OceanGate founder pushed to expand deep-sea voyages despite chorus of concerns

From the start, the plan had been to push boundaries—to go where no one had gone before, as Richard Stockton Rush III liked to say. One partner had start-up experience and was passionate about “making humanity into a multi-planet species.” The other, Mr. Rush, was an aerospace engineer and investor with a family fortune. Both had once dreamed of going to space.

“We were frustrated astronauts,” Guillermo Sohnlein recalled. In 2009, he and Mr. Rush founded OceanGate Expeditions, the company believed to have imploded the submarine during an expedition to the Titanic, killing 61-year-old Mr. Rush and four other people.

The goal of OceanGate’s founders, Mr. Sohnlein said, was to make deep-sea travel as accessible to wealthy tourists and researchers as entrepreneurs like Elon Musk had made space travel.

“Internally,” he said, “we called ourselves SpaceX for the ocean.”

As authorities map the shattered remains of the submarine, dubbed Titan, on the ocean floor near the Titanic shipwreck, the focus is on the company at the center of the expedition. The tragedy, which stunned the world and bewitched the nation this week, came as no surprise to veteran deep-sea explorers, many of whom had warned that Titan’s new design was a catastrophe waiting to happen and one that must undergo rigorous testing.

“When I first heard this story,” said Adam Wright, an entrepreneur in Berkeley, California, who ran an underwater company for many years and once considered working with Mr. Rush, “I was shocked that he had made people pay to go in his submarine.”

In some ways, trust was in Mr. Rush. He was an heir to a San Francisco oil fortune and traced his ancestry back to two signers of the Declaration of Independence. The San Francisco Symphony Hall is named for his maternal grandmother, Louise Davies, who was a prominent patron of the arts on the West Coast.

The Apollo 12 commander Charles Conrad Jr., better known as Pete, was one of the best friends of his family. As a young man, Mr. Rush to mr. Conrad asked how he could become an astronaut too, and he was advised to consider joining the military and get a pilot’s license. Mr Rush once said. While still in college, according to his company biographyDuring his summers at Princeton, where he earned a degree in aerospace engineering in 1984, he flew planes to and from Saudi Arabia.

But his eyesight was not up to fighter pilot standards, Mr. Rush, so he became a flight test engineer at McDonnell Douglas in the Pacific Northwest. In 1986, he married Wendy Weil, a pilot herself and a great-great-granddaughter of the shopping magnate Isidor Straus, who co-owned Macy’s, and his wife Ida, both of whom died on the Titanic in 1912.

In later interviews, Mr. Rush that he made his money “the old fashioned way” – “I was born into it and then grew it.” Friendly and quick-witted, he was asked to join San Francisco’s elite Bohemian Club, of which his father was a member. Sohnlein said.

He had invested part of his inheritance in a series of engineering and engineering ventures, and by the early 2000s was wealthy enough to consider traveling to space on one of the private rockets under development.

But when he witnessed the triumphant launch of SpaceShipOne in the Mojave Desert in 2004, the first privately funded manned spacecraft, he abruptly lost interest in being just a passenger. told Smithsonian magazine: “I didn’t want to go into space as a tourist. I wanted to be Captain Kirk on the Enterprise.”

Mr. A certified diver since he was 14, Rush would later trace his maritime hub to a dive in Puget Sound, which was so cold he began exploring the possibility of securing a small submarine to more comfortably explore the waters. Discovering that very few submarines were available on the private market, he said, he built a 12-foot mini-submarine with a Plexiglas window from blueprints made by a retired U.S. Navy submarine commander, completing it in 2006.

The project became a passion. Two years later, Mr. Sohnlein and Mr. Rush each other through Graham Hawkes, an engineer and veteran diver expert. On Thursday, Mr. Hawkes himself Mr. Rush as a businessman who wanted to carve out a niche in the extreme travel market. For a while, Mr. Rush interested in buying Mr. Hawkes, but no deal was struck.

Instead, Mr. Rush in 2009 joined forces with Mr. Sohnlein, then a serial entrepreneur and angel investor focused on expanding human civilization to other planets.

“We thought going undersea was as close to space as possible without leaving Earth,” Mr Sohnlein said.

