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What Made Us Care So Much About the Titan?

Alison Osius — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 21:06:55 +0000

February, 20 years ago, long before OceanGate’s Titan submersible imploded. It kept snowing and snowing and snowing. Slopes that hadn’t gone in 20 years were sliding. Five skiers from the Front Range were missing in the mountains outside Ashcroft, near Aspen, Colorado.

Each night as darkness fell—I remember it clearly—I’d peer out a window and wonder, Are you still out there? Can you make it to morning? The people were missing for five days. I didn’t know any of them. But I had—have—a friend, Hugh Herr, who in 1982, at 17, was lost in the wintertime mountains of New Hampshire for days, dying of cold and thirst, fearing he’d never see his family again. As a lifelong climber and skier, I’ve known many people who’ve had accidents, and haven’t exactly avoided risk myself, just tried to be careful.

That year of 1993, people with backcountry skiing experience in the Aspen area felt off-the-record certain the skiers had been buried and killed. When I heard on the radio that they had emerged, I stumbled into the common area at Climbing magazine, where I then worked. “Hey!” I cried weakly. I was trying to shout that they’d been found, but my voice cracked and failed.

People streamed out from their offices. We were all so happy—everybody in town was—but then came the harsh second-day analyses. The skiers had gone out amid storm warnings. They had split up, which is what you don’t do. There was further criticism; there always is. Usually some is fair. It’s hindsight.

Now here we are again, minus the happiness phase.

Blue ocean, lost souls, and a reminder to us all to pay attention to the power of nature. (Photo: Bogdan Khmelnytskyi/Getty)

When word broke on Sunday about the missing Titan submersible, I started obsessively checking the news, wondering about the people inside. Many of us felt especially bad for 19-year-old Suleman Dawood, but I actually felt even worse for his father, Shahzada, imagining him down there looking into his son’s face, knowing that the trip had been his idea. My son, in his twenties, didn’t think the father should have castigated himself—he had offered his son an incredible adventure, and, yes, there was risk, and sometimes things go wrong. But I thought Shahzada would have been wracked.

I kept picturing the five people in the Titan: cold and huddling, rime forming on the surfaces around them, with a 19-year-old boy who was afraid and a father who felt responsible for the death of someone he loved. I did not sleep for hours.

I felt a huge jolt of hope on Tuesday night, when it was reported that banging sounds were being detected at 30-minute intervals. I remembered a brilliant, wrenching short story from 1960, “The Ledge,” which was very loosely based on a real incident in Maine. It was about a hunter, his son, and a nephew who are stranded on an offshore ledge in December, hoping for rescue as the tide rises.

The fisherman tells his son and nephew to load their guns.

“I’ll fire once and count to five,” he says. “Then you fire. Count to five. That way they won’t think it’s somebody gunning ducks.”

The systematic nature of the reported banging, possibly coming from Titan, gave me hope. On Wednesday night, knowing that oxygen in an intact-but-immobile submersible would be running out, likely gone by morning, I kept picturing the five people in there: cold and huddling, rime forming on the surfaces around them, with a boy who was afraid and a father who felt responsible for the death of someone he loved. I did not sleep for hours.

I accept that preoccupation with the �վ��ٲ��’s predicament was giving short shrift to a in the Mediterranean, off the Greek coast, five days ago. Much commentary on social media and in writing, such as on Tuesday, showed how our attention to the Titan was a misplaced priority, focusing on the few rather than the many. “Widespread outrage and anguish for the hundreds of souls taking an extraordinary risk in search of a better life,” the author wrote, “and those who failed them along the way, seems much more justifiable than the frenzy over a small, lost group of hyper-niche tourists, tragic as both circumstances may turn out to be.”

All week, many in the nation were fixated, as I was. Why? I have no simple answer. It involves many things, one being that the Titanic shipwreck is an icon, a symbol of tragedy, the way Everest is a symbol, of both excellence and tragedy.

But I was sickened by the lack of sympathy I saw on social media. “Rich people are a drain on society,” one person wrote on Twitter. “Not sure why taxpayer funds are being expended on people who bought into a fancy underwater coffin.” The same kind of schadenfreude was on display in comments attached to stories published by the Washington Post, the paper I grew up with. Sneering and jeering because the people involved were wealthy, bored billionaires who somehow deserved what was happening to them. There were jokes, with more cropping up Thursday after the implosion and deaths were announced. I saw awful puns on my Facebook feed—“sinking low,” “subpar”—and references to Darwin Award winners. Morbid humor is a common response to tragedy, but the aggregate this time was next level. I know: It’s the internet, what do we expect? Yet those on the submersible were real people.

