titanic wreck site tour

Here’s How You Can Visit the Wreck of the Titanic—for $125,000

A series of expeditions will take tourists down to the ill-fated ship in 2021

Courtesy of NOAA/Institute for Exploration/University of Rhode Island (NOAA/IFE/URI)

You’re probably familiar with the RMS Titanic: in 1912, the world’s largest ocean liner of the day embarked on her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York, during which she struck an iceberg, sank, and ultimately took more than 1,500 lives. The Titanic’s final resting place remained a mystery until 1985, when American marine geologist Robert Ballard and French oceanographer Jean-Louis Michel discovered the wreck in the crushing depths of the frigid North Atlantic, nearly 2.5 miles beneath the surface of the sea. 

Rather unsurprisingly, visiting the Titanic has become a bucket-list trip for maritime historians, oceanographers, and, well, anyone who has deep enough pockets to go. However, expeditions are rare: only one team has visited the site in-person in the last 15 years. But all that’s about to change.

OceanGate Expeditions , a company that provides well-heeled clients with once-in-a-lifetime underwater experiences, has announced a series of six trips to the Titanic via submersible in 2021. Each has space for nine paying tourists, whose $125,000 tickets will help offset the cost of the expeditions (and put a pretty penny in the pocket of OceanGate owner Stockton Rush).

OceanGate’s expeditions will each run for 10 days out of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. Nine tourists, who are actually dubbed “mission specialists” on this expedition, will join the expedition crew on each sailing, and they’ll be expected to participate in the research efforts—this isn’t just a sightseeing affair. OceanGate’s goal is to extensively document the Titanic wreck before it disintegrates entirely due to a deep-sea bacteria that eats iron, which researchers are concerned might happen within the next few decades. As this is a scientific project, mission specialists will have to meet certain physical criteria to ensure their compatibility with the expedition, not to mention training, which includes a test dive.

On each expedition, each mission specialist will be able to partake in a single six- to eight-hour dive to the Titanic via the private Titan submarine, which includes the 90-minute descent and 90-minute ascent. The sub seats five—a pilot, a scientist or researcher, and three mission specialists—and it does have a small, semi-private bathroom for emergencies, in case you were wondering.

Now, it should be known that this isn’t OceanGate’s first attempt to visit the iconic wreck: two previous expeditions had to be scrubbed. (In 2018, the sub was hit by lightning, and its electrical systems were fried, and in 2019, there were issues with sourcing a ship for the expedition.) But hey, perhaps the third time's the charm!

Several international treaties protect the Titanic—the wreck sits in international waters—but their primary goal is to prevent looters and illegal salvage operations from damaging and disrespecting the wreck. However, in terms of tourism, it’s actually perfectly legal to visit the wreck, so long as the expedition doesn’t intrude upon it (i.e., land on the deck or enter the hull.)

“A review of the International Agreement on Titanic, as well as the 2001 UNESCO Convention on Underwater Cultural Heritage, would reveal that non-intrusive visits do not even require a permit or authorization,” said Ole Varmer, a retired legal advisor to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who was instrumental in negotiating the legal protection of the wreck. “The scope of the prohibition against commercial exploitation of underwater cultural heritage is to prevent unauthorized salvage and looting; it does not include non-intrusive visits regardless of whether they are for-profit or not.”

In terms of OceanGate Expeditions, the company is working with NOAA, the federal agency in charge of implementing the International Agreement on Titanic for U.S.-based Titanic activities, to ensure it follows all protocols set down by that agreement.

There are two major factors to consider regarding ethically visiting the Titanic. First, it’s a memorial site to the lives lost during the disaster, so the wreck should be treated with respect. But that, of course, is true of all memorial sites around the world.

“Speaking as one who visited Titanic’s wreck twice during RMS Titanic, Inc.'s 1993 and 1996 Research and Recovery expeditions, I see nothing unethical about visiting the wreck, nor about helping to defray the significant expense of bringing a visitor to the wreck,” explained Charles Haas, president of the Titanic International Society. “People around the world learn by seeing and visiting. They pay for access to museums, cathedrals, monuments, exhibitions, and, yes, final resting places.”

But second, it’s a fragile piece of cultural heritage. It should be protected—the expedition organizer must take appropriate steps to ensure that it won’t disturb the wreck.

“In the past, submersibles visiting the site by RMS Titanic, Inc. [the only company legally allowed to salvage the wreck], and others have rested on the deck of the hull portions,” says Varmer. “That practice has likely caused some harm and exacerbated the deterioration of the site.  Hopefully, that will no longer be practiced or permitted.”

Per OceanGate’s description of its expeditions, the company’s submersible won’t disturb the wreck, so if you have $125,000 lying around, fee; free to spring for the bucket-list trip of 2021!

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Titanic: The Virtual Experience showcases an unrivalled collection of nearly 400 artifacts recovered directly from the wreck site of the RMS Titanic. Photographed at Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition, this 25,000 square foot experience allows you to view full scale room re-creations from Titanic including the famed Grand Staircase and an up close, personal view of Titanic’s artifacts including personal belongings, items from each class of service and the largest piece ever recovered, a 15-ton portion of the Ship’s hull. In addition, Titanic: The Virtual Experience showcases never before seen video of the Ship today, video of the recovery of her artifacts, unique historical facts and passenger stories as well as a full audio tour in multiple languages.

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How to Book a Dive to See the “Titanic” Shipwreck

Citizen scientists will soon have the opportunity to participate in research missions to the historic site..

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The five-person submersible, Titan , will be heading out on a series of 10-day Titanic expeditions starting in May.

Courtesy of OceanGate Expeditions

Editors note: OceanGate’s Titan suffered a “ catastrophic implosion ,” killing all five people on board, according to the U.S. Coast Guard on June 22, 2023.

It won’t be cheap and it won’t be easy, but if having the chance to personally witness the Titanic shipwreck is a once-in-a-lifetime dream experience you would like to fulfill—there is now a way to do so. Undersea exploration company OceanGate Expeditions is hosting Titanic survey expeditions starting in May 2021 and is looking for citizen scientists to join the crew.

OceanGate will be sending its five-person submersible, Titan , on a series of 10-day Titanic expeditions (there will be six missions in total next year) that will each include a small group of experts and researchers, along with citizen scientists. Individuals interested in joining these deep-sea research missions will need to apply and be interviewed before being approved to participate in the dives.

Potential eligible participants must be at least 18 years old at the time of the expedition, must be able to board Zodiacs in rough water, and must demonstrate basic balance, mobility, flexibility, and strength.

“We refer to those supporting the mission as mission specialists. They are active, trained participants in the expedition. They are not tourists or travelers. This is an important distinction. This is a true expedition environment and every crew member, including the mission specialists, are crucial to the successful completion of our mission objectives,” OceanGate said in a statement sent to AFAR about the expeditions.

Indeed, the training is rather involved. Mission specialists must complete a training dive mission prior to joining one of the Titanic survey expeditions. With the training mission under their belt, they will then be expected to participate in various support roles on the Titanic dive, including operating sonar and laser scanners, assisting with navigation and sub-to-surface communications, documenting their observations, and taking photos and video footage of sea life, the shipwreck, and artifacts using onboard cameras.

They will also be asked to participate in processing and reviewing images and footage from the dive and to contribute to a detailed review and analysis of the data.

Mission specialists will be asked to participate in support roles during the mission.

Each of the six missions has up to nine slots for qualified citizen scientists (there are multiple dives per mission)—who must also be willing to invest $125,000 to have this truly unique experience.

Each dive will begin with a briefing, followed by a 90-minute descent to the Titanic site. During the descent, teams look for bioluminescent lifeforms. Once at the site of the shipwreck, they will spend about three hours exploring. With the help of the submersible’s bright exterior lights, the team will observe areas that include the bow section of the ship (the most impressive part of the wreck, according to OceanGate), the area where the ship’s grand staircase was located, the bridge remains, and the debris field where century-old artifacts have been scattered across the ocean floor. The teams will then embark on the 90-minute ascent back to the surface.

The Titanic shipwreck was discovered on September 1, 1985, by oceanographer Robert Ballard. It is located 12,467 feet below the Atlantic Ocean’s surface about 370 miles southeast off the coast of the Canadian province of Newfoundland. Nearly 1,500 people perished when the luxury passenger liner Titanic sank in April 1912, while sailing from Southampton, England, to New York City.

“Expeditions will be conducted with great respect for those who lost their lives in the tragic sinking of the Titanic ,” OceanGate told AFAR. The company said it plans to observe the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s guidelines for exploration of the Titanic , as well as UNESCO’s guiding principles for the preservation of underwater World Heritage sites.

“Our main mission objectives include observing and documenting at a safe distance, and not touching or landing on the Titanic . We will be documenting the site for future generations and going back annually to document and determine the rate of deterioration of this historic site,” OceanGate explained. The six anticipated missions for 2021 are currently scheduled to take place on May 30, June 8, June 16, June 24, July 2, and July 10. The inaugural mission will mark the first time in 15 years that passengers have been able to visit the wreck, Bloomberg reports .

As for precautions that will be in place due to the coronavirus pandemic, OceanGate is mandating that crew get tested for COVID-19 and wear masks; it also is having crew members quarantine in advance of the expeditions. The company has added air filtration systems on its submersible.

>> Next: Scuba Diving Slave Shipwrecks Is a Spiritual Journey

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A remarkable new view of the Titanic shipwreck is here, thanks to deep-sea mappers

Rachel Treisman

Scientists were able to map the entirety of the shipwreck site, from the Titanic's separated bow and stern sections to its vast debris field. Atlantic/Magellan hide caption

Scientists were able to map the entirety of the shipwreck site, from the Titanic's separated bow and stern sections to its vast debris field.

A deep sea-mapping company has created the first-ever full-sized digital scan of the Titanic, revealing an entirely new view of the world's most famous shipwreck.

The 1912 sinking of the Titanic has captivated the public imagination for over a century. And while there have been numerous expeditions to the wreck since its discovery in 1985, its sheer size and remote position — some 12,500 feet underwater and 400 nautical miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada — have made it nearly impossible for anyone to see the full picture.

Until now, that is. Using technology developed by Magellan Ltd., scientists have managed to map the Titanic in its entirety, from its bow and stern sections (which broke apart after sinking) to its 3-by-5-mile debris field.

Newly released footage of a 1986 Titanic dive reveals the ship's haunting interior

The result is an exact "digital twin" of the wreck, media partner Atlantic Productions said in a news release.

"What we've created is a highly accurate photorealistic 3D model of the wreck," 3D capture specialist Gerhard Seiffert says. "Previously footage has only allowed you to see one small area of the wreck at a time. This model will allow people to zoom out and to look at the entire thing for the first time ... This is the Titanic as no one had ever seen it before."

The Titanic site is hard to get to, hard to see and hard to describe, says Jeremy Weirich, the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Ocean Exploration program (he's been to the site).

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"Imagine you're at the bottom of the ocean, there's no light, you can't see anything, all you have is a flashlight and that beam goes out by 10 feet, that's it," he says. "It's a desert. You're moving along, you don't see anything, and suddenly there's a steel ship in front of you that's the size of a skyscraper and all you can see is the light that's illuminated by your flashlight."

This new imagery helps convey both that sense of scale and level of detail, Weirich tells NPR.

Magellan calls this the largest underwater scanning project in history: It generated an unprecedented 16 terabytes of data and more than 715,000 still images and 4k video footage.

"We believe that this data is approximately ten times larger than any underwater 3D model that's ever been attempted before," said Richard Parkinson, Magellan founder and CEO.

