We've all been glued to our TV sets hoping and praying that the 5 souls aboard the Oceangate Titan would come home safely, after being lost at sea. But sadly, as the wreckage was found, we know that is not the case. This is a sad tragedy, but so much about this story deserves a deeper look. As an engineer, I'm furious with some of the things that led up to this event, so today let's break down what really happened and figure this out together.



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Chapters
0:00 - Introduction
0:52 - Oceangate History
2:00 - Challenges of Deep Sea
5:11 - The Red Flags
8:05 - History of the Titan
10:00 - More Drama
12:00 - Whistleblower
13:42 - Communication Problems
15:00 - How we Fix This


















what we'll cover
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On June 18, 2023, Titan, a submersible operated by OceanGate, went missing in international waters in the North Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

The submersible was on a tourist expedition to view the wreckage of the RMS Titanic with 5 individuals on board, including the founder and CEO of Oceangate, Stockton Rush.

Due to the estimated 3 days of oxygen supply, there was a huge rescue effort by the US Coast Guard and Canada's Coast Guard, which was unsuccessful until early on June 22nd, when evidence of the wreckage of the vessel started to emerge, leading to the tragic conclusion that the vessel imploded in the ocean depths and there were no survivors.

As an engineer, I'm furious about what happened and the different shortcuts that were taken.

So let's try to figure out what exactly what happened and what we can learn from this.

Let's start with what we know about the company operating the Titan submersible.

Oceangate Incorporated is a privately held US company operating out of Everett, Washington that provides crude submersibles for tourism, industry, and research and exploration.

The company was founded in 2009 by Stockton Rush and Guillermo Solin.

Stockton Rush wanted to be an astronaut, so he got his commercial pilot license.

But because of bad eyesight, he could never be a military pilot.

So instead he moved from San Francisco to Seattle to work at McDonnell Douglas as a flight test engineer for the F-15 Eagle.

After attending the launch of Spaceship 1 in the Mojave Desert in 2004, he decided he didn't wanna go up to space as a tourist.

He wanted to be like Captain Kirk on the Enterprise.

He wanted to explore and pivoted his pursuit to undersea exploration.

He was married to Wendy Rush, a descendant of Isidore and Ida Strauss, 2 people who actually passed away on the sinking of the Titanic.

The tragic events happened during a deep sea tourism expedition to explore the wreckage of the Titanic, which sunk in the Northern Atlantic in 1912.

Before we get into the specifics of this particular tragedy, let's put just how difficult deep sea exploration is into context.

It's easy to be in awe of aviation and space exploration because breaking free of gravity and flying through the air seem like such a feat.

But in many ways, deep sea craft are the much greater engineering challenge.

We don't think about air pressure because at sea level it's just 14.7 pounds per square inch.

That pressure is the result of the column of air that reaches above us all the way into outer space.

All those air molecules above us pushing down result in that pressure.

But water is a much more dense fluid than air.

So for every 10 meters or 32.8 feet you dive, the pressure increases by 1 atmosphere or 14.7 PSI.

The Titanic is sitting on the ocean floor at about 12, 500 feet below sea level.

The 2 broken parts of the ship, the bow and stern, are more than 2, 600 feet apart and surrounded by debris after over 100 years of being at the bottom of the ocean.

The wreckage is 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland in Canada.

Imagine laying on your back with a 1 foot by 1 foot board.

And how much weight you'd feel on that board at a hundred meters, the size of a soccer or football field.

We have the pressure of 10 atmospheres or 145 PSI, which means on that 1 by 1 foot board, we would feel the weight of 20, 880 pounds.

At 381 meters, 1250 feet, we have the height of the Empire State Building in New York City.

At this depth we would feel 37.4 atmospheres of pressure and that 1x1 foot board would feel the weight of 80, 000 pounds.

At 490 meters we have the max dive depth of the C-class of US Navy submarine.

Here we'd feel 48.5 atmospheres of pressure.

That 1x1 foot board would feel the weight of 94, 800 pounds.

At 828 meters, we have the height of the Burj Khalifa.

That weight on the board would be 173, 520 pounds.

Now this is around the same depth as the deepest diving submarine in operation today, the Oscar class submarine in the Russian Navy.

At 3, 800 meters sits the wreckage of the Titanic.

That 1 by 1 foot board on our chest would have the weight of 797, 000 pounds.

The Ocean Gate Titan was rated for a mass dive depth of about 4, 000 meters.

Now that might sound insane, but actually it's not even the record for the deepest human beings have been.

That honor goes to James Cameron And the Deep Sea Challenger built in Australia in 2012.