All week, many in the nation were fixated, as I was. Why? I have no simple answer. It involves many things, one being that the Titanic shipwreck is an icon, a symbol of tragedy, the way Everest is a symbol, of both excellence and tragedy. But I think the main reason we were drawn in is that the drama was happening in real time—or so we thought, until we found out on Thursday that they’d died the first day. The passengers could still be alive, we mistakenly thought. They had over 90 hours of oxygen. I kept thinking of the Aspen skiers. They came back.

In the end, many of us were pulled into this story by the power of the individual. The most influential piece of journalism I read as a graduate student was John ��’s New Yorker story from 1946, “Hiroshima.” It was pioneering in its approach and structure. As the professor who assigned it explained, if a reader takes in an article about hundreds or thousands of people being killed, he or she often thinks, That’s terrible, and then turns the page and goes on to something else. Hersey based his story on individuals, six of them, survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. He noted where each was at the time of the blast, how far from the epicenter, and then followed them through his or her day, struggling amid the devastation. Readers experienced the events as seen by that person. It made a difference to know their names.

��’s New Yorker editors saw what they had, a human account, all the more powerful for its muted tone. In magazine and later book form, “Hiroshima” humanized the Japanese to Americans, who were accustomed to dehumanizing them during the war. These were real people, men, women, children and babies on the ground, people with eyes burned out and skin falling off, a young mother carrying her dead infant for days, refusing to let go.

“That kid didn’t get to live his life,” I said to my husband, referring to Suleman Dawood.

“A lot of people don’t,” he said.

Ever hear the parable of the starfish? In it, a boy is walking along a beach where a storm has washed up thousands of starfish. He is picking them up and throwing them back into the waves. An old man asks why he is bothering, saying there are too many to save. “It won’t make any difference,” he says.

The boy listens, then reaches down, picks up another starfish, and wings it into the water. “Well,” he says, “it made a difference to that one.”

The point of that tale is that you can make a difference, if only to one person. My husband is in the Buddy Program, a friend and mentor to a 12-year-old; several friends work with that program, too. Why? Because there’s a world within one person.

Each of the people in the submersible was a human being, and at the end of the day—the sad end of the story—that is why we cared.

Alison Osius is an editor at ��ԹϺ��, and a former editor at Climbing and Rock and Ice magazines.

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Why All the Hate for Billionaire Explorers?

wsiler — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 20:29:03 +0000

Five people were killed this week when they took an experimental submarine, the Titan, into ocean depths to visit the wreck of the RMS Titanic. Yesterday, search and rescue officials confirmed the vessel had seemingly imploded.

Internet reactions to the tragedy continue to range from compassion to outright vitriol directed at both the submersible’s maker, Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate, and its paying passengers: Hamish Harding, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Shahzada Dawood, and his son Suleman Dawood.

Why the mixed emotions? Is it because the submersible ride cost a steep $250,000 per-person—unaffordable for most—and because at least two of the passengers were billionaires? Or, because despite dire warnings from industry peers about the safety and functionality of Stockton’s Titan submersible, he and his tourist crew went anyways? Or, because we put dangerous faith in innovators and these missions sometimes result in loss of life? Or, perhaps, it’s simply easier in today’s digital age to weigh in on disasters from behind a screen—positive or negative.

“Rich people taking risks outdoors is nothing new,” explains Dr. Len Necefer, an ��ԹϺ�� contributor who works at the intersection of Indigenous peoples, natural resources, and environmental policy. “From Christopher Columbus to Richard Branson, money and resources have historically brought the ability to do dumb, dangerous stuff.”

We asked Dr. Necefer, along with Matthew Scott, an ��ԹϺ�� contributor and Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and frequent leader of vehicle-based expeditions through some of the world’s most remote places, to examine some of the social media memes, comments, and reactions to this tragedy.

https://twitter.com/superking1816/status/1672224657142054912?t=OiTonpD0Z9wbPyJCXJ2TCQ&s=19

“$250,000 is a lot of money. Couldn’t it have been better spent helping people in need?”