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Experts in Titanic history and deep-sea exploration are hailing the model as an invaluable research tool. They believe it could help scientists and historians solve some of the ship's lingering mysteries — and learn more about other underwater sites, too.

Longtime Titanic explorer and analyst Parks Stephenson described the model as a "game changer" in a phone interview with NPR.

"It takes [us] further into new technology that's going to be the standard, I think, not just for Titanic exploration, but all underwater exploration in the future," he adds.

The effort yielded 16 terabytes of data and more than 715,000 still images, in what Magellan calls the largest underwater scanning project ever. Atlantic/Magellan hide caption

The effort yielded 16 terabytes of data and more than 715,000 still images, in what Magellan calls the largest underwater scanning project ever.

A project years in the making, featuring Romeo and Juliet

Explorers and artists have spent decades trying to depict the Titanic wreck, albeit in lower-tech ways.

After Robert Ballard — along with France's Jean-Louis Michel — discovered the site in 1985, he combined all of his photos to form the first photomosaic of the wreck, which showed the ship's bow and was published in National Geographic. Those efforts have been replicated in the years since.

"But the problem with all that is it requires interpretation," Stephenson says. "It requires human interpretation, and there are gaps in the knowledge."

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Flash forward to the summer of 2022. Scientists spent six weeks capturing scans of the site, using technology that Magellan says it had been developing over the course of five years.

The expedition deployed two submersibles, named Romeo and Juliet, some 2.3 miles below the surface to map every millimeter of the wreck site.

They didn't go inside the ship, let alone touch the site, in accordance with existing regulations, and paid their respects to the more than 1,500 victims with a flower laying ceremony.

And they describe the mission as a challenge, with the team fighting bad weather and technical challenges in the middle of the Atlantic.

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"When we saw the data come in it was all worth it," Seiffert says. "The level of detail we saw and recorded was extraordinary."

The scientists spent months processing and rendering the data to create the "digital twin," which the company says it's looking forward to sharing publicly.

Stephenson saw an early version of the model, when Atlantic Productions brought him on to consult on its validity. So did Ken Marschall, the maritime artist known for his Titanic paintings.

"We've both seen it with our eyes. We've both seen thousands of digital images of the wreck in imagery, moving imagery," Stephenson said. "But we'd never seen the wreck like this. It was different, but at the same time you just knew it was right."

Experts say the model will be a valuable tool for future Titanic research and deep-sea exploration in general. Atlantic/Magellan hide caption

Experts say the model will be a valuable tool for future Titanic research and deep-sea exploration in general.

There's still a lot left to learn about the Titanic

Can there really be that much left to discover about the Titanic, more than 110 years on?

Stephenson says "at the end of the day, none of this matters." But there's a reason people keep visiting and talking about the wreck, he adds, and it's not because of any buried treasure.

"It's fame, I guess," Stephenson says. "People can't get enough of Titanic. And as long as people can't get enough of the Titanic, people will keep going to ... these mysteries."

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In Stephenson's case, it's the unanswered questions that keep drawing him back.

"I've been grinding away at this for a while, and I'm not on a crusade to dismantle the Titanic narrative that has grown since 1912," he says. "But ... I have had enough experience and seen enough evidence that makes me seriously question even some of the most basic aspects of the Titanic story."

One example: Stephenson says there's reason to doubt the long-accepted conclusion that the ship hit the iceberg along its starboard side. He points to a growing body of evidence that suggests it actually grounded briefly on part of the iceberg that was submerged underwater instead.

Just looking at the preliminary modeling has helped Stephenson bring a lot of his evidence and questions into focus — it may be early days, but he says he already has a better understanding of how the ship's stern came to be in such bad shape.

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Stephenson sees this moment as a paradigm shift in underwater archaeology.

"We're essentially getting to the end of the first generation of Titanic research and exploration, and we're getting ready to transition into the next generation," he says. "And I think this tool basically signals a shift from that generation to the next."

Stephenson wants to use the model to document the extent of Titanic exploration up to this point, from Ballard to James Cameron and beyond. He says a "massive project" is underway, and will hopefully result in a scientific paper and online archive. Then, he plans to use the tool to answer whatever questions remain.

There have been "photomosaics" and other renderings of the shipwreck over the decades, but this is the first such 3D model. Atlantic/Magellan hide caption

There have been "photomosaics" and other renderings of the shipwreck over the decades, but this is the first such 3D model.

The Titanic is a gateway into deep ocean exploration

As a maritime archaeologist, Weirich is most interested in what the ship's condition can teach us about how to better preserve deep-sea shipwrecks in general. For example, how has it impacted the environment since it sunk, and how have the visits since its discovery impacted the site?

The Titanic site has been designated as a maritime memorial, which makes preservation even more important. And Weirich says research on everything from its rate of deterioration to the microbial environment can be applied to other such sites worldwide.

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There are estimated to be hundreds of thousands of wrecks in the world, from ancient wooden ships in the Black Sea to World War II vessels in the Gulf of Mexico, Weirich says.

And this kind of technology could play a crucial role in learning more about deep-sea environments in general, from undersea resources to geological features to unknown species.

Weirich says he hopes these images of the Titanic will give people a greater appreciation for the deep ocean, and a better understanding of just how much is left to explore.

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"The story of Titanic and the shipwreck itself is extremely compelling, but it is a gateway for people to understand what we know and don't know about the deep ocean," he adds.

Weirich remembers being personally captivated by those first images of the shipwreck in National Geographic when he was just 10 years old. That sparked his lifelong interest in ocean exploration — and he hopes young people seeing these latest images are inspired too.

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Witness the sinking of RMS Titanic. Explore the shipwreck. Titanic VR is an immersive educational interactive story and game; with over 6 hours of game-play you will leave with a greater understanding of the historic tragedy that unfolded in 1912.

Titanic shipwreck exploration.

Diving to the bottom of the North Atlantic, you take on the role of Dr. Ethan Lynch, Associate Professor of Maritime Archaeology at the fictional University of Nova Scotia. With funding from a mysterious investor, Dr. Lynch and his PhD candidate Jean Robinson have set out aboard a research vessel to dive the wreck of RMS Titanic and discover treasures which have remained submerged for a century.

Begin your missions by navigating your way through the ocean depths until you discover her shipwreck. Follow the instructions set by your mysterious investor and use your ROV to collect and document artefacts which could unveil more truths of the tragic sinking.

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Titanic Tours: What To Know About These Underwater Excursions

With today's advanced technology, it's easier than ever to discover new ways to explore shipwrecks, such as the Titanic, with tours like these.

It's safe to say that when an iceberg pierced the Titanic on its maiden voyage just over 100 years ago, no one was thinking about turning the shipwreck into a tourist attraction. But now, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the sinking, some travel companies are offering tours of the site. Visitors can take an expensive excursion or they can simply look on Google, where the wreck is pictured in all its rustic, 3-D glory.

It's a surreal sight ― especially if you know that when the Titanic went down in 1912 it claimed more than 1,500 lives. But is visiting the ship such a good idea? Absolutely, yes!

Package Tours On Titanic Shipwreck Underwater Excursions

There are now two companies offering underwater tours of the Titanic's wreckage. Bluefish and OceanGate, which has its headquarters in Everett Washington, both offer dives to the site that cost roughly $60,000- $105,129 per person, not including airfare or lodging. But what do you get for this price? Here's what to know about the tours:

Now that the wreckage is covered with silt again and no longer clear enough for photographs, some pictures taken on previous dives have been reproduced on tours' brochures. Up-close views of Titanic's exterior can also be seen in the James Cameron documentary Titanic.

Bluefish's brochures claim that "the wreck is eminently photographable providing an opportunity for multiple dive photography." OceanGate's website notes that there are at least a dozen friezes from the ship above water. Both tour companies are adamant about protecting the site and the body of water around it, possibly due to the controversy that arose last year when one company was using a ship to drop tourists onto the wreckage.

A Bluefish video demonstrates what it's like inside the sub by dropping a GoPro camera into an empty one as well as dead still sharks. It also shows some footage of Titanic itself before it was covered up with silt and debris.

Tourists will use OceanGate's custom-built submersibles made out of titanium, not unlike those used for space missions like Apollo 13. The sub is big enough for three passengers and has a window, touchscreen monitors for navigation, a pressure gauge, and all the equipment that tourists will need to live.

Both companies will take precautions like deploying a safety diver. They also plan to check guests' lungs for signs of pneumonia before each dive to ensure that they are healthy enough.

The Titanic sank in 1912 and many people died, but the wreck was never declared a cemetery or war gravesite, so knocking on it is prohibited. Both companies also request that tourists don't take chunks of the ship as souvenirs, which has happened before with other famous wrecks like the Lusitania.

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5 Things To Take Note About the Titanic Wreck Site

Once you’ve decided on which company to go through to visit this sunken piece of history, the basic accommodations are all set! While the entire site itself is a historical wonder, there are a few things to note. Below are different things to be aware of before you take a dive.

What To Bring With You When Visiting The Underwater Wreckage

According to Blue Marble Private, divers should bring nothing larger than a handbag with them on the excursion. Their kit will include a snorkel plus mask, computer, and regulator, wetsuit, and boots.

What To Expect When Diving At The Site Of The Titanic Wreck

Divers will be able to explore the three most important parts of the wreckage, including its bow section, stern and engine room. Each area has plenty of marine life, so you might feel as though you're swimming through a fishbowl.

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What To Know When Diving At The Site Of The Titanic Wreck

Dive trips are run with a maximum of 12 divers at one time, and the company cautions that diving can be strenuous if you're not fit or healthy enough for it. This is why they recommend medical checks before each excursion.

What Not To Do When Visiting The Underwater Wreckage Of The Titanic

You must report any sightings of the wreck to the government agencies responsible for its protection, i.e., the Maritime and Coast Guard Agency (MCA) in Belfast. You should also respect all regulations that surround this precious archeological site.

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What To Expect From The Marine Life At The Site Of The Titanic Wreck

Titanic wreck excursions are perfect for snorkelers and scuba divers alike , and visitors will be able to reap the benefits of both in one visit. There are plenty of fish to see if you're snorkeling, and you might even spot some whale sharks, too.

What To Know About The Safety Measures In Place For The Tour

According to the Titanic wreck tour operator's website, there are a number of safety measures in place to ensure that visitors have an enjoyable experience. These include two divers per dive, a support crew on the surface, and medical staff. Visitors should always bring a whistle with them, especially since it is an international sign of distress. A knife and glow stick will also be useful in an emergency.

Titanic wreck trips are a unique and exciting way to learn about the history of one of the most famous vessels to ever sail the seas, which is why they're so popular among Titanic enthusiasts as well as people who have never seen it before. They're also great for anyone who loves the water since it's a chance to explore something man-made while enjoying the natural beauty of an underwater ecosystem. The fact that you can set foot where no other human has for nearly 100 years only adds to the appeal, making this one of the most fascinating excursions you can take.

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See the Titanic in Stunning Detail With New 3D Scan

Researchers collected 16 terabytes of data to create the very first full-sized 3D scan of the wreckage

Daily Correspondent

More than a century after the Titanic sank during her maiden voyage across the Atlantic, deep-sea researchers have created the first full-sized, 3D digital scan of the wreckage.

Over a period of six weeks last summer, the team used two remotely operated underwater vehicles to explore the shipwreck from all angles, as well as the surrounding debris field that stretches for up to three miles. Items that belonged to the vessel’s roughly 2,200 passengers and crew members—such as champagne bottles, watches and shoes—are still scattered across the seafloor.