The Deep Sea Challenger reached the deepest part of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, the deepest point on earth, at a mind boggling 11, 000 meters or 36, 000 feet.

Here, we'd feel 1, 090 atmospheres of pressure and that 1 by 1 foot board would have the weight of 2.3 million pounds on it.

Compare that to the difference in pressure of an airplane at cruising altitude of 36, 000 feet, where outside the pressure might be 3 psi, and on the inside, between 10 and 12.

And that hopefully puts in perspective why more people have been to space than have been into the deepest parts of our oceans.

Now let's talk about the red flags that plagued Ocean Gate from the get-go.

By the way, Ocean Gate just sounds like a walking scandal ready to happen.

First, the design limitations of the Titan require that the hatch be bolted down by 17 to 18 bolts from the outside.

This means there's no way for the passengers inside to open the hatch.

They'd have to rely on ground crews to open it.

Now this is understandable because these deep sea vessels have to be incredibly tight, they have to be very strong, the water seals have to hold and that's all complicated.

But I think this shows you why it's really important to have backup systems and have some sort of an explosive detonation cord you can pull to blow the hatch in the event that the craft surfaced and no 1 found it.

And that was actually 1 of the fears early on is that the vessel could actually surface and be at the surface somewhere along the Atlantic, unfound, and still die from suffocating because they couldn't open the hatch and the air could run out.

The Titan also didn't have GPS or other navigational instruments on board.

And it didn't have a locator beacon either, like a black box on an aircraft.

Most subs use GPS for near-surface navigation, which doesn't work in deeper waters.

In deeper waters, they use dead reckoning course information obtained by the ship's gyro compass, measured speed and estimates of local ocean currents.

They also rely on inertial navigation systems, which is an estimated position source utilizing acceleration, deceleration, pitch and roll from the computers that transmit this data.

The Titan, in contrast, appeared to rely only on data provided by the surface support vessel.

In 2019, Oceangate published a blog post explaining why the Titan was not certified by any ship authority, which is a huge red flag.

Oceangate stated, the vast majority of marine and aviation accidents are actually a result of operator error, not mechanical failure, and argued that classification focused solely on the physical state of the vessel and not the corporate actions, which are characterized as a constant committed effort and a focused corporate culture of maintaining high-level operational safety.

That sounds like absolute bulls**t to me.

Journalist David Progge, who rode on the Titan to view the Titanic in 2022, noted during his expedition the surface support vessel lost track of the Titan for about 4-5 hours and mentioned that adding a locator beacon was actually discussed during this event.

They could still send short text to the sub but they had no idea where it was.

It was quiet and very tense, he says, and they shut off the ship's internet to keep us from tweeting.

Oh my god, that is terrifying and they've already known that this could happen.

The craft was also controlled by a video game controller which sounds like some cool Silicon Valley way of thinking, beanbag chairs and break rooms, but it's downright stupid.

Military spec products go through incredible rigorous testing, making them safe in all operating environments.

For example, As expensive as Apple's Vision Pro headset is at $3, 500, it is downright cheap compared to the $400, 000 that it costs to get a helmet for the F-35 fighter jet.

Well, lower volumes, of course, but also because they have to go through unbelievable vibration testing to make sure the wells will all hold up, make sure that the higher levels of radiation at 40 to 50 thousand feet won't do any damage long term, and to make sure absolute reliability.

Now let's talk about how we got to the Titan.

Oceangate started by purchasing Antipodes, which is a submersible back in 2012, which was their first test bed for testing and learning about this entire endeavor.

Next, they built Cyclops 1, which is in collaboration with University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory.

And this was a deeper sea vessel capable of reaching a max depth of 500 meters.

Still nowhere near deep enough for the Titanic, but this was their next step and their next iteration.

In the early design, the hull was made of carbon fiber and the whole submersible would dive vertically with pivoting seats to ensure the passengers remained upright.

Now it was said that Boeing worked with Ocean Gate and the University of Washington on their initial design analysis, but we'll get back to that in a second, because there's a little bit more to that story.

Finally, they would arrive at the Titan, their final product that would actually be rated for 4, 000 meters.

1 of the key takeaways about the Titan is that this is a carbon fiber and titanium hold submersible.

Now this is really exotic in the world of materials.

We've been using high-strength steel and aluminum for a long time.

And we have data, engineering data on how they fail and what to look for and test methodologies.

In fact, any car you've ever driven probably doesn't have much carbon fiber in it.

The only exceptions are really, really high-end supercars or even in the case of aviation more recently with the Boeing Dreamliner.