Scott: That kind of coin is being thrown around daily, all around you. When I see a person of extreme affluence spending their money on experiences, instead of a gold-encrusted steak from that terrible Salt Bae guy—I support it.

Dr. Necefer: This particular adventure is one of the dumb outcomes of a gross misallocation of society’s resources. Let’s not forget the other stories from just this past week of in the Mediterranean and outside the Canary Islands.

The willingness to allow certain people to die while every effort is made to save others is a really dark reflection on humanity…

— Olabode (@olabode_szn)

“It’s unethical for billionaires to exist at all since the only path to hoarding so much wealth involves exploiting others. Good riddance.”

Scott: Billionaires are a by-product of the values and legislation that a majority of society supports. If society didn’t want billionaires, we could tax them out of existence with the stroke of a pen. But deep down, you want to be a billionaire the same as I do.

Dr. Necefer: I’m sure OceanGate, the people in it, and anyone who decided that it was a good idea to associate with this mission are going to get sued out of existence. I can just see those wrongful death lawyers wringing their hands together in delight with the money they’ll make on the stupid litigation that will come from this. Who knows, maybe a new billionaire will be minted through these lawsuits?

“That sub looked sketchy. It was stupid for anyone to even get on it.”

Scott: There’s no way in hell I’d get on a submarine controlled by a knock-off game controller. But let’s not forget that some of the people on that submarine—which included elected members of the Explorer’s Club—had legitimate deep sea submarine experience, including at the Titanic site. They obviously felt comfortable enough to strap themselves in. There are few, if any, regulations or standards for submersibles capable of this depth. You have to accept this risk before doing something like this.

Dr. Necefer: Let’s quote OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush: “Safety is just pure waste.”

“The passengers were just paying for a seat, they’re not real adventurers.”

Scott: “The battle for authenticity, as viewed through someone else’s eyes, is a battle you will never win. How many people reading this went on a gap-year backpacking trip to Thailand where they spent a couple weeks getting drunk and then went home to brag about their “adventure?” These folks bolted themselves into a steel tube and went to the bottom of the ocean. Sounds like an adventure to me.

Dr. Necefer: Honestly, if I had access to this kind of money? Hell yeah I’d do it. But hell no would I think of myself as an adventurer.

https://twitter.com/KhandakerMunta/status/1671671157106573314?t=4_V1Mzwb6TlcDMnzO-9Cmw&s=19

“They were just watching the trip through a 21-inch TV screen from inside the sub, and occasionally through a tiny porthole. What was the point?”

Scott: Were you expecting a double bay window with a screen door? This is 3,000 meters below sea level. The small porthole was the entire point of the trip—to see the wreck of the Titanic with your own eyes.

Dr. Necefer: From what I can see from the vessel’s layout, the toilet has a direct view out of the porthole. Talk about a million dollar view, huh?

“Stockton was just exploiting gullible rich people to pay for his research.”

Scott: It’s really easy to point fingers at this early stage. When you consider the exploration credentials and accomplishments of some of the expedition members, my opinion is that you’d be hard pressed to take advantage of those guys without them knowing what they were getting into.

Dr. Necefer: Good marketing can convince people to do just about anything. Up to, and including, spending a quarter of a million dollars on a vacation they’ll never come home from.

For those who keep saying "it's cruel to laugh at him , y'all are just jealous"
Just want to point at the jackass who said "safety is pure waste" and dimwit billionaires who actually listened to him deserve this.

— HeZukka (@SpaceBoiAhmed)

“These guys argued against government regulations and purposefully chose to operate in gray areas. Why did they expect those same governments to come to their aid once they got into trouble?”

Scott: Let’s be humans here for a second. If someone had the assets necessary to help, why wouldn’t they?

The outrage comes from dissimilar responses to two disasters happening at similar times—the migrant ship disaster off Greece, and this OceanGate thing. But, the resources and training of the combined United States and Canadian Coast Guards, plus the United States Navy, are also dissimilar from the training and resources of Greek government responders.

Dr. Necefer: Of course we should ensure that search and rescue services remain accessible without a paywall. But damn, reaching Titanic depths is a next level SAR mission. There should at least be contingencies paid by the wealthy people who do stuff like this. You know, like taxes.

“At what point does extreme risk taking become unethical?”