In total, the two submersibles captured more than 16 terabytes of data—715,000 images and a high-resolution video—in the North Atlantic, reports the  New York Times ’ April Rubin. Researchers then spent seven months piecing together a “one-to-one digital copy, a ‘twin,’ of the Titanic in every detail,” says Anthony Geffen, who leads  Atlantic Productions , the film company making a documentary about the modeling process, to the  Associated Press ’ Sylvia Hui.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Atlantic Productions (@atlantic.productions)

The result: a model that’s incredibly detailed, showing even tiny features like the serial number on the ship’s propeller.

“This is the Titanic as no one had ever seen it before,” says Gerhard Seiffert, a 3D imaging expert for Magellan, the deep-sea investigation company leading the project, to  CNN ’s Niamh Kennedy.

On April 10, 1912, the Titanic departed from Southampton, England, and began sailing west toward New York City. The vessel struck an iceberg near Newfoundland on April 14 , proceeding to sink in just a few hours. More than 1,500 passengers and crew members died in the wreck.

First located in 1985 , the ship’s wreckage is situated about 435 miles off the coast of Canada, roughly 12,500 feet—2.4 miles—below the water’s surface.

With the model now complete, its creators hope it will help Titanic researchers more accurately piece together  what happened during the famed disaster. Anyone interested in the vessel’s history will be able to use the model to walk through the ship virtually, “as if the water has been drained away,” writes Magellan in a statement.

Already, the scan is leading to new discoveries: For instance, researchers noticed for the first time that one of the Titanic ’s lifeboats wasn’t deployed used because it was “blocked by a jammed metal piece,” reports the Times .

“There are still questions, basic questions, that need to be answered about the ship,” says Parks Stephenson, a Titanic expert who was not involved in the project, to  BBC News ’ Rebecca Morelle and Alison Francis.

The new model, he adds, is “one of the first major steps to driving the Titanic story towards evidence-based research—and not speculation.”

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.

What is submersible tourism? The Titanic expedition, explained.

How common are deep-sea expeditions like the Titan’s? Where else do submersibles go?

Seeing the wreck of the Titanic firsthand is a journey.

One must board a submersible vessel about the size of a minivan built to withstand the pressure of descending nearly two and a half miles into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean . It takes about two hours to reach the sunken ship and another two to get back to the surface, plus time for exploration.

And even with a price tag of a quarter of a million dollars, there has been no shortage of people with interest for such an adventure. Philippe Brown, founder of the luxury travel company Brown and Hudso , said there’s a long wait list for the OceanGate Expeditions submersible experience at the center of the world’s attention. The vessel, called the Titan, vanished Sunday in the North Atlantic with five onboard , triggering a wide-reaching search mission that ended Thursday, when the Coast Guard said a remotely operated vehicle discovered debris from the vessel on the ocean floor. Pieces of the submersible indicated it had imploded in a “catastrophic event," Coast Guard officials said. A spokesperson for OceanGate said the pilot and passengers “have sadly been lost."

For the world’s richest and most intrepid travelers, a submersible trip is not so far-fetched, says Roman Chiporukha, co-founder of Roman & Erica, a travel company for ultrawealthy clients with annual membership dues starting at $100,000.

“These are the people who’ve scaled the seven peaks, they’ve crossed the Atlantic on their own boat,” Chiporukha said. The typical vacation of the ultrawealthy, like a beach getaway on the Italian Riviera or St. Barts, “really doesn’t do it for them,” he added.

That description fits tycoon Hamish Harding , who was among the five people on Titan. An avid adventurer who’s thoroughly explored the South Pole and the Mariana Trench, Harding was also on the fifth spaceflight of Blue Origin , the private space company founded by Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Capt. Hamish Harding (@actionaviationchairman)

Harding and the Titan journey represent the extreme end of the submersible tourism industry, which has been growing in popularity since the 1980s. Ofer Ketter , a longtime submersibles pilot and co-founder of SubMerge , a firm that provides consulting and operations of private submersibles, says such deep-sea journeys are rare in comparison to those in more tropical locations. For example, the luxury tour operator Kensington Tours offers a $700,000, 10-day yacht trip that includes a 600-plus-foot dive in a submersible in the Bahamas to explore the Exumas ocean floor.

Here’s what else to know about the industry.

Deep water, high pressure: Why the Titanic sub search is so complex

Missing Titanic submersible

The latest: After an extensive search, the Coast Guard found debris fields that have been indentified as the Titan submersible. OceanGate, the tour company, has said all 5 passengers are believed dead.

The Titan: The voyage to see the Titanic wreckage is eight days long, costs $250,000 and is open to passengers age 17 and older. The Titan is 22 feet long, weighs 23,000 pounds and “has about as much room as a minivan,” according to CBS correspondent David Pogue. Here’s what we know about the missing submersible .

The search: The daunting mission covers the ocean’s surface and the vast depths beneath. The search poses unique challenges that are further complicated by the depths involved. This map shows the scale of the search near the Titanic wreckage .

The passengers: Hamish Harding , an aviation businessman, aircraft pilot and seasoned adventurer, posted on Instagram that he was joining the expedition and said retired French navy commander Paul-Henri Nargeolet was also onboard. British Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son, Suleman, 19, were also on the expedition, their family confirmed. The CEO of OceanGate , the submersible expedition company, was also on the vessel. Here’s what we know about the five missing passengers.

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3d “digital twin” showcases wreck of titanic in unprecedented detail, “this is a new phase for underwater forensic investigation and examination.”.

Jennifer Ouellette - May 17, 2023 8:43 pm UTC

The RMS Titanic sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic in 1912, but the fate of the ship and its passengers has fascinated the popular imagination for more than a century. Now we have the first full-size 3D digital scan of the complete wreckage—a "digital twin" that captures Titanic in unprecedented detail. Magellan Ltd, a deep-sea mapping company , and Atlantic Productions (which is making a documentary about the project) conducted the scans over a six-week expedition last summer.

“Great explorers have been down to the Titanic ... but actually they went with really low-resolution cameras and they could only speculate on what happened," Atlantic Productions CEO Andrew Geffen told BBC News . “We now have every rivet of the Titanic , every detail, we can put it back together, so for the first time we can actually see what happened and use real science to find out what happened." 

Further Reading

Titanic  met its doom just four days into the Atlantic crossing, roughly 375 miles (600 kilometers) south of Newfoundland. At 11:40 pm ship's time on April 14, 1912,  Titanic hit that infamous iceberg and began taking on water, flooding five of its 16 watertight compartments, thereby sealing its fate. More than 1,500 passengers and crew perished; only around 710 of those on board survived.

Titanic remained undiscovered at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean until an expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel and Robert Ballard reached the wreck on September 1, 1985. The ship split apart as it sank, with the bow and stern sections lying roughly one-third of a mile apart. The bow proved to be surprisingly intact, while the stern showed severe structural damage, likely flattened from the impact as it hit the ocean floor. There is a debris field spanning a 5-by-3-mile area, filled with furniture fragments, dinnerware, shoes and boots, and other personal items.

As reported previously , we've seen images and video footage of the wreck since it was discovered in the mid 1980s. That includes the  footage shot by director James Cameron in 1995 for sequences featured in his  blockbuster 1997 film —although much of the latter was actually miniature models and special effects filmed on a set, since Cameron couldn't get the high-quality footage he needed for a feature film.

Last year, a private company called OceanGate Expeditions released a one-minute video showcasing the first 8K video footage of the wreck of the Titanic , showing some of its features in new, vivid detail. One could make out the name of the anchor manufacturer (Noah Hingley & Sons Ltd.), for instance, and the footage also gave us a better look at the bow, hull number one, the number-one cargo hold, solid bronze capstans, and one of the single-ended boilers. The footage was shot during the company's 2022 descent, with guests forking over $250,000 apiece for a seat on the submersible. A second OceanGate expedition to the Titanic wreckage was planned for this year.

The joint mission by Magellan and Atlantic Productions deployed two submersibles nicknamed Romeo and Juliet to map every millimeter of the wreck, including the debris field spanning some three miles. The result was a whopping 16 terabytes of data, along with over 715,000 still images and 4K video footage. That raw data was then processed to create the 3D digital twin. The resolution is so good, one can make out part of the serial number on one of the propellers.

"This model is the first one based on a pure data cloud, that stitches all that imagery together with data points created by a digital scan, and with the help from a little artificial intelligence, we are seeing the first unbiased view of the wreck," historian and Titanic expert Parks Stephenson told BBC News . “I believe this is a new phase for underwater forensic investigation and examination.”

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TITANIC Expedition 2024

In July 2024, the world’s leading deep ocean imaging experts, oceanographers, scientists, and historians will gather to launch RMS Titanic, Inc.’s first expedition to the wreck site of the RMS Titanic since 2010. This expedition will utilize cutting-edge technology to focus on imaging and high-resolution photography of the site to preserve the Titanic ’s legacy for future generations and scientific study. It will be carried out by ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) to survey the wreck site and debris field. The images captured will reveal important new insights into the condition of the site, areas and artifacts at risk, and contribute to ongoing conservation efforts and educational initiatives already underway.

The mission of the Titanic Expedition 2024 is to utilize the latest technology to continue the important work of surveying the Titanic wreck site, enhancing our understanding of its historical significance, identifying at risk artifacts for safe recovery in future expeditions, protecting and conserving the area for future generations, furthering current scientific study, engaging a world-wide community in discovering and identifying new artifacts and marine life never before seen, and inspiring the next generation of explorers.

Expedition Objectives

• Preserve the existing state of the site digitally.
• Protect the site by comparing to 2010 imaging to determine the impact of the oceans and other expeditions on the site.
• Study the deterioration at the site and the state of the Marconi Wireless Room .
• New areas of the debris field.
• New marine life previously unknown or unseen.
• New areas of deterioration which could provide unobstructed access to the interior of the ship .
• Engage the worldwide community to be involved in the identification/determination of artifacts for future potential recovery.
• Bring the wreck site to the public in exhibitions, classrooms, and immersive experiences through personal computers and mobile devices with unprecedented clarity to see what only a few in the world will ever see first-hand .
• Involvement in carrying the legacy of Titanic forward by continuing the work at the site through education, career paths in science, technology, engineering, arts, deep ocean exploration, digital content, research, and creative storytelling.

The work and contributions of P.H. Nargeolet to our knowledge of the sea, of the Titanic wreck site, and of Titanic ’s passengers and crew through the art of artifact recovery.

RMS Titanic, Inc. is pleased to partner with world-renowned scientists, oceanographers, naval architects, microbial biologists, metallurgists, historians, and other experts for Titanic Expedition 2024. All expeditions to survey and recover artifacts have been a collaborative effort, bringing scientists from many different domains and countries together, united in the goal of studying the wreck site. We are honored to work with the following key individuals in the Titanic Expedition 2024:

Troy Launay

David Gallo, Ph.D.

Evan Kovacs

Rory Golden

Jessica Sanders

C-Innovation

Why do you need to conduct expeditions.

Expeditions allow RMS Titanic, Inc. to fulfill our Mission to preserve the legacy of Titanic and her passengers and crew, not just through artifact recovery, but also through continuous research, imaging, and educational initiatives. Technology is improving at an incredible pace and we are able to do more now than as recently as two years ago. We are committed to bringing the world current and relevant information in innovative and engaging platforms which, unlike the site itself, are accessible to the public and not just a select few. Expeditions allow us to bring the wreck site to the public and meet our responsibility as salvor-in-possession to preserve the site in perpetuity for future generations.