But before that, we've always used aluminum and titanium and other materials like that.

So just generally there's less known about it and it's also really difficult to make sure that you get it right.

Oceangate signed a contract with Spencer Composites in January 2017 for the carbon composite cylinder.

This was the same company that built the composite pressure hole for the single person deep flight challenger for Steve Fawcett.

After Fawcett passed away, Deep Flight Challenger was acquired by Richard Branson's Virgin Oceanic, which had announced plans to conduct a series of 5 dives to the deepest points of the ocean.

But Deep Flight refused to endorse the plan as the craft had been designed to dive only once.

This is important, we'll get back to this in a second.

In a statement, they said, the problem is the strength of the DeepFly Challenger does decrease after each dive.

It's strongest on the first dive, said Adam Wright, the firm's president.

It was designed to set the record, dive to the deep, and then be retired as an exhibit in the Smithsonian.

This is a really crucial part because sometimes in engineering, what it comes down to is the operational lifetime and understanding it.

And by the way, I tried to go to OceanGate.com to get a little bit more information.

And I noticed that their site was taken down on June 22nd.

So after the disappearance of the Titan in 2023, the University of Washington stated that APL, their Applied Physics Laboratory, had no involvement in design, engineering, or testing of the Titan submersible.

A Boeing spokesperson also said that Boeing was not a partner on the Titan and did not design or build it.

A NASA spokesperson said that NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center had a Space Act agreement with OceanGate but did not conduct testing and manufacturing via its workforce or facilities.

Basically, all of these partnerships that they had are now being revealed that they were not really partnerships.

This is a classic example of a company trying to get credibility by partnering with NASA.

But what exactly they did with NASA isn't really well understood.

It could have just been as simple as, hey, can we run out a little bit of space over in this corner of your facility?

This is probably the most infuriating for me as an engineer.

David Lockridge, the Oceangate director of marine operations, filed a quality control report in January 2018, stating that no non-destructive testing or NDI of the carbon fiber hull had taken place to check for voids or delaminations in the carbon fiber layup that could compromise the whole strength.

NDI, non-destructive investigation, NDT, non-destructive testing, is a way of checking something to make sure that it's safe without actually breaking it apart.

Because really the best way to check if something is safe is to cut it in half, break it, and go, yep, it's safe.

But of course you've destroyed the product.

So NDT is something that engineers lean on all the time to make sure things are safe.

And in the world of carbon fiber, it's that much more difficult because carbon fiber doesn't bend or yield or get grooves and cracks the way other materials do.

It requires a lot of information and insight.

Lockridge was told that Oceangate would rely on the real-time acoustic monitoring system, which he felt would not warn the crew of potential failure with sufficient time to safely abort the mission and evacuate.

The day After he filed his report, he was summoned to a meeting in which he was told the acrylic window that you look out of was only rated for 1300 meters because Oceangate would not fund the design of a window rated for 4000 meters.

In that meeting, he reiterated his concerns and added that he would refuse to allow crude testing without a whole scan.

Lockridge was dismissed from his position as a result.

Oceangate filed a lawsuit against Lockridge that June, accusing him of improperly sharing proprietary trade secrets and fraudulently manufacturing a reason to get rid of him.

I'm sure it was all sealed off and we'll never know exactly what was agreed upon, but that is absolutely terrifying.

During a human piloted descent on December 10th, 2018, Stockton Rush used the vertical thrusters to overcome unexpected positive buoyancy when descending past 10, 000 feet.

These submersibles are like a balloon with air inside, right?

And so they have different ways and balance systems to be able to accomplish that.

But for whatever reason, around 10, 000 feet, he had to use vertical thrusters to continue his descent.

And when this happened, it caused interference with the communication systems between spinning propellers, the disturbance in the wake of the water coming off those propellers and everything else, they lost contact for 1 hour.

Now, Rush was thrilled to call himself the second person to solo dive to 13, 000 feet after James Cameron.

But if that was me, I would be terrified.

I would come back and figure out what on earth happened with the comms and what can we do?

Whatever has to happen to never let that happen again.

And we know it happened again because of that report from the reporter.

After these tests were completed in January 2020, the hull of the Titan began showing signs of cyclical fatigue and the craft was derated to 3, 000 meters.

Now the hull was repaired and again rated again for 4, 000 meters of diving depth But by who and was everything done properly?

I decided to make this video because I think we're at the precipice of a new age of exotic tourism and exploration between going to the space to go to the moon, low earth orbit, or deep sea diving.

We're at the edge of seeing more of this.

Wealthier people, the people that were involved in this particular incident, always wanna have that next thing.

