Stockton Rush and the Titan: Expired Carbon Fiber and Ignored Warnings

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Stockton Rush co founded OceanGate in 2009 with shallow wreck dives off California and in the Gulf of Mexico, but he knew the Titanic was the name that would sell seats at up to $250,000 each. He called safety regulations a pure waste and opposed the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993. Rather than a titanium sphere, the Titan was a 2.4 meter carbon fiber cylinder with titanium end caps, built to hold five, using carbon fiber he said came cheaply from Boeing past its shelf life, a claim Boeing disputes. Carbon fiber excels under tension but buckles under repeated compression, and Rush relied on a patented acoustic monitoring system to warn of cracking instead of seeking classification from bodies like Lloyd's Register.

In 2018 David Lochridge, OceanGate's director of marine operations, warned the system would give only milliseconds of warning and that the viewport was rated for a fraction of Titanic depth. Rush fired and sued him, and dismissed warnings from Will Kohnen of the Marine Technology Society and Rob McCallum. On June 18, 2023, Titan went silent at 3,341 meters after reporting two dropped weights, a routine step. Its debris lay 500 meters from the Titanic's bow.

• The original hull cracked and was rebuilt by 2021, and Rush reused titanium rings from the damaged hull against engineering advice.
• In 2022 a thruster was installed backward, and the pilot steered by holding the game controller sideways.
• A loud bang on a July 2022 ascent was later judged by the Coast Guard to be the hull delaminating.
• A Navy acoustic system built to track Cold War submarines picked up the implosion while the public search went on for days.
• Paul-Henri Nargeolet's family is suing OceanGate for $50 million for wrongful death.