What do you learn from expeditions?

We are committed and passionate about sharing what we learn from our expeditions. The data we collect and the information we uncover spans the scientific, historic, and objects that can be collected, imaged, and analyzed, especially for education and cultural appreciation. However, by utilizing the latest technology and imaging and leveraging the expertise of some of the most respected minds in various fields, the range of domains that benefit from our expeditions to the Titanic wreck site include climate science, marine biology, engineering, geology, geophysics, cinematography, maritime operations, naval science, and public policy as well as the creative arts.

How long does an expedition take?

Our expeditions are deeply researched, planned, and executed to ensure the greatest of care and concern for the safety of our crew, respect for Titanic and the wreck site, and environment. It takes between 2 and 2.5 hours to reach the bottom of the ocean where the Titanic wreck site lies, about 2.5 miles below the surface. The exact length of the expedition depends on the objectives of the mission, the weather conditions, and other factors. The primary objective is the safety of all involved in the expedition.

Can I get updates on what the expedition finds?

We plan to release updates on Titanic Expedition 2024 on a regular basis. We know there is an intense curiosity and interest in this mission worldwide, and we want to fulfill our objective of educating the public about Titanic . The best place to make sure you are among the first to know is by following us on Facebook , Instagram , X , TikTok , and by becoming a Member here .

How often do you do expeditions?

This will be the ninth expedition to Titanic and the first since 2010. To date, we have honorably and respectfully conducted eight expeditions to the wreck site in 1987, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2004. We recovered artifacts from the debris field in seven of those expeditions.

Why are you able to recover artifacts from the wreck site?

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia recognized RMS Titanic, Inc. as the exclusive salvor-in-possession of Titanic in 1994. RMS Titanic, Inc. is the only entity able to legally recover artifacts and we take the designation very seriously. As salvor-in-possession, RMS Titanic Inc.’s activities with respect to Titanic must account for the public interest.

Do you sell artifacts?

No, the artifacts we recover are not sold. Our Collections team ensures that they are carefully protected and preserved upon recovery. Then, working with our collections experts, they research the history and lives that might have been tied to the artifact so that those stories can be shared with guests who visit our permanent, touring and virtual exhibitions.  They are also used in our educational programs to provide insightful and meaningful lessons in STEAM.

Should recovered artifacts be given to museums?

Museums can only display a scant number of objects and artifacts at any one time due to many limitations including space, curatorial staff, and other factors. RMS Titanic, Inc. believes it is in the best interest of the public to provide artifacts for display all over the world, which is why RMS Titanic, Inc. makes touring exhibitions of Titanic artifacts available. Our Collections team consists of some of the most respected, talented, and passionate professionally trained museum staff in the world.

Where can I see recovered artifacts?

TITANIC: The Artifact Exhibition provides many opportunities to see permanent collections in Orlando, Florida and Las Vegas, Nevada. Touring exhibitions, which are extensions of the permanent exhibitions, are located throughout the world. Check discovertitanic.com for the latest touring exhibitions.

Are you recovering artifacts in this expedition?

One of the objectives of Titanic Expedition 2024 is to image, research, and engage the community on potential artifacts for future recovery in 2025 We will not recover artifacts on this expedition. The mission of the Titanic Expedition 2024 is to continue the important work of surveying, mapping, and imaging the Titanic wreck site and debris field.

Who will be part of the crew?

What credentials do you need to be a part of the expedition.

There is no singular credential needed to be a part of Titanic Expedition 2024.  Many of the team members have extensive, decorated careers in oceanography, diving, marine sciences, naval military service, and advanced academic degrees but the commonality lies in the commitment and dedication to preserve the legacy of Titanic .

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June 19, 2023 - Search mission underway for missing Titanic tour submersible

By Elise Hammond , Maureen Chowdhury and Mike Hayes, CNN

Our live coverage of the search for the missing Titanic tour submersible has moved here.

OceanGate says it's taking "every step possible" to bring missing submersible crew back to safety

From CNN’s Jackie Wattles

OceanGate Expeditions says it is taking “every step possible” to return the five crew members onboard the missing submersible to safety and focusing its entire search effort on their wellbeing, according to a statement released by the company Monday night.

OceanGate Expeditions is the group that was conducting the expedition to view the wreckage of the Titanic.

“We are deeply grateful for the urgent and extensive assistance we are receiving from multiple government agencies and deep-sea companies as we seek to reestablish contact with the submersible,” the statement read.

Here's the full statement:

“For some time, we have been unable to establish communications with one of our submersible exploration vehicles which is currently visiting the wreck site of the Titanic. Our entire focus is on the wellbeing of the crew and every step possible is being taken to bring the five crew members back safely. We are deeply grateful for the urgent and extensive assistance we are receiving from multiple government agencies and deep-sea companies as we seek to reestablish contact with the submersible. We pray for the safe return of the crew and passengers, and we will provide updates as they are available.” 

US Coast Guard to continue surface search for missing submersible throughout the evening

From CNN’s Artemis Moshtaghian

The US Coast Guard  tweeted that it will continue to conduct surface searches for the missing submersible throughout the evening.

The Coast Guard tweeted that The Polar Prince, the vessel used to transport the submersible to the site of the Titanic wreckage before the expedition, as well as aerial support from the Air Force’s 106th Rescue Wing will be involved in the surface searches. 

Canadian Coast Guard surface and subsurface search, as conducted by Canadian P8 Poseidon aircraft, will continue in the morning, according to the US Coast Guard.

Titanic's fate has long been a source of fascination. Here are some key facts about the luxury liner

From CNN Staff

The submersible that has gone missing in the North Atlantic was part of an expedition to view the wreckage of the RMS Titanic, perhaps the most famous shipwreck in the world.

More than 100 years after its disastrous maiden voyage, the fate of the luxury liner has long served as a source of fascination , and been the backdrop for countless books, fiction and non-fiction and, of course, the blockbuster movie.

The ship set sail from Southampton, England, to New York on April 10, 1912.

Then, between April 14-15, it hit an iceberg around midnight and sank in less than three hours.

A total of 1,517 people died and 706 survived out of 2,223 passengers and crew, according to the  US Senate report  on the disaster.

Here's more interesting facts on the Titanic:

The ship: The estimated cost of construction was $7.5 million. At the time, the RMS Titanic was the largest passenger ship afloat. The ship’s length was 882 feet, 9 inches, and it weighed 46,328 tons. Its top speed was 23 knots. The wreckage is located about 350 miles off the southeast coast of Newfoundland.

The cause of the crash: The iceberg punctured five of 16 supposedly watertight compartments designed to hold water in case of a breach to the hull. Investigations at the time blamed Capt. Edward Smith for going too fast in dangerous waters, initial ship inspections that had been done too quickly, insufficient room in the lifeboats for all passengers, and a nearby ship’s failure to help. Many maritime safety reforms were implemented as a result of the findings of the investigations.

Smith went down with the ship, and his body was never recovered.

Key dates post-shipwreck:

• September 1, 1985 -  Scientists from Woods Hole Deep Submergence LAB in Massachusetts, led by Dr. Robert Ballard, and IFREMER, the French Institute Francais de Recherche pour l’Exploitation des Mers, led by Jean Jarry, locate the wreckage of Titanic.
• July 13, 1986 -  Ballard and his crew use the manned deep-ocean research submersible Alvin to explore the wreckage. The Alvin is accompanied by a remotely operated vehicle named Jason Jr. to conduct photographic surveys and further inspections.
• May 31, 2009 -  The last known survivor, Millvina Dean, dies at age 97.
• April 8-20, 2012 -  The 100th anniversary of the Titanic’s voyage. The MS Balmoral traces the ship’s route from Southampton to New York and holds a memorial service, above the wreck, on April 15.

Read more here .

Aircraft and sonar deployed in search for missing submersible. Here's what we know

From CNN staff

A search and rescue operation is underway for a missing submersible operated by a company that handles expeditions to the Titanic wreckage off the coast of St John’s, Newfoundland, in Canada.

The vessel has between 70 and 96 hours of life support, officials said Monday afternoon.

Here's what we know so far:

• The timeline: The expedition began with a 400-nautical-mile journey to the wreck site, which is about 900 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The submersible began its descent Sunday morning but lost contact with a crew of Polar Prince , the support ship that transported the vessel to the site, 1 hour and 45 minutes into its descent, officials said. The US Coast Guard was alerted that the submersible was overdue and it launched searches on the surface of the water and launched an aircraft to start conducting aerial and radar searches, Rear Adm. John Mauger said during a news conference Monday.

Here's a map of area:

• What we know about the vessel: The submersible, named “Titan,” is 23,000 pounds and made of carbon fiber and titanium, according to the tour operator, OceanGate Expeditions. The 21-foot vessel has life support for up to 96 hours, according to the OceanGate website . Mauger said officials "anticipate that they're somewhere between 70 to the full 96 hours " of oxygen available on the vessel at this point. The  Titanic wreckage, discovered in 1985 , sits in two parts at the bottom of the ocean nearly 13,000 feet below the surface.
• Who is on board: Five people are in the missing submersible, according to authorities. Businessman  Hamish Harding is one of the passengers, according to a social media post by his company, Action Aviation. Typically a pilot, a “content expert” and three paying passengers are on the expeditions, according to the OceanGate website. The cost of joining the eight-day expedition is "from $250,000," according to the operator. Mauger said the Coast Guard is notifying the families of the people on the submersible.
• Search efforts: The effort is incorporating aircraft, sonar buoys and "sonar on the ship that is out there to listen for any sounds that we can detect in the water column," Mauger said. The Polar Prince is also assisting with the search, a co-owner said. The Canadian Armed Forces and the US Coast Guard have deployed aircraft to the remote area of the North Atlantic.
• What's next: The Coast Guard said its priority is locating the vessel. If crews do find the vessel in the water, then rescue plans will be formed, Mauger said. At that point, the Coast Guard will reach out to the US Navy, the Canadian Armed Forces and private industry partners to assess what "underwater rescue capability might be available," Mauger said.

Businessman Hamish Harding is one of the passengers on the submersible, his company says

From CNN's Paul P. Murphy 

Businessman and adventurer Hamish Harding is one of the passengers on the submersible that went missing during a dive to the wreckage of the Titanic, according to a social media post by his company, Action Aviation. 

OceanGate, the company conducting the expedition, released a statement Monday confirming it lost contact with the submersible but did not specify who was onboard.

Harding, a British national, was one of the first people to travel  the Challenger Deep  in the Pacific Ocean — the deepest known point on Earth.

The United Arab Emirates-based businessman also made headlines in 2019 for being part of a flight crew that broke the world record for the  fastest circumnavigation  of the globe via both poles. More recently, he was a passenger on Blue Origin’s June 2022 space flight .  

Harding  posted  on Facebook on Saturday about his participation in the expedition.

“I am proud to finally announce that I joined OceanGate Expeditions for their RMS TITANIC Mission as a mission specialist on the sub going down to the Titanic,” the post read.

CNN has reached out to Action Aviation for comment but did not immediately receive a response. 

The Explorers Club, a New York-based group of elite explorers and scientists that’s been involved in many of the world’s most prestigious discoveries, confirmed Harding was on the submersible.

President Richard Garriott de Cayeux said he saw Hamish last week and “his excitement about this expedition was palpable,” Cayeux wrote in a statement, “I know he was looking forward to conducting research at the site.”

Harding is one of the founding members of the club.

A spokesperson for the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office told CNN it was aware of reports of a British citizen on the submersible.

