part, you want to make sure that your colleagues who have passed away haven’t lost their lives in vain. You want their deaths to mean something and their legacy to live on.”
This feeling is part of why Söhnlein hasn’t stopped thinking about OceanGate and Rush in the year since the Titan disaster.
“I probably think about him and the company and everything 10 times more than I did before the incident,” he said.
Developments in human transportation systems
During the interview, Söhnlein did not mention his regrets; rather, he spoke of his desire to realize OceanGate’s initial vision of “opening the oceans to humanity.”
He told BI he sees a problem that the only people who can dive deep into the ocean are billionaires with the resources to build submarines, or researchers and government agencies with access to deep-sea vessels.
“When Stockton and I sat down and looked at the state of the world in 2009, we thought, ‘This is a tragedy,'” he said. “The most important ecosystem on the entire planet is one that we can only access if we are a national government or billionaires. And that’s ridiculous.”
The Titan explosion continues to be investigated today. A recent Wired report revealed more information about Rush’s effort to build a low-cost submarine and how he ignored his colleagues’ warnings.
People inside and outside OceanGate have called for Rush to do more testing on Titan before taking passengers. Last year, BI reported that OceanGate had completed more than 14 expeditions and 200 dives using two submarines.
Söhnlein said he had read the Wired report but did not want to comment because he felt it would speculate about its content.
He also told BI that he did not take into account how many tests were appropriate for a deep-sea submarine because “it is different for each submarine depending on the level of innovation.”
Asked if he would have said anything different to Rush before the outburst, Söhnlein told BI he would speculate once again.
“I don’t know. I’d be speculating since I’m not with the company and only talk to Stockton occasionally,” he said. “I didn’t have access to all the information. I wasn’t there every day. I didn’t see the submarine being built.”
“OceanGate has suspended all exploration and commercial operations,” a communications firm representing OceanGate wrote in a brief email to BI.
Last year, Söhnlein told BI about his grand vision of sending 1,000 people to a floating colony on Venus. After leaving OceanGate, he also founded Blue Marble Exploration, which he describes as “an exploration-focused media company.”
In a recent interview with BI, he said one takeaway from the Titan explosion that he would apply to ongoing exploration initiatives goes beyond submarines and is relevant to current developments in the “human transportation system” such as autonomous vehicles. to suborbital flight.
“At some point in the technology development cycle you need to bring people into the loop,” Söhnlein said. “But if you’re going to start putting people into this transportation system, you need to have the right level of comfort along with the feasibility of technology to do it as safely as possible. And I think that’s kind of a lesson learned for everybody.”
Read the original article on Business Insider