OceanGate Is Worse Than You Thought

in 1912 the Titanic claimed 1500 [Applause] lives in 2023 it claimed five more hi my name is Stockton rush I'm the CEO and founder of Ocean Gate let's take a look at Titan D was designing a mouse trap for billionaires a submersible vessel which takes people to see the wreck of the Titanic has gone missing in the Atlantic Ocean tonight an international search operation is underway like the Titanic it was a disaster just waiting to happen I've broken some rules to make this I think I've broken them with with logic and good engineering behind me

at some point safety just is pure waste an experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body he quite literally and figuratively went out with the biggest bang and who was the last person to murder two billiones Stockton was supposedly a very smart boy a graduate of Princeton University and the youngest jet transport pilot in the world I wanted to be an astronaut it's why I got an engineering degree I watched Star Trek Star Wars all the video and and I wanted to see those alien life forms and uh eventually

I realized one I was wasn't going to go to space and I wasn't going to get to Jupiter or Mars but I did realize that all the cool stuff that I thought was out there is actually underwater Stockton had become an expert in aerospace engineering he did this in hopes of becoming the first person to set foot on Mars but unfortunately for Stockton someone else was likely to beat him to it and one day we will indeed occupy Mars and maybe that's why Stockton decided to create the SpaceX of the ocean we always called ourselves

SpaceX for the oceans when I first met Stockton he struck me as a very intelligent person he also struck me as a very Savvy engineer elon's doing the same thing at SpaceX right so Stockton's obsession with space quickly became an obsession with the ocean and what I wanted to do with the business was just move the needle get people excited about the ocean explore the ocean and discover what was what was out there Stockton's philosophy was simple why would we use resources to explore space when we haven't even fully explored earth and its oceans there's

so much to explore in the ocean as only 25% has been mapped with modern technology there will be a time when people will go to space at much less cost and very regularly I think the same thing's going to happen going underwater it's going to get less expensive and much more accessible that's where we're going to have cities and that's where people are going to be they're going to be down there exploring to me we'll have cities underwater before we have them uh up up in space on the moon yeah and this was Stockton's vision

an underwater city that would provide humans with sustainable resources for Generations if you think about the Earth as really the land mass that we all occupy then there are three planets worth of resources available in the ocean minerals chemicals biological it is a vast huge opportunity an opportunity that was being overlooked in favor of space exploration establishing a self-sustaining base on Mars the future mankind is underwater it's not on Mars we're not going to have a base on Mars with the you know we'll try and waste a lot of money you will have a base

underwater because when the sun when the sun extinguishes there will still be hydrothermal vents and there will still be those life forms down there the living off chemosynthesis that don't need the sun you know when we if we trash this planet the the best Lifeboat for mankind is underwater but getting humans to the bottom of the ocean is a very difficult task it's dangerous it's expensive there is the um there's a regulatory Challenge and the current regulations wouldn't allow Stockton to build a submarine that could go deeper than 150 ft I think over time Stockton

just realized that the only way uh we were going to be able to help Humanity unlock the secrets of the ocean was to get past the regulations and just prove that it could be done uh as safely as possible at some point safety just is pure waste I mean if you just want to be safe don't get out of bed don't get in your car don't do anything it's some point you're going to take some risk and it really is a risk reward question I said I think I can do this just as safely by

breaking the rules so for the next few years Stockton continued breaking the rules he'd go on to document his entire journey in 4k and he'd give lectures on submarine safety along the way and one of the things I came up with the myth one is that Subs are dangerous in the last 35 years there hasn't been a serious injury and there have been over 15 million people going them but they're statistically the safest vehicles on the planet Stockton didn't always have this attitude towards safety the early days of Ocean Gate were an entirely different story

only after a complete systems test is the ocean gate crew ready to die the company's first sub was a vessel called antipodes and it was the perfect test sub for Ocean Gate it's our first sub Antiquities and we use that as our training sub 58 in diameter it is about 15 ft long this sub had already been certified by the American Bureau of shipping so there was a very slim chance of it imploding it was designed to withstand depths of around 1,000 ft which is impressive but nowhere near the depth of the Titanic this is

where the Titanic is on the ocean floor below 12,500 ft of water but ocean game weren't ready for the Titanic just yet at this point they were just a local submarine team and in the early days Their Eyes Were set on some lesser known shipwrecks local submarine team is exploring the wreck of a luxury passenger liner that sank 90 years ago this spring up the coast of Port Townsen today we're doing our third day of diving on the SS Governor the SS governor was located in Washington and it was often referred to as the area's

mini Titanic the governor was a luxury liner that was on its way from San Francisco to Seattle on April 1st 1921 shortly after midnight it collided with a frighter eight of the 240 people on board went down with the ship for years there have been rumors that it went down with the loaded safe the safe the infamous safe that safe is believed to contain around $4 million worth of gold coins at first I thought Ocean Gate was trying to pull off a $4 million submarine Heist you know just like the opening scene in the first