They came up with a plan to build and lease submersibles that could dive at least 4,000 meters — more than 13,000 feet — below the ocean’s surface, Mr. Sohnlein said: “Our theory was that if we could take a page from Elon Musk’s book at SpaceX, and use private capital to build deep-diving submarines, we can make them available to anyone who needs them – researchers, filmmakers, explorers – at a fraction of the cost.

The company started with a used yellow submarine and shallow dives, then moved on to a steel-hulled cylinder Cyclops 1, which could go deeper. But the steel-hulled craft was extremely expensive to operate and transport.

Mr. Sohnlein quit in 2013, feeling that OceanGate had moved from the startup phase to Mr. Rush’s specialty of engineering. Shortly after he left, Mr. Sohnlein, began Mr. Rush to talk publicly about building a titanium-coated Cyclops 1 prototype out of lightweight carbon fiber, a material common in aerospace that he believed would dramatically reduce operating costs.

Looking back, Mr Hawkes said this week that he wished he had warned Mr Rush that carbon fiber was too unreliable to use in the hull of a submarine, which must withstand enormous pressures. One day it could dive safely to 3,000 feet, he said, but it could sustain damage that was impossible to detect and implode at 9,000 feet the next day.

In 2017, OceanGate advertised expeditions up to 12,500 feet to the Titanic ruins in Titan, a submarine that can accommodate five people and dives eight times deeper than Cyclops. Early press reports said tourists would pay about $105,000 each, a price OceanGate set because it was the inflation-adjusted price of a first-class ticket on the Titanic in 1912.

Alarms were sounding in the deep-sea exploration community. In January 2018, OceanGate’s Director of Maritime Operations, David Lochridge, was compiling a report warning of the potential hazards to passengers.

Weeks later, several experts had a tense conversation with Mr. Rush at a conference of manned underwater vehicle specialists in New Orleans, according to Karl Stanley, who has operated a tourist submarine in Honduras for decades. “People were attacking him in that room,” Mr. Stanley said.

Shortly thereafter, in March, more than three dozen industry leaders, deep-sea explorers and oceanographers alerted Mr. a letter that the company’s “experimental” approach could lead to potentially “catastrophic” problems with the Titanic mission.

“We suggested, ‘Look, you’re going too fast, and the idea of ​​bypassing the existing classification process could lead to serious consequences,'” Will Kohnen, the head of the Marine Technology Society’s committee on manned underwater vehicles, recalled Thursday. . “You do not know what you do not know.”

Mr Rush, he said, threatened to leave the industry group entirely during a phone call. On its website in 2019, OceanGate said the certification process was too slow to keep up with the company’s pace of rapid innovation. Mr Rush had called submersibles in general “obscenely safe” and complained that the industry was being too cautious.

Mr Stanley said he and Mr Rush took the Titan for a 12,000ft dive in the Bahamas in April 2019. The ship made such a terrifying creaking noise as it collapsed that Mr. Stanley begged Mr. Rush to cancel any Titanic expeditions that had already been announced for June.

OceanGate canceled the Titanic dive for that year, saying it had not obtained permits for a research support vessel. But Mr. Rush persevered. Mr Sohnlein, who now lives in Barcelona, ​​Spain, said critics unfairly judged Mr Rush’s decisions.

“These people weren’t working at OceanGate, they weren’t part of the technology development program, they certainly weren’t part of the testing program and anyway, everyone has their own opinion,” Mr Sohnlein said. “Stockton was very risk averse.”

The company declined to comment Friday or answer a list of questions. “We are unable to provide any additional information at this time,” Andrew Von Kerens, a spokesperson for OceanGate, wrote in an email.

By 2020, OceanGate documents submitted with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicating that it raised approximately $18 million by selling stock to investors. Mr. Sohnlein said that Mr. Rush “probably lost money” after kicking in every investment round and providing much of the initial capital.

By 2021, after a few false starts, OceanGate was completing expeditions to the Titanic at ticket prices that more than doubled to $250,000. According to legal documents filed by the company, 28 people rode in Titan over the course of 2022.

“It was an amazing experience,” said Alan Stern, 65, a planetary scientist who was on a Titanic dive to the Titanic last year. Mr. Rush was “intelligent” and “can do it.”

But “they were candid in their paperwork and in their conversations,” he added of OceanGate. “This is not a Disneyland ride.”

William J. Broad And Jenny Gross reporting contributed. Kitty Bennett contributed research.