Scott: Walking out of your front door comes with risks. Staying inside raises certain risks. Everything is a risk. Racing drivers, who often come from the same financial group that undertake extravagant trips like this, die all the time. They assume the risk, and that risk is their own. You have no idea how much stupid money is being spent in that world. Winning the Baja 1000 costs millions. Winning a Formula One constructor’s championship? Billions. Risk taking becomes unethical when you’re endangering lives other than your own without their full knowledge or understanding. If those folks willingly got on a submarine which they knew was experimental with a window that was rated for less than half of the pressure and depth they were going to, that’s on them. But if they were misled—there’s an ethical issue.

Dr. Necefer: I am fully in support of people taking risks if they’re fully aware of the dangers involved. These folks should be able to get their submarine thing on, but should also be aware that society is going to have little sympathy when things go wrong.

“Deep ocean and outer space travel should be regulated by governments.”

Scott: We have to be careful that as a society we do not regulate ourselves into complacency. The survival of our species largely depends on furthering our understanding of the unknown.

Deep ocean exploration will never fall under the realm of public transportation. It is inherently experimental. However, space travel might one day become commonplace, and just like our governments agree on air travel regulations, there will need to be space travel regulations.

Dr. Necefer: I’m not an expert in either ocean or space tourism, but pulling from environmental and technology policy: we cannot let private actors externalize costs and risks to society. In this particular instance OceanGate was circumventing safety regulations by calling this vehicle “experimental.” When the experiment predictably goes wrong then the coast guards of two nations come try to save them? Yeah great business planning there.

“Why is there so much hate around this?

Scott: In our highly unequal world, this was a look over the fence between the haves, and have-nots for a lot of people.

Trips of this cost are happening all over the world, all of the time. It’s crude to say, but $250,000 to go to the bottom of the ocean and see the Titanic is an incredible bargain. Right now, as we speak, dozens of ultra-wealthy people are paying that just in jet fuel to hop back and forth across the Atlantic in their Gulfstreams.

In my opinion, this Netflix-special-waiting-to-happen has clearly triggered people’s feelings, but it’s not really about submarine travel—it’s about the perceived differences in treatment between the poor and the wealthy.

Dr. Necefer: This is just an easy target for justified frustrations about society.

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Stockton Rush, the Pilot of Missing Titanic Sub, Told ��ԹϺ�� Why He Kept Going Back

mturner — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 18:16:57 +0000

While researching an ��ԹϺ�� story on high-end adventure tourism, I spoke twice by Zoom with Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, once in 2021 and again in 2022. The company is located in Everett, 25 miles north of Seattle.

Energetic and passionate, Rush talked about the need to advance the world’s oceanic knowledge and why he was pursuing deep-sea tourism as a business. A picture of an OceanGate submersible cockpit served as his video-chat background, giving him the appearance of taking my calls from the helm of his fleet.

Rush and four others disappeared in the Titan on Sunday, June 18, during a dive to see the historic wreck of the Titanic. A fervent search-and-rescue mission ensued across an area about 900 miles off the coast of Cape Cod—in a region often referred to as twice the size of Connecticut—as the sub’s final hours of oxygen were believed to be dwindling.

In an update at 3 P.M. ET on June 22, Coast Guard officials announced that a “catastrophic implosion,” which instantly killed all the passengers, occurred in the submersible, and offered “heartfelt condolences.” Debris from the submersible was found on a smooth section of sea floor 1,600 feet off the bow of the Titanic by a remotely operated vehicle searching the site.

Three adventurers were onboard with Rush: British businessman and explorer Hamish Harding, and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman. The French maritime expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet was also onboard, serving as the sub’s Titanic expert after more than 35 dives to the wreck.

While marine rescue is never simple, �վ��ٲ��’s depth complicated this mission even more. The Titanic rests 12,500 feet deep, so it took two-and-a-half hours for his sub just to reach the wreckage, Rush told me.

“I like to say that if you stopped someone on the street and said name three things in the deep ocean, they’re gonna say sharks, whales, and the Titanic. Everything else is a distant second,” Rush told me.

What We Know About Stockton Rush, OceanGate CEO

Rush, 61, graduated from Princeton in 1984 with a degree in aerospace engineering. He had become the world’s youngest jet-transport rated pilot at age 19, and went on to build his own Glasair III experimental aircraft in ’89—the same year he earned an MBA from U.C. Berkeley. Rush led several successful IP ventures over the subsequent decades and served on the board of multiple tech companies. He married Wendy Rush, also a Princeton ’84 graduate, who works as communications director at OceanGate. In an uncanny coincidence, Wendy is the descendant of the married couple Isidor and Ida Straus, who died in the Titanic sinking in 1912.

