OceanGate
- The Titan submersible's implosion was one of the worst technology failures of 2023.
- As the coverage played out, it became clear that much of the disaster could have been prevented.
- Hopefully, in 2024, innovation can avoid the kind of hubris that brought down the sub's mastermind.
In the summer of 2023, our minds went to the terrifying depths of the Atlantic as we waited four long days to find out what had happened to the Titan submersible and its five passengers on their way to the Titanic wreckage.
Before marine investigators put the pieces together about what happened to the ill-fated submersible, experts laid out nightmare scenarios of its passengers slowly running out of oxygen, or — as it turned out to be the case — a mercifully swift implosion caused by a breach in the vessel's pressure hull.
In that time and the days that followed, an image began to form of its leader, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who was also one of the passengers on the submersible and the sort of move-fast-and-break-things innovator who dreamed that the strategy could work even in the deep sea.
A letter sent by dozens of industry leaders and experts directly to Rush in 2018 expressed concern over the submersible's lack of formal safety certification. The letter warned that the consequences could be "catastrophic," a word eventually used by the US Coast Guard to describe the submersible's implosion.
In interviews, Rush lamented about the safety regulations around the submersible industry, once calling it "obscenely safe" and stifling for innovation.
"At some point, safety is just pure waste," he told CBS journalist David Pogue in 2022.
OceanGate opted to build the submersible's hull with a combination of carbon fiber and titanium, instead of the standard titanium. In 2017, Rush told TechCrunch that "everyone said you couldn't build with this with carbon fiber," but that using a more buoyant material significantly reduced costs.
Emails from Rush viewed by Business Insider painted a picture of a CEO bent on pushing the limits of the Titan submersible despite implorings from experts who said the vessel was not ready for deep sea exploration.
Prior passengers reported troubling experiences inside the Titan. Submersible expert Karl Stanley expressed concerns about a large cracking sound coming from the vessel's hull after taking a 12,000-foot plunge inside the Titan in 2019. Mike Reiss, a producer for "The Simpsons," also said he took four dives with the company and that, each time, the submersible lost communication with the support ship.
It also turned out that beyond the allure of visiting the Titanic, Rush had deeper ambitions to mine the seabed for oil and gas. The Titanic exploration was just a way of getting people invested, he told Fast Company in 2017.
Altogether, the absence of safety certifications, ignored warnings from friends and colleagues alike, and an overall lack of common sense in pursuit of even more riches added up to make the sub's implosion one of the worst technology failures of the year.
The MIT Technology Review put it this way:
Everyone had warned Stockton Rush, the sub's creator, that it wasn't safe. But he believed innovation meant tossing out the rule book and taking chances. He set aside good engineering in favor of wishful thinking. He and four others died. To us it shows how the spirit of innovation can pull ahead of reality, sometimes with unpleasant consequences.
The Review highlighted other failures in the tech space over the year — Cruise robotaxis being booted off of San Francisco's streets just two months after it received approval to expand its fleet operations; the shortlived dreams of a room-temperature superconductor that could change the world; and the $700 AI Pin that Business Insider's Katie Notopoulos said is unlikely to replace our phones.
None of them quite left behind the legacy Rush's did, with its tragic ending and ominous breadcrumbs that offered a grim warning for innovators in better years to come.