The co-founder of the company involved in the Titan implosion, which killed five people, has promised to pursue more dangerous projects.
OceanGate boss Stockton Rush and his four passengers died instantly a year ago when their homemade submarine suffered a catastrophic implosion while plunging into the wreckage of the Titanic.
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The Titan – which was driven with a game controller – disappeared from radars on June 18 and failed to resurface from the £195,000-a-head 12,500ft journey to the wreckage.
Hopes for a miracle diminished by the hour, and then by the day, as desperate rescuers worked around the clock to find any sign of life.
Five days after the submarine returned, debris was found on the ocean floor.
British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son Suleman died on board.
Rush, CEO of the OceanGate Expedition who led the mission in the North Atlantic, also died in the tragedy that hit the world.
Now, a year later, Guillermo Sohnlein, who co-founded OceanGate with Rush in 2009, has promised to continue pursuing extremely ambitious and dangerous new projects.
Driven by an uncontrollable desire to explore, he told The Sun that the shocking deaths of the five aboard the Titan had not dampened his ambitions.
Instead, the disaster inspired the explorer to redouble his efforts with more high-risk missions – including deep ocean and space exploration.
Former US Marine captain Sohnlein, 58, said: “The interesting thing about the exploration community is that we know that what we do carries a certain level of risk.
“And we know that no matter how hard we try to mitigate this risk and manage it, things will go wrong.
“You hope that when they go wrong, it’s not fatal. But you know there is risk and that things will go wrong.
“The exploration community is a little strange because we know there will be risks. We know there will be setbacks.
“And when setbacks occur, rather than deterring explorers, it seems to motivate explorers to keep going and continue their pursuit.”
Sohnlein said such tragedies force explorers to “reflect and do a reality check” and apply lessons learned to future projects.
“But once you do that, you are fully committed to continuing to move forward and it seems to be even more intensified, in a perhaps macabre way,” he said.
“It seems to be even more pronounced when that setback leads to fatalities, because I think part of it is that the rest of the exploration community wants to make sure that the legacies of the people who lost their lives are honored by continuing to move forward. .
“You don’t want their lives to be lost in vain. You want to make sure their sacrifice was worth whatever they were trying to do.”
How the Titan Tragedy Unfolded
A year ago, five men dived beneath the surface of the North Atlantic in a homemade submarine, hoping to explore the wreck of the Titnaic.
But what was supposed to be a short trip turned into days of agony when the doomed Titan disappeared without a trace on June 18, 2023.
The daring mission took months to prepare – and almost didn’t happen due to harsh weather conditions in Newfoundland, Canada.
In a now chilling Facebook post, passenger Hamish Harding wrote: “Due to Newfoundland’s worst winter in 40 years, this mission will likely be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023.
“A weather window has just opened and we’re going to try a dive tomorrow.”
It would be his last Facebook post.
The next morning, he and four others – led by Stockton Rush – began the 12,5000 foot descent towards the bottom of the Atlantic.
But as it descended deeper, the vessel lost all contact with its surface mothership, the Polar Prince.
This triggered a frantic four-day search for signs of life, with the hunt taking over the entire world.
There was hope that, by some miracle, the crew was alive and desperately waiting to be saved.
But this raised fears that rescuers were racing against time, as the submarine only had a 96-hour supply of oxygen when it set sail, which would be dwindling fast.
So when audio of crashing sounds was detected underwater, it inspired hope that the victims were trapped and signaling for rescue.
It was heartbreakingly discovered that the pounding noises were likely noises from the ocean or other search ships, the U.S. Navy determined.
Countries around the world mobilized their resources to help in the search, and within days the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Odysseus was sent to the location of the ghostly wreckage of the Titanic.
The plan was for the ROV to connect to the submarine and take it to 10,000 feet, where it would meet another ROV before rising to the surface.
But any hopes of a phenomenal rescue were dashed when Odysseus found a piece of wreckage from the submarine about 500 meters from the Titanic.
The rescue mission tragically became a life-saving task, and the devastated families of those on board received the devastating news.
It was confirmed by the US Coast Guard that the submarine suffered a “catastrophic implosion”.
An investigation into the disaster is ongoing.
OceanGate has suspended all its operations.
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Sohnlein and Rush created OceanGate in 2009 as they saw underwater exploration as the closest thing to furthering their vision for space travel — without actually leaving Earth.
Both had a common ambition: to make deepwater exploration more accessible to those outside the small industry.
Sohnlein said: “We were both frustrated astronauts, we grew up wanting to be astronauts, but we both had vision problems so we couldn’t become pilots and then astronauts.
“But we were still driven by this need to explore.
“We came across this world of human submersibles, using technology to take humans to an extreme environment here on Earth, basically diving into the deep pressure of the ocean.
When setbacks occur, instead of deterring explorers, it seems to motivate them to keep going and continue their pursuit.
Guilherme Sohnlein
“The problem that Stockton and I saw still exists today in 2024, 15 years later, and that is that humans do not have access to the depths of the oceans.
“There is no ready-made fleet of submersibles that can take people underwater to at least a significant depth.”
Sohnlein — who aspires to send 1,000 people to Venus by 2050 — left OceanGate in 2013, when the company began developing Titan’s predecessor, Cyclops.
He maintained a minority stake, but decided to increase when the company left its initial start-up phase and transitioned into Rush’s engineering specialty.
Sohnlein, a father of three, insisted that Rush would be frustrated that OceanGate had suspended all its operations.
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The company was criticized when questions were raised about the Titan’s safety and whether it should have been allowed to carry commercial passengers.
It was unclassified and made of carbon fiber, which led experts including Rob McCallum to beg Rush to let an independent agency test his ship.
But Sohnlein said Rush has always been committed to safety.
He added: “I think if Stock had survived and been with us today, I think the regret he would have would be obvious – which is any mishap or problem with the submarine causing deaths or injuries.
“He was very focused on safety.
“I think the next regret he would have is the company not continuing operations and not being able to continue and go beyond Titanic, because Titanic was really just a means to an end for the business.
“It was really about getting to a point where submarines would be chartered by people from all over the world to do all kinds of interesting projects and learn more about our oceans.”
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This story originally appeared on The-sun.com read the full story