How Rush Launched His OceanGate Business

When Rush recognized in his 40s that he would never achieve his dream of being the first person to walk on Mars, he told in 2017, he turned his attention to the sea. He then built his own submersible (which he dived in over 30 times). In 2009, he founded , to conduct commercial research and exploration. Moving sub research and development into the private sector, Rush aimed to bring down the cost of deep-sea exploration and to make it more accessible to scientists and researchers. On most trips, scientists are on board. OceanGate has provided grants for scientific and archaeological marine research through its .

While OceanGate has offered other underwater exploration trips, like to the , the Titanic expeditions have been the company’s marquee project. Fusing research and tourism, missions discovered a deep-sea reef and another shipwreck, collected environmental DNA, and captured the first 8K footage of the Titanic (see video below). Private individuals have paid $250,000 to take part in the trips, helping underwrite the cost of the research. Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman, were such participants.

The Titan was one of very few vessels capable of reaching these depths with humans on board. The only other one in operation is The Limiting Factor, which was until recently owned by Victor Vescovo. The Deepsea Challenger, the submersible that James Cameron went down in to see the Titanic, was damaged in a highway fire in 2015.

When we talked, Rush was frank that his company pushed the boundaries of underwater exploration.

“Nargelot made a comment to somebody that every deep diving submarine is a prototype, that they haven’t made more than one of all of them,” Rush told me last year. “The first year we had prototype issues, we had some equipment problems. We had some tracking and communications problems. We overcame those, and by the end got to the Titanic and took a bunch of people down.”

As many are questioning the ethics of deep-sea tourism and safety issues with the design of �վ��ٲ��’s carbon fiber hull—and as we await the results of the ongoing investigation about what happened—here are Rush’s thoughts from our conversations about diving the Titanic.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush with one of his company’s submersibles off the coast of Florida in 2013

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. It includes comments from my conversations with Rush in March 2021 and September 2022.

��ԹϺ��: Why visit the Titanic? Why do these expeditions?

Rush: The Titanic is just such a unique thing underwater. I like to say that if you stopped someone on the street and said name three things in the deep ocean, they’re gonna say sharks, whales, and the Titanic. Everything else is a distant second.

There are some other great wrecks that we hope to go see, and there are great wrecks we’ve seen before. But the Titanic really has captured the world’s imagination, and it is the pinnacle of things underwater at this time. And it’s a proven site that people want to visit. When the Russians were in need of hard cash, they did some tourist trips out to the Titanic. James Cameron went to it [numerous] times. There’s some history about people wanting to go see it.

Equally important is, it’s decaying and nobody really knows how fast. So there’s a lot of science that hasn’t been able to be done on the Titanic. Past exercises in tourism didn’t do any science, and ours is all going to be focused on not just the decay of the Titanic, but also looking at the biology. There are hundreds of species that have only been found on the Titanic wreck.

The short answer to your questions is the Titanic draws attention. It’s a great research component. It’s basically an artificial reef in the abyssal plain, and what life forms are there? What fish and corals and the like is a huge question. And it’s decaying and we don’t know how fast.

What are the scientific objectives?

They’re twofold. There’s an archeological component. The fundamental question is the one everyone wants to know: When is the thing going to collapse? … It’s being eaten by bacteria that are literally eating the steel, eating the iron. So with the laser scaler, we’ve been able to take measurements of the expansion joint that was in the ship as well as the starboard crack…I’d say the number-one [archeological] goal, other than to document its current state, is to come up with a better answer to how long it will be recognizable. That’s how I like to define it, because it will always be an artificial reef.

The biological objectives are longer term, and that’s really where we’re focusing. How does that as an artificial reef compare to other structures around the Titanic that don’t have this metal structure there? And how is that changing? How are these creatures growing and being colonized? How are they colonizing other sites nearby?

One of the key elements of the Titanic that I get is: Why do we go back to the Titanic? We’ve been there a lot, and it has been visited a lot. But what’s amazing is, there are very, very few sites—a handful, probably—that get visited more than once, when you get down to this kind of depth, more than 3,000 meters. There’s so much to be explored that if you’re a typical research organization, you’re just going to go to a hydrothermal vent, you’re going to analyze it, you’re gonna go to another one. Or you’re going to go to a subsea canyon and document the flora and fauna. But you’re not gonna go back again, because there are so many other sites to go to.