“We are in contact with the family of a British man following reports of a missing submarine off the coast of North America,” the spokesperson said.

CNN’s Artemis Moshtaghian contributed reporting to this post.

Canadian Armed Forces mobilize aircraft to assist in search for missing submersible

From CNN’s Paula Newton

The Canadian Armed Forces is deploying an aircraft to assist in the search for the missing submersible near the Titanic wreckage, a spokesperson told CNN.

“A Royal Canadian Air Force CC-130 Hercules is preparing to join the search as well,” Len Hickey, a senior public affairs officer for the Canadian Armed Forces, wrote in a statement to CNN.

The US Coast Guard said earlier that it had also deployed aircraft that is searching the surface of the ocean and underwater.

Submersible has 70 to 96 hours of oxygen available, Coast Guard says

US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said that the submersible has 96 hours of emergency oxygen on board, based on information received from the vessel operator.

The Coast Guard "anticipate that they're somewhere between 70 to the full 96 hours" of oxygen available on the vessel at this point, he said during a news conference Monday.

Priority on Monday is to locate missing Titanic submersible, Coast Guard commander says

Right now the Coast Guard said its priority is locating the missing submersible that didn’t emerge on Sunday after an expedition to the Titanic wreckage.

Rear Adm. John Mauger, the commander of the First Coast Guard District that is in charge of operations, said that if crews do find the vessel in the water, then rescue plans will be formed. 

Mauger said the Coast Guard is "reaching out to different partners within the US Navy, within the Canadian Armed Forces and within private industry to understand what underwater rescue capability might be available."

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Billionaire explains why he's planning voyage to Titanic site nearly year after submersible implosion

Entrepreneur Larry Connor said he wants to show certified submersibles are safe.

Nearly a year after five people died aboard the OceanGate "Titan" submersible while on a deep-sea voyage to the site of the Titanic, a billionaire has announced plans to go to the infamous wreck.

Entrepreneur and real estate investor Larry Connor said this week that he and Triton Submarines CEO Patrick Lahey are planning their own deep-sea expedition in a submersible.

Asked why, Connor told "Good Morning America" correspondent Will Reeve that the purpose of the voyage is to "demonstrate safety" of certified submersibles.

"If you look at submersibles that have been DNV certified ... there's never been an accident," he said. "The OceanGate vessel was not certified and never would have been."

While on a tour of the Titanic wreckage off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, in June 2023, the OceanGate submersible imploded underwater, killing all five people on board, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush. Following a dayslong search, the remnants of the missing submersible were found on the ocean floor about 1,600 feet from the bow of the wrecked Titanic.

Experts called the carbon fiber construction of the Titan fundamentally flawed and a whistleblower who worked on a predecessor to the Titan vessel raised concerns about the inefficiency of the hull design. Rush had previously defended the decision to manufacture the submersible with carbon fiber, saying he believed it would have a better strength-to-buoyancy ratio than titanium. The exact cause of the implosion remains under investigation by federal authorities.

MORE: James Cameron compares submersible tragedy to Titanic sinking: 'I'm struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster'

OceanGate, which suspended all exploration and commercial operations after the deadly implosion, could not be reached for comment.

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Connor said he and Lahey are designing a new, safer and certified submersible, known as the Explorer, that could take two people to the Titanic site. The submersible will cost $13 million to $15 million and have an acrylic hull and offer a near-panoramic view.

Connor said he is "very confident" about the plan and would not do a dive if he was not "100% convinced" that the submersible was safe.

"The moment we don't meet one standard, the project is done," he said. "We will not compromise safety."

In addition to proving safety, he said continued deep-sea dives carry scientific benefits.

"Almost three-quarters of the earth is covered in water. Isn't doing research important and worthwhile, given that fact?" he said.

MORE: Why Titanic continues to captivate more than 100 years after its sinking

Hakeem Oluseyi, a physicist and ABC News contributor, said he doesn't think deep-sea submersibles "should be abandoned for a single accident."

"If you think about the early days of space travel, we lost an entire crew," he said. "But that tells us what we've done wrong in the past and how to get it right in the future."

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Billionaire plans to take submersible to Titanic nearly one year after OceanGate implosion

Nearly one year after the OceanGate Titan submersible disaster gripped the nation, another ambitious businessman is looking to make the same trip.

Larry Connor, an Ohio businessman and billionaire , told The Wall Street Journal last week about his plans to prove that a dive to the Titanic wreckage site can be done safely when proper engineering is employed.

Shortly after news broke in June 2023 of the Titan's suspected implosion, Connor called up Triton Submarine's CEO Patrick Lahey, who had publicly criticized OceanGate's safety practices and called its CEO "predatory," and insisted they could and should make something better.

“[Connor said], you know, what we need to do is build a sub that can dive to [Titanic-level depths] repeatedly and safely and demonstrate to the world that you guys can do that, and that Titan was a contraption,’” Lahey told The Wall Street Journal.

Connor and Triton Subs did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Here's what we know so far about the newest Titanic-bound submersible.

Who is Larry Connor?

Larry Connor is an entrepreneur and founder of The Connor Group , a luxury real estate company based in Dayton, Ohio. His net worth is $2 billion, according to  Forbes , while Connor Group’s real estate portfolio is worth $5 billion.

Connor is a known explorer, having previously voyaged to the  Mariana Trench  and  International Space Station , told news outlets he wants to prove that a deep-sea submersible can be made safely and such a trip can be done "without disaster."

“I want to show people worldwide that while the ocean is extremely powerful, it can be wonderful and enjoyable and really kind of life-changing if you go about it the right way,” Connor told The Wall Street Journal.

The date of the intended dive has not yet been announced.

Triton Submarines' $20 million submersible

Connor told the Wall Street Journal he would be working with Triton Submarines, a company that builds submersibles for sea exploration at various depths.

The trip will use the Triton 4000/2 "Abyss Explorer." With a $20 million price tag, the two-person craft is described on the Triton website as “the world’s deepest diving acrylic sub," boasting the ability to descend over 13,000 feet (4,000 meters).

Lahey, the CEO, co-founded Triton with the now-retired Bruce Jones, the former of whom plans to accompany Connor on his mission, the Wall Street Journal reported.

“Patrick has been thinking about and designing this for over a decade," Connor told the outlet. "But we didn’t have the materials and technology. You couldn’t have built this sub five years ago.”

What happened to the OceanGate Titan submersible?

On June 18, 2023, five people boarded a submersible created by the company OceanGate to visit the Titanic wreckage site 12,500 feet (3,800 meters) under the water.

This was OceanGate Expeditions' third annual voyage to the site, and each passenger paid $250,000 for the opportunity to view the wreckage, according to an archived itinerary of the mission.

Aboard the submersible was British businessman Hamish Harding; Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, members of one of Pakistan's most prominent families; French explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henry Nargeolet; and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush.

The vessel was heavily scrutinized before departure for its design, made of carbon fiber and titanium and measured in at about 9 feet high, 8 feet tall, and 22 feet wide. The craft was said to have been piloted with a video game controller .

The submersible was not up to the task and imploded on its way down to the ocean floor. Communication between the Titan and its mothership stopped about 90 minutes into the trip. It is assumed the destruction of the vessel happened soon after.

A massive rescue mission ensued . Ultimately, The Titan's debris were found in five large parts on the sea floor about 1,600 feet from the Titanic's bow and the passengers were declared officially lost on June 22. Some human remains were later recovered.

Contributing: Haadiza Ogwude and Jason Rossi , Cincinnati Enquirer

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Titanic survivor’s family slams billionaire planning to dive to wreck after OceanGate as having ‘more money than sense’

• Luke Kenton , Senior Exclusives Reporter
• Published : 23:36 ET, Jun 4 2024
• Updated : 23:37 ET, Jun 4 2024
• Published : Invalid Date,

AN Ohio billionaire planning to take a $20 million sub to the Titanic wreck to prove the industry is safer after the OceanGate disaster has more money than sense, a relative of two Titanic survivors says.

Luxury real estate tycoon Larry Connor announced last week that he and Triton Submarines co-founder Patrick Lahey are planning to plunge more than 12,400ft to the Titanic site in a two-person submersible.

The announcement comes almost a year after the private submersible industry was rocked by disaster when a sub operated by OceanGate imploded above the wreck in the North Atlantic last year, killing five, including the company's CEO, Stockton Rush .

Connor called Lahey days after the June 2023 tragedy and asked him to build a better submersible than Rush's.

The pair are setting out to prove the deep dive can be conducted without disaster – but Shelley Binder , a descendent of Titanic survivors Leah and Phillip Aks, has questioned the need to disturb the site any further.

"For generations, people who have the money are going to spend it doing things to prove their machismo and appease their sense of adventure, but does that mean they should?" asked Binder.

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"Fundamentally, I think one could say these people have more dollars than sense.

"And the idea of tourism to a wreck where 1,496 people lost their lives in a truly horrific disaster of epic proportions is offensive.

"What happened aboard that ship was extremely traumatic and harrowing for my great-grandmother and great-uncle.

"This was a devastating and landmark moment in their lives, and it had long-lasting repercussions for my entire family."

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While Binder herself has mixed feelings about Titanic tourism , conceding that other historical disaster sites such as the ruins of Pompeii are frequently visited by curious holidaymakers, she insists that her great-grandmother and great-uncle would've strongly opposed the notion.

Numerous others who lost relatives in the infamous sinking also disagree with Titanic tourism, she says.

"When the Titanic wreck was discovered in 1985, my uncle said that he thought they should leave the ship alone.

"There are so many people that see the wreck as a grave site and they're truly offended by it, this idea of commercial tourism [...] they believe it's an abomination.

"I think my great-grandmother would've been offended by it too, this idea of rich people or a bunch of billionaires going down and seeing where a majority of poorer people died trying to immigrate to the United States.

"The majority of the people aboard that ship were in third class, my great-grandmother and great-uncle among them. They survived but they had to fight for their lives to get out of third class and to safety.

"I think my great-grandmother would be thinking, 'How rude. What are you thinking? How is that appropriate?'"

SHOCKING DISASTER

OceanGate's Titan sub  was missing for more than four days before remnants of the vessel were found 1,600ft away from the Titanic's bow on June 22, 2023.

All five passengers aboard the vessel were confirmed dead.

They were OceanGate CEO and founder Stockton Rush; British Billionaire Hamish Harding; the legendary French diver  Paul-Henry Nargeolet ; British-based  Pakistani  tycoon  Shahzada Dawood , and his 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood.

OceanGate had only been providing tours of the Titanic site since 2021, charging guests up to $250,000 per head to catch a haunting first-hand glimpse of the so-called "unsinkable ship".

Its prized Titan vessel was billed by the company as the new frontier of deep-sea exploration and designed with the help of engineers from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

However, concerns about the safety of the carbon fiber vessel were raised as early as 2018, and the sub was only certified to dive to 4250ft – far short of the depths of the ocean floor where the Titanic lies.

Rush was posthumously panned for skirting safety practices and balking at third-party classification and certification.

Connor and Lahey have pledged to do things much differently this time around.