And so if we're gonna do this, it's important to realize just how unsafe this can be.

Unlike commercial aviation, there are no regulatory boards involved here.

The company did have to register the parent vessel that takes people from Canada, right?

But what happens out in open waters is not very highly regulated.

This is a really tough story for me because as an engineer, I do love ambition.

I mean, building your own vessel, carbon fiber, 5 inches thick.

But as an engineer, I also realize how important safety measures and protocols are.

If you ever hop on an airplane, you cannot imagine how safe you are because of all the people involved from company members like Boeing and Airbus personnel, engineering test officials, all the way to the FAA and other regulatory approval bodies that make sure every little thing is regulated and controlled.

1 of the first things to realize about an implosion of the vessel is that there was probably not a lot of suffering.

We mentioned how much weight you would feel at these depths, and you would pretty much just get crushed.

So probably what happened is they built a vessel which was, in and of itself, pretty impressive.

The carbon fiber layup, the composite structure, titanium.

This was an exotic craft and it had a viewing window to go see the Titanic.

These are things that human beings could not do before.

But the problem is every craft, every vessel, every engineering device has an operational lifetime.

Now, the way engineers do this is by testing something and figuring out how many cycles can we hit this with before problems start to emerge.

For example, your car will work almost forever.

It's just atmospheric pressures at sea level, right?

Now if it rusts and things, that could change the equation.

Aircraft are pressurized and depressurized, pressurized, depressurized, right?

And you can't really inspect every little nook and cranny.

So what engineers figured out is if we're going to build this out of aluminum, if we're going to build it from carbon fiber, we have to do a test every 1, 000 hours, 500 hours, whatever the case might be.

A complete overhaul where they tear down the wall panels and inspect, and they'll actually get out and check for any cracks and other impurities and imperfections.

Because any crack or any little divot can be a stress concentration point where it'll start to impound and fail.

Then finally, they'll say at this many hours, 20, 000 flat hours, whatever the number might be, the aircraft is retired.

That doesn't mean it's going to fall apart, but we know we, we tested it for millions of hours and nothing bad will happen in this window.

Odds are a plane could probably fly for thousands more flights after that, but we don't want to do that.

What was the operational lifetime of the Titan?

They were not doing NDIs or NDTs, non-destructive testing to see what was happening to the carbon fiber.

Again, carbon fiber is a mesh weave that is laid in alternating patterns and then glued up.

It is incredibly strong and incredibly impressive as an engineering material but it's equally not as well studied.

We have a hundred years of history and experience with high strength steel, aluminum and other materials.

And that's why this is so important to cover.

We're on the brink of space tourism where rich people can buy a ticket to go up and tour around the moon, have a nice little catered lunch and come home.

Whenever we have new frontiers, we have unknowns.

And when you have to build vessels able to withstand the pressures of the oceans, deep, deep waters, there's a lot that is unknown.

And that's why we don't have commercial versions of this.

I think this vessel just had some sort of a crumple or some defect or deformation.

Something was happening over a couple of cycles.

I mean, they did successfully go down and come back 3 times and at a fourth time, they crumpled.

Honestly, I don't think any vessel that goes to the Mariana Trench or 12, 000 feet in the Atlantic should have a life more than a couple of cycles.

And I think what they were trying to do, I think Stockton Rush was trying to make these tickets affordable, right?

Now they started at $125, 000, double that by the time these guys went on at 250, right?

The real price for this probably should have been a million dollars.

That allows you to replace the vessel every so often or to do complete disruptive testing to replace parts.

There is a whole slew of things that have to happen.

But I think in the interest of trying to be affordable, being on the ship yourself, the prestige of your reputation, trying to build a brand, trying to build a company.

They took all kinds of shortcuts and did things they do not understand.

And I'll be honest with you, we know more about space than we do our deep oceans or the deep earth.

These are just really, really hard environments to get to.

I was hoping that we would find them somewhere and that this would all kind of be a learning lesson without loss of life.

But in engineering, we have to always learn from our mistakes.

If you're a believer in freedom and these people took the risk, they knew what they were doing.

I'm a believer of freedom and taking your own risk or taking your own choices.

But did they fully understand what this vessel was?

So those are things that we can try to improve upon.

And maybe the next time somebody comes up with this idea to do deep ocean exploration, there's better methodology in place.

And I would imagine it's gonna get much more expensive.

If you thought this story was crazy, check out this 1 next.

Until next week, I'm Ricky, this is Tuba Da Vinci.

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Oceangate Submarine Disaster - What REALLY Happened