Because people want to go to the Titanic, it’s a very unique opportunity, because they’re going to pay us to go there. And now we can go every year. I don’t think there’s anywhere else on planet Earth at that depth where you’re gonna be able to take researchers every year to get that kind of granular data: ‘Hey, this type of coral is more prevalent, here it’s not.’ That’s quite relevant, because there are a million shipwrecks, and there are tens of thousands that are in the deep ocean from World War II. We really don’t know their impact and how they’re affecting the ecosystem. The scientists are pretty excited, because you just don’t get that opportunity.

Given the scientific aspect of your expeditions, why involve Mission Specialists (what OceanGate calls the paying tourists)?

I started OceanGate back in 2009, with the idea that there were two needs out there.

The first one was, we knew very little about the ocean. Our knowledge of the ocean, particularly the deep ocean, anything below scuba-diving depth—it’s sad, very sad, how small it is. It’s getting better, and there are a lot of efforts to increase ocean knowledge, but we don’t have it. And there were researchers who wanted to go and actually see the environment in person, not just look at an image from a robot.

So you had on the research side a huge need. But subs were expensive. I knew from my own personal travel experience that there was also this growing market of people who want to do a different type of travel. In particular, I looked at Earthwatch and how they were able to get people to pay to work on archeological digs. They had the same kind of thing: a great need for manpower to dig an archaeological site and help fund it and a research need. So I thought in the ocean, maybe there’s a match there.

That’s really what OceanGate’s been working on for the last 10 years, coming up with different projects. We’ve done over 18 major expeditions (at much less cost than the Titanic) matching these adventure travelers who want to do something different than just sit and then get a tourist experience where somebody tells them what’s going on. They want to be involved in both the planning of the operation and the execution and the follow up. That’s why we’ve set up the Titanic mission and why we bring the Mission Specialists, because they help underwrite the cost of doing this research.

Who are you finding is in the current market for these experiences? Who are the people that are coming to participate?

It’s a remarkably diverse group. The Titanic is an outlier in that it is such an iconic piece. So on the Titanic we have what are often referred to as Titaniacs. These are people who are just [obsessed]. I’ve had young kids come up and say, “I just love the Titanic. I know everything about the Titanic.” Yet they weren’t even born when the movie came out, which was a huge bump in enthusiasm. There’s been something like 16 feature-length movies on the Titanic. Lord knows how many books. So in the Titanic world, we have the folks who are just all Titanic. They really want to see it.

That’s probably half of our client base. The other half are these people who are these adventure travelers who go scuba diving in Indonesia or set up their own safari off the grid in Africa. One couple shipped their bikes to Croatia and started biking without a backroads guide or anything. So they’re definitely early adopters this first year.

They range in age from I think 26 to 80. We’ve actually taken a 92-year-old gentleman in the sub. They range from people who have climbed Everest to people who are not that physically able. We’ve designed the sub to handle the average person. Our requirements are: you should be able to climb a ladder or stand on a chair, and get up off the floor (you can use your hands). Basic agility is really all we need, given what we’ve done to design the experience. We try and make it as accessible as possible.

For the Mission Specialists that first time that they see the Titanic, when they’ve made such an effort to get there, what is that moment like?

It varies from specialist to specialist. In general, everyone says it’s more amazing than they expect. They have an idea of what it’s gonna look like from the movie, or maybe some of our earlier videos. But when you get there, the colors are just incredible. And the colors—as you get closer and closer, once you get within about five feet, all of a sudden the oranges and the reds come out. It’s this pastel portrait. It’s so amazingly beautiful as a wreck.

Then you’ve got this giant window [on the sub]. One of the great things is it’s 21 inches, so you can have three people all looking at the same image and not looking at this teeny little porthole like they had to do with the Russian Mir subs. That ability to be in a group setting and have multiple people is really one of the key elements…With five people they really get an interesting dynamic. You get two and a half hours going down. People get to know people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x40SAJS2whY

Can you tell me about the personal travels that inspired you?