OceanGate Disaster: A Timeline

FIVE people were killed when OceanGate's Titan submersible suffered a catastrophic implosion in June 2023. Here's how the tragic incident unfolded in real time:

8:00am - The Titan begins its descent from the Canadian research vessel the Polar Prince to the Titanic wreck in a journey that was expected to take two hours

9:45am - Communications between the submersible and the surface vessel are lost an hour and 45 minutes into the trip

3:00pm - The Titan fails to return to the surface as scheduled

5:40pm - The US Coast Guard receives a report about a missing submersible 900 nautical miles east of Cape Cod and a search is launched

Planes and ships from the US and Canada descend on the area, with some dropping sonar buoys that can monitor to a depth of almost 4,000 meters to help find the vessel

The first 24 hours of the search come up empty

10:00am - France joins the search effort, sending the state-of-the-art deep-sea diving vessel the Atalante toward the site

During the second day of searching, sounds are detected by a Canadian Lockheed P-3 Orion aircraft, which is equipped with gear to trace submarines. Reports emerge that banging sounds at 30-minute intervals have been detected

Speculation mounts that the passengers trapped inside may have been banging on the side of the Titan to alert searchers to their location

US Coast Guard, US Navy, Canadian Coast Guard, and OceanGate Expeditions establish a unified command to oversee the search

6:00am - US Coast Guard confirms the existence of underwater noises but the origin was unclear. A remotely operated vehicle was sent to the area but again proved fruitless

1:00pm - Officials say no more underwater noises were detected. The scale of the search by this time was more than two times the size of Connecticut

Later that evening, the Atalante arrived to join the search

6:00am - The approximate deadline for when the air in the submersible was expected to run out passed

11:00am - A Canadian navy ship carrying a medical team specializing in dive medicine arrives on the scene

11:48am - The Coast Guard says a debris field was discovered by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) near the Titanic site. It was later confirmed the debris was 1,600ft from the Titanic's hull

4:00pm - Officials announce the five crew members aboard the Titan were likely killed by a "catastrophic implosion". Rear Adm John Mauger, the First Coast Guard District commander, said an ROV discovered the tail cone of the Titan sub and the debris is “consistent with a catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber”

The Coast Guard announces its Marine Board of Investigation will lead a probe into the loss of the Titan to prevent similar occurrences in the future

Pieces of the Titan are brought back to shore. Officials also announced human remains were "carefully recovered" at the site and would be subject to a "formal analysis"

OceanGate officially shuts down, announcing on its website that all operations have ceased immediately

For their dive, the pair will be using a $20 million sub called the Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explore , which they say can complete the voyage multiple times.

Triton Submarines is known as an industry leader having already delved to deeper depths than the Titanic site.

Triton's vessels have been to the depths of Mariana Trench, the deepest point on earth at more than 10,900 meters – 7,000 more than the Titanic.

According to the company's website, the Triton 4000/2 is a "high-performance, flexible platform designed specifically for professional applications."

Triton says the sub can dive to 4,000 meters below the sea and that "the world's deepest diving acrylic sub" is commercially certified for dives over 13,000 feet. 

A rep for Connor has not yet returned a request for comment regarding Binder's remarks.

Connor and Lahey's Titanic excursion does not yet have a set date.

Speaking about the forthcoming trip to the Wall Street Journal last week, Connor said, "I want to show people worldwide that while the ocean is extremely powerful, it can be wonderful and enjoyable and really kind of life-changing if you go about it the right way."

REMARKABLE TALE OF SURVIVAL

More than a century before the OceanGate disaster, after its unveiling, the  Titanic  was also considered to be a high-tech marvel and was billed as the safest ship ever built.

Shelley Binder's great-grandmother, Leah, was 18 and a new mother when she boarded the ship in Southampton, UK, on April 10, 1912.

With only her 10-month-old son Phillip for company, Leah, a Polish immigrant, was heading to meet her husband, Sam Aks, in America where they hoped for a better life.

Sam had left the UK for the US three months earlier on the Cymric, but Leah stayed behind because her family insisted that she had to wait for the Titanic, believing the ship to be unsinkable.

She bought a ticket for the Titanic's maiden voyage in third-class passage, but within four days disaster would strike: the Titanic struck an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and began to sink.

Somewhere within the frantic melee that erupted that evening, Binder's great-grandmother became separated from her son.

Eventually, she was able to traverse a "human ladder", Binder said, and climb onto a rescue vessel named the Carpathia, believing the whole time her young son was dead.

By some miracle, Phillip survived. He had also been placed onto the Capathia with another woman who was looking after him.

Leah was reunited with baby Phillip in the vessel's hospital ward.

There are so many people that see the wreck as a grave site and they're truly offended by it, this idea of commercial tourism [...] they believe it's an abomination. Shelley Binder

Along the way, Madelaine Astor—wife of millionaire John Jacob Astor —gave Leah a scarf to use as a blanket to keep the baby warm.

Leah and her son Phillip were among the 712 survivors of the Titanic. 1496 other women, children and men died, freezing to death or downing in the mercilessly cold North Atlantic waters.

After safely arriving in the US, Binder says her great-grandmother had a nervous breakdown and was in and out of the hospital for almost a year, traumatized by the horrors she'd witnessed.

She would continue to be plagued by that trauma right up until she died in 1967, confessing to her son she still had nightmares about the sounds of hundreds of people screaming and freezing to death in the waters around her.

'TACKY AND OBNOXIOUS'

Speaking to The U.S. Sun about Titanic tourism last year, Binder said, "I've met a lot of families of the victims of the Titanic and they, as a majority, feel very much that this is a grave site to them.

"My two relatives survived, and it's a miracle I'm here talking to you today, but some of their families' bodies were never recovered and this is their last resting place.

"For those families [...] they think it's tacky and obnoxious to go there.

"I mean, try to wrap your mind around 1496 human beings - men, women, and children - dying in the most painful way possible, in 28-degree water freezing to death.

"It's horrific. And you can see the wreckage without having to physically go down there yourself.

"Is there really much they were going to see by looking out those windows? Why don't you just get a huge pit in your backyard and burn $250,000 and then watch the 8k footage of the wreck they recently uploaded online?

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"Those images were captured by unmanned subs. Is that not good enough for you, to sit back in your air-conditioned living room and enjoy?"

• Titanic tourist submarine

Missing Submersible Rescuers Detect ‘Underwater Noise’ in Search Area and Redirect Efforts

The Coast Guard said in a brief statement on Twitter that some of the remote-operated vehicles involved in the search had been relocated in an attempt to determine the origin of the sounds.

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This blog has ended. Follow Thursday’s live coverage of the missing submersible.

Mike Ives ,  Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs ,  Jenny Gross ,  Jenna Russell and Jesus Jiménez

Here’s the latest on the missing submersible.

A Canadian surveillance aircraft looking for the missing Titan submersible and the five people on board in the North Atlantic has “detected underwater noises in the search area,” the U.S. Coast Guard said early Wednesday.

The Coast Guard said in a brief statement on Twitter that remote-operated vehicles were still searching for the Titan. Officials in the United States and Canada did not immediately respond to requests for further comment late Tuesday.

An international team of rescuers has been racing to search for the Titan in an area of the ocean larger than Connecticut. Aircraft from the United States and Canada have been scanning the surface, and sonar buoys have been pinging the depths. The Titan was thought to have less than two days of oxygen remaining as of Tuesday.

Even if the Titan can be located — in a remote patch of ocean where the seafloor lies more than two miles below the choppy surface — retrieving it might not be easy . To recover objects off the seafloor, the U.S. Navy uses a remote-operated vehicle that can reach depths of 20,000 feet. But ships that carry such a vehicle normally move no faster than about 20 miles per hour, and the Titanic wreck lies about 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.

The submersible was more than halfway into what should have been a two-and-a-half-hour dive to the ruins of the Titanic when it lost contact with a chartered research ship on Sunday morning. Leaders in the submersible craft industry had warned for years of possible “catastrophic” problems with the craft’s design and worried that the Titan had not followed standard certification procedures.

Here’s what to know:

The vessel was operated by OceanGate Expeditions , which has provided tours of the Titanic wreck since 2021. Spots in the tours go for a price of up to $250,000 as part of a booming high-risk travel industry .

In 2018, more than three dozen people, including oceanographers, submersible company executives and deep-sea explorers, warned that they had “unanimous concern” about the craft’s design and worried that the Titan had not followed standard certification procedures. In a 2019 blog post, the company said that “bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.”

Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate Expeditions, was piloting the submersible, according to the company. The other four occupants are Hamish Harding , a British businessman and explorer; the British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman ; and Paul-Henri Nargeolet , a French maritime expert who has been on over 35 dives to the Titanic wreck site.

Victoria Kim , Salman Masood and Yonette Joseph contributed reporting.

Mike Ives and Yonette Joseph

A Canadian plane searching for the Titan ‘detected underwater noises,’ the U.S. Coast Guard says.

A Canadian surveillance aircraft looking for the missing Titan submersible in the North Atlantic “detected underwater noises in the search area,” the United States Coast Guard said early Wednesday.

The Coast Guard said in a brief statement on Twitter that some of the remote-operated vehicles involved in the search had been relocated in an attempt to determine the origin of the sounds. Those searches had so far “yielded negative results” but were continuing, the statement said.

Canadian P-3 aircraft detected underwater noises in the search area. As a result, ROV operations were relocated in an attempt to explore the origin of the noises. Those ROV searches have yielded negative results but continue. 1/2 — USCGNortheast (@USCGNortheast) June 21, 2023

The Coast Guard said the Canadian aircraft was a P-3 surveillance plane, a model that is used for maritime patrol and support operations around the world. Data from the aircraft has been shared with the U.S. Navy for further analysis, it said.

The Coast Guard, the Department of Homeland Security and the Canadian military did not immediately respond to requests for comment. News of underwater noises in the search area was reported earlier by Rolling Stone magazine and CNN .

An international team of rescuers has been looking for the Titan in area of water larger than Connecticut. Aircraft from the United States and Canada have been scanning the surface, and sonar buoys have been deployed in the water. The Titan was thought to have less than a day of oxygen remaining as of Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the president of the Explorers Club, a New York-based organization, sent club members a letter that said sonar in the search area had “detected potential ‘tapping sounds’ implying that the crew may be alive and signaling” at 2 a.m. local time. The club’s president, Richard Garriott de Cayeux, did not elaborate.

In a statement posted to Twitter later on Tuesday, he said that “likely signs of life have been detected at the site.” He added that the club was working for approval to deploy a remote-operated vehicle in the search area that was capable of descending to depths of 6,000 meters, or nearly 20,000 feet.

Trevor Hale, a spokesman for the club, declined to comment on the record in a brief phone interview early Wednesday morning. One of the five people aboard the Titan, the British explorer Hamish Harding , is a board member of the club.

Search Vessels Around the Titanic Wreckage

Polar Prince

newfoundland

North Atlantic

the Titanic

Skandi Vinland

Deep Energy

The Canadian vessel

Horizon Arctic deployed

a remote-operated vehicle

that discovered a debris field.

The Titanic wreckage

sits on the ocean

floor, approximately

12,500 feet down.

North Atlantic Ocean

that discovered a debris field

containing remains of the Titan.

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The New York Times

Titan by the numbers: 22 feet long with room for five.

The Titan submersible that went missing over the weekend in the remote North Atlantic is the most lightweight and cost-efficient deep-sea submersible ever made, according to OceanGate Expeditions , the Everett, Wash.-based company that developed it.

Here are details that the company has shared about the vessel.

Capacity: Five people (one pilot and four crew members)

Maximum depth: 13,123 feet

Dimensions: 22 feet long, 9.2 feet wide, 8.3 feet high

Weight: 21,000 pounds

Pressure vessel materials: Carbon fiber and titanium

Speed: 3 knots (about 3.45 miles per hour), with propulsion by four electric thrusters

Life support: 96 hours for five people

The doomed ocean liner Titanic continues to intrigue the public after more than a century.

