Almost three weeks after the Titan-submersible during a fateful expedition to the Titanicwreck exploded, OceanGate announced that the company was suspending all its exploration expeditions and commercial operations indefinitely.
Stockton Rush, founding member and CEO of OceanGate, was one of the five people on board the Titan when it exploded on June 18. All five passengers died.
Now this operator has announced that he will no longer send individuals to the Titanic-wreck, or any other place, will not take.
The company was founded in 2009 by Rush and Guillermo Söhnlein and for the past 13 years has used commercial underwater vessels to take people on all kinds of expeditions to shipwrecks such as the Andrea Doria and Titanic to take.
The company made headlines in June when one of its submarines, the Titanon one of these expeditions to the Titanic disappeared. A few days later, the US Coast Guard announced that there had been a “catastrophic explosion” – presumably due to the craft’s pressure pump and the intense pressure of the North Atlantic Ocean.
The debris was found on the seabed, about 500 m from the bow of the Titanic. It lies about 4 km below the sea surface and about 640 km from the coast of Newfoundland.
On board the Titan were British explorer Hamish Harding, French submarine expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Pakistani-British tycoon Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, and Rush, the craft’s operator. They presumably died instantly.
- Additional source: The Guardian