I built my own airplane and went in the early 2000s on a trip to Central America with a group called the Baja Bush Pilots Association. That was sort of a weird form of extreme travel: 21 private planes flying through Central America, [landing on] the little dirt strips all over the place…I realized that the trips I enjoyed most, it really depended on it being different and having a purpose. I really didn’t enjoy going and looking at a museum. It’s OK, but I’d rather go out and hike or explore a new area….

If you want to do extreme travel, one of the other challenges was, I’m not going to be climbing Everest. That’s something that has huge physical requirements, time requirements, and other things. I had wanted to go to space, and I still do, maybe when it gets cheaper. But when I looked at space, I thought there wasn’t a purpose there. I’d love to go work on the space station for a month, but that’s not generally available at any real price point.

So I looked at my own personal experience, and that of the folks that I travel with, I said, going somewhere with an exploration—this bush pilot thing was like we showed up without a purpose, and you land in the middle of nowhere. And you have to figure out where’s the hotel? Where am I going to get gas and all these little—I liked problem-solving. Those experiences and my love of the ocean blended together.

What is this article going to be about?

Exploring tourism at the edge of existence, including space and deep-sea travel.

We’ve been talking to a couple of the space folks on using the sub as a space analog…. The only really good [analog] is underwater, because in that case, you’re in a capsule with some people in a life-threatening or a potentially dangerous environment. It’s about as close to being in a space capsule [as we] can get.

If you mock it up on the surface, you know, ‘I can just open the door and go to McDonald’s if I don’t like it.’ When you’re in the sub, it’s a good stress test. We’re talking to the space folks about, “Hey really your folks should go in a sub. If they want to go to space or they want to go to Mars. If they want to go around the moon, a good training exercise is to put them in a setup where they’re in there with four other people for 12 hours, two and a half miles away from anything. If they’re going to lose it, that’s where they’ll lose it.”

How accessible is deep-ocean exploration right now in your view, and what needs to change for it to become more broadly accessible?

If you want to go on the web and see pictures of deep-sea creatures, that’s becoming more accessible. If you want to actually go down and see them and be part of that discovery process, it’s extremely inaccessible.

The only way you’re gonna get into the deep ocean in a submarine is if you work for NOAA, or you have a PhD and you can get time on Alvin or one of the deep-diving subs, or you’re a billionaire. There are a number of billionaires—Ray Dalio, Victor Vescovo, who made the sub to go to the Mariana Trench. Then you have to be a friend of theirs, or have something to offer… If you want to dive shallow, there are a few subs out there. So [if you] want to go 100 feet, or 1000 feet even, you can do that. But if you want to get to the average depth of the ocean of 4,000 meters, there really isn’t an opportunity to do that.

What would need to change for those sorts of experiences to become more broadly accessible, like you’re working on?

We came at it from that perspective. My perspective is from a business background, and I looked at what was happening….There were a number of projects, but they were typically altruistic. The idea was, We’re going to either go to the government to get money, or go get donations to do a project.

To make a business, and the only way we’re going to get more people underwater is to have more subs available, more people doing it so the price can come down. That’s what we did with OceanGate. We do dives in the Puget Sound area that are only $2,500 to be a Mission Specialist, up to the Titanic [at $250,000]. What needs to happen is—and I hope to have many imitators—you need to have more OceanGate subs out there, or more OceanGate-like subs….We are hoping to lead the way in that so that if you come to, say, New York City, one of the things you might be able to do is go dive in the Hudson Canyon at a reasonable price. It’s always going to be expensive, but we hope it gets down to the cost of, you know, premium seats at a Super Bowl game or something like that.

Is there anything else important I should have asked?

I think the biggest piece for us…is this need for knowledge of the ocean. We all were taught that two-thirds to three-quarters of the planet is underwater, but it’s actually 95-plus percent of the livable volume. Most of the life on this planet is underwater. If there’s life in the solar system, it’s probably aquatic. If there’s life in the universe, it is largely aquatic. NASA came to this conclusion that where you have water and energy and carbon, you have life. They find that with these extremophiles and the like.

The size of the opportunities is going to require lots of methods of exploring it. There’s a place for the average person to contribute and to really get out there and do something. That’s really what we want to do, be able to make it accessible to help advance our knowledge of the world.

of Ann Arbor, Michigan, is a freelance writer who specializes in water and travel coverage. Her writing has appeared in NPR, National Geographic, and other national outlets. She is the former digital editor of Scuba Diving magazine.

The author, Alexandra Gillespie, just after a dive (Photo: Alexandra Gillespie )

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