The five people aboard the missing deep-sea submersible Titan are not the first to risk their lives for a chance to glimpse one of history’s most famous shipwrecks.

More than a century after the R.M.S. Titanic struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic during its first voyage from Britain to New York, the disaster continues to fascinate people like few other episodes in history.

The Titanic, the world’s largest steamship at the time, made headlines when it went down in the early hours of April 15, 1912, killing 1,500 people. It had been packed with glamorous guests and was called “unsinkable” by officials of the company that operated it.

For decades afterward, it was the holy grail of undiscovered shipwrecks and the subject of much storytelling, including “A Night to Remember,” Walter Lord’s best-selling 1955 book.

The mystique endured even after the wreck of the Titanic was found on the sea floor in 1985. Two years later, Mr. Lord was a speaker at a Titanic tribute event aboard a chartered yacht in New York that included a five-piece band like the one that had played for doomed passengers on the Titanic’s stern. In 1997, the James Cameron film “ Titanic ,” starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, introduced the tragedy to a new generation.

Today, young people are watching conversations about the Titanic unfold on social media — including on the short-form video app TikTok, where established facts about the disaster merge with misinformation and manipulated content .

Advances in deep-sea submersible technology have made it possible to travel to the wreck itself. With tickets for the Titan voyage priced at $250,000, the trip is not for everyone, and some critics object to the very idea of visiting an underwater gravesite. Even so, the trips are popular enough to sustain a booming mini-industry.

The company that owns the Titan submersible, OceanGate, has been taking tourists to the Titanic wreck since 2021. It said in a 2019 news release that slots were being booked by “citizen explorers seeking an adventurous, scientific and meaningful experience.”

This year, the company announced that five expeditions, each lasting eight days , were planned for 2023, and another five for 2024.

“This is your chance to step outside of everyday life and discover something truly extraordinary,” the company said. “Become one of the few to see the Titanic with your own eyes.”

Shawn Hubler

Aboard a submersible, you’re a ‘long way’ from help, a former Navy pilot says.

A former national security official who operated deep-dive submersibles for the U.S. Navy said on Tuesday that piloting a vessel like the one that rescuers are searching for in the North Atlantic was like navigating in outer space.

“You are a long way from anything that can give you help,” said Jeff Eggers, a former Navy commander who spent four years piloting military mini-submarines that were similar in size to the missing submersible, called the Titan, but more technologically sophisticated. “You’re incredibly reliant on the integrity of the vessel. And you’re dependent on the resources you’ve built into the craft.”

In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Eggers, who retired from the military in 2013 after two decades of service and served as special assistant for national security affairs in the Obama administration, said the public tended to underappreciate the perils inherent in excursions like the one undertaken by Titan, which went missing on Sunday en route to the ruins of the Titanic.

Among other things, he said, the civilian-operated submersible appeared to lack significant safeguards that the Navy requires, including an escape hatch, so that even if the Titan managed to surface, its occupants would be unable to exit the craft on their own.

Other risks are a constant concern in submersibles, he added, including potential malfunctions with the ballast systems; failures in the vessel’s inner pressure hull, which is shaped like a hot dog and can crack catastrophically under the extreme weight of the ocean; and electrical fires and failures, which tend to knock out the ability to communicate and maneuver.

“We had a lot of redundancy and safety engineered into our submersibles,” he said of the Navy submersibles that he operated. “There’s much less oversight in the civilian context.”

Leaders in the submersible craft industry have long warned that the Titan’s design posed potentially serious problems.

“The conditions at those depths are unforgiving,” Mr. Eggers said. “It’s like operating a small spacecraft.”

William J. Broad

Some experts fear an innovative submersible maker was ‘cutting corners.’

Many vessels that descend into the sunless depths of the sea for scientific exploration are sturdy behemoths with proven engineering and track records for safety.

But Titan , the lost submersible from the company OceanGate , is a technological maverick based on novel concepts that differ from standard designs. Moreover, unlike most deep-sea craft, Titan has undergone no certification by a reputable marine group that does such licensing work for other craft, including one built by OceanGate that dives to shallower depths.

“It suggests they were cutting corners,” said Bruce H. Robison, a senior marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, who has explored the ocean’s depths with more than a dozen different kinds of submersibles.

Alfred S. McLaren, a retired Navy submariner and president emeritus of the Explorers Club of New York City, agreed. “I’ve had three people ask me about making a dive on it,” he said in reference to the lost submersible. “And I said, ‘Don’t do it.’ I wouldn’t do it in a million years.”

When asked to respond to questions about the certification of Titan, a spokesman for OceanGate said in an email, “We are unable to provide any additional information at this time.”

As a class, submersibles go down for hours, not days or months, and rely on a mother ship for support, communications, sustenance for the crew, as well as sleeping bunks and proper toilets.

Whether dependable old designs or innovative newer models, all the craft face the crushing pressures of the abyss — at the level of the Titanic’s resting place, three tons per square inch. They thus face strict requirements for risk avoidance, if not the flat-out assurance of crew and equipment safety.

Private vessels — those used on superyachts, exploratory craft, tourists jaunts — are not formally regulated by any governmental or intergovernmental agency. Nor do they meet the rigorous standards that are applied to deep-sea craft used by the United States Navy and other government agencies.

Even so, the best of the private submersible class undergo extensive testing, certification and ratings for particular depths by such organizations as Lloyd’s Register , a British company that specializes in assessing the quality of oceangoing equipment for the maritime industry. In the industry this is known as classing.

Titan — the 22-foot long submersible that disappeared on Sunday while diving to the Titanic — is unlike most submersibles in that its passenger hull is made of two very different materials. It’s composed of a mix of carbon fiber and titanium, producing a craft significantly lighter than submersibles made primarily of steel or titanium, a lightweight, high-strength metal.

The dissimilar types of materials used in the craft’s hull construction “raise structural concerns,” said Dr. McLaren, who has twice dived on submersibles to the Titanic. “They have different coefficients of expansion and compression, and that works against keeping a watertight bond.”

On its website, the submersible’s owner, OceanGate, a private company in Everett, Wash., says the vessel’s light weight and its launch and recovery platform significantly cut transport and operating costs, making Titan “a more financially viable option for individuals interested in exploring the deep.” Even so, the passenger cost on the current Titanic dive was $250,000.

Titan’s novel construction features also make it incapable of being certified, according to the company . OceanGate explains the craft’s unlicensed (what the industry calls unclassed or uncertified) status on its website as reflecting the vessel’s cutting-edge technologies, rather than a sign of shortcuts or inadequacies that could jeopardize safety.

“The vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure,” the company said on its website. “As a result, simply focusing on classing the vessel does not address the operational risks. Maintaining high-level operational safety requires constant, committed effort and a focused corporate culture — two things that OceanGate takes very seriously and that are not assessed during classification.”

The company did, however, say that one of its other submersibles has completed a safety certification. Antipodes goes down 1,000 feet, a tiny fraction of the Titanic’s depth, which is some two and a half miles. Like Titan, it has been used for tourist dives. Its certification was performed by the American Bureau of Shipping , a marine industry giant based in Houston.

In an interview, Jennifer Mire, a spokesperson for the American Bureau of Shipping, said the company had done no evaluation of the larger submersible. “We don’t have any connection to the Titan,” she said.

OceanGate, in explaining Titan’s lack of certification on its website, said that groups like Lloyd’s Register and the American Bureau of Shipping “often have a multi-year approval cycle due to a lack of pre-existing standards, especially, for example, in the case of many of OceanGate’s innovations, such as carbon-fiber pressure vessels and a real-time hull health monitoring system.”

Dr. McLaren said the company’s line of reasoning was unpersuasive and that the innovative nature of the craft made certification even more important. Knowing that it was uncertified, he said, was enough to make him “run in the opposite direction.”

Triton Submarines , an American company that makes innovative submersibles with transparent hulls to give passengers a panoramic view of the abyss, calls vehicle certification one of the company’s founding principles.

“We are proud that every submersible delivered remains in active service and certified to its original design depth,” it says on the company’s website . “Every Triton ever completed has passed certification.”

Christine Chung

Extreme travel rescue operations are vast in scale and cost. Who foots the bill is murky.

The ongoing search and rescue effort for the missing Titan submersible with five people on board, involving a huge response from American, Canadian and French authorities, is vast in scale, including both the U.S. Navy and the Coast Guard.

The expense for such an endeavor is likely to be equally great, and it is unclear whether taxpayers in the countries involved, ultimately, will be required to pay it. The passengers aboard the submersible paid $250,000 each for the experience of diving to the Titanic.

“These people paid a lot of money to do something extraordinarily risky and hard to recover from,” said Chris Boyer, the executive director of the National Association for Search and Rescue , a nonprofit that focuses on wilderness rescues. The rescue mission, he said, would “probably cost millions.”

In the United States, search and rescue efforts — who conducts them and who pays for them — depend on where you get lost , Mr. Boyer said. Some states, like New Hampshire, charge individuals for rescues if the people are determined to have been reckless.

Cynthia Hernandez, a spokeswoman for the National Park Service , said in a statement that the agency does not charge for search and rescue operations that occur within its parks because it considers them a public service. The park service conducted 3,428 search and rescues last year.

But, she said, when the cost of search and rescue efforts “crosses a certain threshold, funds may be diverted from N.P.S. funds for other types of programs or projects.”

It is unknown whether OceanGate Expeditions, the company that provided the excursion to the Titanic ruins, required its participants to sign up for any trip insurance.

The organizers of risky and adventurous expeditions, including operators like Abercrombie & Kent and Black Tomato , said that they require extensive insurance policies. Peter Anderson, managing director of the luxury concierge service Knightsbridge Circle , said the company works with services like Covac Global that can “evacuate and repatriate our members for medical emergencies.” But even the minimum policy, $100,000, would not come close to paying for the current efforts.

The Coast Guard did not immediately respond to questions about the expense of past extensive search and rescue efforts.

In 2021, it rescued Cyril Derreumaux , an experienced kayaker who was about a week into an attempt to paddle 2,400 nautical miles from the California coast to Hawaii. The Coast Guard estimated his rescue, which involved a helicopter and at least one diver, cost $42,000, according to The San Francisco Chronicle .

Mr. Derreumaux, who lives in Marin County, Calif., and is now 46, emphasized in an interview that his goal was to fulfill a dream and that he was not a tourist who had undertaken the venture with minimal training. He received backlash after being rescued, he said, with some people saying that the effort was costly and unnecessary. A stranger even sent him a Venmo request for tens of thousands of dollars, Mr. Derreumaux said.

Mr. Derreumaux said he was thankful to the Coast Guard for saving his life, along with the lives of many others in need of its help.

“I would not have called the Coast Guard if it weren’t a life-threatening situation,” he said.

He attempted the trip again the following year. This time, he was successful.

“I knew I had what it takes to do it,” he said. “I think it’s part of the human spirit of trying to do things that are really hard for what it teaches us about human resilience, determination and to do things that maybe don’t make sense.”

Of the Titan’s passengers, Mr. Derreumaux said: “Their lives are worth saving.”

Claire Fahy contributed reporting.

Anushka Patil and Jacey Fortin

Inside the Titan: Quiet and cramped, with a single porthole.

Passengers seeking a glimpse of the R.M.S. Titanic aboard the submersible that disappeared in the North Atlantic this week have endured hours in a dangerous drop to the ocean floor aboard a cramped craft with a single porthole.

Mike Reiss, a producer and writer for “The Simpsons,” boarded the vessel, known as the Titan, last summer. He said that passengers were required to sign a waiver that mentioned death three times on the first page.

Passengers on his 10-hour journey — a trip that can cost up to $250,000 — were composed but excited, he said. Sandwiches and water were available on the vessel, but he recalled being told that many passengers did not eat during the journey because of excitement, and that the rudimentary toilet on board had never been used.

OceanGate Expeditions, which operates the vessel, has described the trip on its website as a “thrilling and unique travel experience.” The company did not immediately respond to a request for more information on Tuesday.

The Titan is a tight fit. David Pogue, a CBS reporter and former New York Times tech columnist who has been on board, described the cylinder as “about the size of a minivan.”

Images from OceanGate show a vessel with an interior like a metal tube , where passengers can sit on the flat floor with their backs to the curved walls. There is some overhead lighting but no chairs, and little room to move or stand upright.

Still, Mr. Reiss, who had previously traveled with OceanGate Expeditions to see Hudson Canyon off the shores of New York City, described the journey to the Titanic as “very comfortable” and said he fell asleep during the quiet, dimly lit descent. “You just drop like a stone for two and a half hours,” he said.

As the submersible made its way to the Titanic, Mr. Reiss said, it was carried off course by underwater currents. The compass was “acting very weird,” he recalled, and the team knew only that they were about 500 yards from where they should have been.

Still, the Titan, which could spend only three hours on the ocean floor, managed to arrive at the wreck with roughly 20 minutes to spare for what Mr. Reiss called a quick “photo op.” He was able to see the sunken ship through the porthole, which he described as the size of a washing machine window.

The wreck was “the biggest thing in the world,” he said, “but you’re in such darkness, you just don’t know where it is going to be.”

Here’s how to search for the missing craft underwater.

The hunt for a deep-diving submersible last seen slipping beneath the waves to visit the wreckage of the R.M.S. Titanic on Sunday now involves the coast guards of both the United States and Canada. But finding a single object on the bottom of the ocean is no easy task.

The U.S. Coast Guard is facing extreme logistical challenges as it races to find and reach the Titan. The five people inside the submersible were believed to have roughly 40 hours of breathable air left as of early Tuesday afternoon, Coast Guard officials said.

While the U.S. and Canadian militaries have deployed rescue craft by both air and sea, the job of locating the Titan may ultimately fall to civilian undersea explorers, who typically use technologies in tandem to search the seafloor and identify objects.

To scan large areas of water, devices called autonomous underwater vehicles are often used. Before being placed into the water, these torpedo-like robots are programmed with the boundaries of a search area. They then dive and propel themselves at a preset altitude above the bottom, radiating sonar waves.

The emitters, called side-scan sonars, have evolved to produce fairly detailed imagery of objects on the bottom that can be analyzed once the vehicles are brought back aboard a mother ship and their data is downloaded. Those missions can take hours to complete, depending on the size of the area being searched.

Using the analysis of those sonar images, explorers may find areas of interest, often based on features like straight lines and right angles that indicate a man-made object.

The extreme depths involved pose a challenge. Divers wearing specialized equipment can safely reach depths of just a few hundred feet below the surface before having to spend long amounts of time decompressing on the way back up. A couple hundred feet deeper, and darkness reigns.

The Titanic lies at a depth in the North Atlantic that humans can reach only while inside specialized submersibles that keep their occupants warm, dry and supplied with breathable air.

Searchers can send down a type of uncrewed device called a remote-operated vehicle, which is controlled by a human operator on the surface and has optical cameras that send a constant video feed through an umbilical line to the mother ship. Such vehicles often have gripper arms that can pick up objects on the seafloor.

Advanced vehicles like the U.S. Navy’s CURV-21 can dive to 20,000 feet underwater and can use gripper arms to delicately thread straps and lifting lines to objects so they can be winched to the surface by cranes aboard a salvage ship.

But getting that kind of equipment to the site takes time. The Titanic’s wreck is about 370 miles south of Newfoundland, and the kinds of ships that can carry a vehicle like the Navy’s deepest-diving robot normally move no faster than about 20 miles per hour.

In many submersibles, the air inside is recycled — carbon dioxide is removed and oxygen is added — but on a long enough timeline, the vessel will lose the ability to scrub enough carbon dioxide, and the air inside will no longer sustain life.

If the Titan’s batteries run down and are no longer able to run heaters that keep the occupants warm in the freezing deep, the people inside can become hypothermic. Should the submersible’s pressure hull fail, the end for those inside would be certain and quick.

Daniel Victor

Stockton Rush, pilot of the Titan, is a booster of deep-seas tourism.

Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate Expeditions and one of the five occupants of the submersible missing this week in the North Atlantic, has advocated for deep-seas tourism in the face of criticism.

His company proceeded with its tours despite the “unanimous concern” expressed by three dozen industry leaders in 2018. In an interview last year , he told The New York Times that high-resolution footage gathered on the Titanic tours could benefit researchers.

“No public entity is going to fund going back to the Titanic,” Mr. Rush said. “There are other sites that are newer and probably of greater scientific value.”

In the interview, he defended the price tag — seats in the Titan cost up to $250,000.

“For those who think it’s expensive, it’s a fraction of the cost of going to space, and it’s very expensive for us to get these ships and go out there,” said Mr. Rush, who founded OceanGate in 2009. “And the folks who don’t like anybody making money sort of miss the fact that that’s the only way anything gets done in this world.”

By some accounts, Mr. Rush has been a charismatic booster of submersible trips. Mike Reiss, a writer and producer of “The Simpsons,” who took a trip in a different OceanGate submersible that was piloted by Mr. Rush, compared him on Tuesday to Henry Ford and the Wright brothers, describing him as “a magnetic man” who is “the last of the great American dreamers.”

Craig Howard, a longtime friend of Mr. Rush’s, said on Tuesday that just before he left Newfoundland for the Titanic site, Mr. Rush told him he was excited for this year’s dives.

“And there was always a ‘next dive,’” he said.

Mr. Rush is a descendant of two signers of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton. He graduated from Princeton with a degree in aerospace engineering in 1984, according to his company biography. In 1989, he personally built an experimental aircraft that he continues to fly, the company said.

In a segment on “CBS Sunday Morning” that aired in November 2022, Mr. Rush told the interviewer, David Pogue, that he grew up wanting to be an astronaut and, after he earned his degree, a fighter pilot.

“I had this epiphany that I didn’t want — it wasn’t about going to space,” Mr. Rush said. “It was about exploring. It was about finding new life forms. I wanted to be sort of the Captain Kirk. I didn’t want to be the passenger in the back. And I realized that the ocean is the universe.”

Anushka Patil and Emma Bubola contributed reporting.

Matthew Bloch ,  Keith Collins and Scott Reinhard

Multiple vessels assisted in the search Tuesday, with more on the way.

The Sycamore was

approximately 975 miles

from the wreckage

at 10:54 a.m. Wednesday.

Ann Harvey and

Terry Fox at

around 11:00 a.m.

Newfoundland

The Polar Prince , John Cabot

and three other vessels

were within 26 miles

of the wreckage by around

11:00 a.m. Wednesday.

at 10:50 p.m.

Atalante at

Glace Bay at

10:50 p.m. Tuesday

Sources: United States Coast Guard, MarineTraffic, GEBCO

Note: All times are in Eastern. Data as of 11:30 a.m.

The U.S. Coast Guard said on Tuesday that several more vessels were on their way to assist in the search for the Titan submersible, including its ship the Sycamore and a Canadian Coast Guard vessel, John Cabot. The French government said on Tuesday that it was also sending a research vessel, the Atalante, which is equipped with an exploration robot, to help with the search. They will join the M.V. Polar Prince and Deep Energy, a pipe-laying vessel flagged in the Bahamas.

The Polar Prince deployed the Titan submersible on Sunday and has been searching the area since losing contact with it less than two hours later. Deep Energy arrived at the scene earlier on Tuesday and launched a remotely-operated vehicle, or R.O.V., to aid in the search, the Coast Guard said. American and Canadian aircraft have also been scanning the search area by sight and radar, and have deployed sonar buoys.

More From Forbes

Another titanic submersible is in the works. what can we expect.

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An art school student in Mumbai puts final touches on a painting depicting five people aboard a ... [+] submersible named Titan that imploded near the wreck of the Titanic on June 22, 2023. (Photo by INDRANIL MUKHERJEE/AFP via Getty Images)

When I first saw news this past week about the development of a new submersible to visit the Titanic wreck, I had mixed feelings. The revelation immediately took me back to the mess a year ago when OceanGate's Titan submersible infamously imploded on a dive to visit Titanic, 12,500 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. All five adventure tourists aboard were killed, including a billionaire, a father/son team and OceanGate’s founder and owner.

At the time, I wrote a comprehensive piece about the disaster and the uninformed media circus that followed for a good week afterward (link below). Most critics agree in retrospect that Titan was ill-constructed, made of questionable material, and that the unfortunate implosion was just a matter of time.

Here's a question: Do we really need to dive to Titanic again? I personally don’t know. How much more can we glean that we haven't already since the renowned oceanographer Bob Ballard found the wreck back in 1985? More than 100 dives, mostly in the reliable but now retired Russian Mir subs, have been completed.

Those questions aside, the developers of this new sub have deep enough pockets to get it built correctly, and are also proven ocean engineers. A major funder of the venture is Larry Connor, an adventurist and real estate titan from Dayton, Ohio. He has orbited the Earth with SpaceX, journeyed to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on Earth nearly seven miles down, driven race cars and more.

Adventurer and Ohio real estate titan Larry Connor is funding the development of a new submersible ... [+] to visit the Titanic wreck.

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Most recently, Connor organized and participated in a formation HALO (High Altitude, Low Opening) parachute jump from 38,000 feet, breaking the previous world record.

On the engineering side is Partick Lahey, of Triton Submersibles. His venerable company has been building small ocean subs for decades. It even built the titanium sub that entrepreneur/adventurer Victor Vescovo used to take tourists and scientists down to explore the deepest parts of the ocean bottom.

I know both men personally. They are solid, accomplished guys. Lahey in 2016 took me in a small Triton sub to 1,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic’s Bermuda Triangle as part of a NEKTON science mission (link below). As for Connor, I had done some helicopter-hoist training with him near Melbourne, Florida, last summer while he prepared for his big charity parachute jump (link below).

During my heli-training, I brought up the Titan implosion. “It's a tragedy, first off,” Connor said. “I think it was avoidable. It's going to hurt ocean exploration, a relatively small industry with a lot of really good people.

Victor Vescovo attends the Five Deeps press conference at the British Museum, celebrating Victor ... [+] Vescovo and the OMEGA Planet Ocean watch for the worlds deepest dive on record (Photo by Mike Marsland/Getty Images for Omega)

“If you look at the last 50 years, any submersible that's had DNV [Det Norske Veritas] certification has never had a fatality,” he continued, “and that's thousands of dives. Unfortunately, OceanGate decided against advice from many experts who said its strategy, approach and vehicle construction were flawed. It wasn't DNV certified, either.

“Hey, I'm all for being a disruptor. But you can't do that and risk other people's lives at the same time. Because of this accident, we'll need to reeducate the public about underwater exploration.”

Clearly, in addition to minting a way to visit Titanic himself, that reeducation is a reason Connor’s funding the new sub. Vescovo, for his part, is just as enthusiastic. “Patrick and Larry are the ones to show the world how to dive the Titanic correctly and safely in a new, state-of-the-art submersible."

No hard dates for Connor’s dives have been set, but we will report more when announcements are made.

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