Titanic movie it's payday boys but as it turns out even if they did happen to find the treasure they would have been forced to hand it over to the man who owns its Salvage rights so I guess Ocean Gate weren't in this area for profit they really just wanted to explore the area and test their new Subs capabilities the crew of the sub is practic ing its approaches to the governor in 240 ft of water for a much more dangerous inspection of the montabello at 900 ft down after the mini Titanic Ocean Gate would move

on to a much deeper shipwreck their goal was to ramp up the depths of their Dives one shipwreck at a time it's part of our ramp up to a California Expedition that we're doing in September to a shipwreck called the SS montabello the montabello was a US oil tanker that was torpedoed by a Japanese sub off the coast of California during World War II the SS Montebello was not another ship holding treasure in fact it was quite the opposite it went down with an estimated 70,000 barrels of oil on board and it's posing a huge

environmental threat to California's Coast L Ocean Gate wanted to make a name for themselves by preventing this environmental threat and their plan was to create a 3D map of the wreck using their new sonar technology team is also testing the latest in two and threedimensional sonar equipment and taking our sub and our blue view sonar system down there to create a 3D map of that wck not many people know about these Expeditions but they were a critical part of ocean Gate's early days and after mapping out that oil spill they were ready for phase two

of their company's Mission an historic Washington State tragedy is helping head off a future one down the coast in Seattle Gary chinam KING5 news this local submarine team was taking over the ocean Stockton increases the budget and after 130 successful Dives investors were asking the same question was this team going to be the next SpaceX name of the company Ocean Gate Incorporated it's a Cutting Edge high-tech firm out of the Midwest awaiting imminent patent approval on their next generation of submersible Vehicles right now the stock trades over the counter at 10 cents a share but

with the collaboration of one of Hip Hop's biggest stars our analysts indicate it could go a lot higher than that mammore was on top of the world in 2014 it was the year he won four Grammy Awards and the Grammy goes too M lore and Ryan Lewis but his most underrated win that year was his collaboration with Stockton rush I think we're going to find sharks the pair would Team Up In Search of the incredibly rare six skill shark a trait that was very uncommon amongst most shark species what is the probability that we will

see a shark today somewhere between 0 and 100 mammore had been a fan of sharks his entire life and he was pretty skeptical that Stockton would find a shark as rare as the six skill if we don't see a shark you'll buy me a shark no one a baby shark that's a deal it's a deal okay but little did he know they would find a shark in that yellow submarine under 400 ft of water Stockton and mammore were going to create memories that would last forever oh my God six skill six skill six skill top

side top side we have E6 Gill at the viewport very exciting didn't think it was going to happen pulled it out our mission is complete it has been an unbelievable experience something that I will absolutely never forget that was awesome and It's Made Me Love sharks even more stay true stay true stay true and that was it that was the business model at at the time for Ocean Gate we do Dives looking for six skill sharks and things like that that are 5,000 it's a very unusual business it's its own category it's a new type

of travel and eventually they'd be selling tickets to the Titanic for up to $250,000 a person however it wasn't going to be in Antiquities remember this Yellow Sub was only certified for Dives that were 12th the depth of the Titanic and unfortunately for Stockton you couldn't just buy or rent a sub that was capable of going 12,500 ft Stockton believed it was the strict laws and regulations that were preventing him from innovating the submersible industry so he came to the conclusion that he only had one reasonable option remaining building his own sub initially we didn't

think we were going to build our own Subs we thought we were going to get somebody else to build our subs the industry standard just wouldn't allow for them to build what we felt we needed uh and what we thought Humanity needed to explore the ocean so they did what a lot of companies do they break the rules and act now then they ask for forgiveness later and the name they decided to give their first custombuilt sub Cyclops a new man submersible now undergoing sea trials that's that's pretty good right there it was time to

go all in Stockton was going to ignore the industry's strict rules and regulations it was time to prove them all wrong Cyclops is going to be a very useful tool for any organization company or institution that needs to go underwater and perform tasks at depth Cyclops is the newest creation of Ocean Gate a for-profit private company in partnership with the University of Washington's Applied Physics laboratory we couldn't have done it without that partnership you know the Applied Physics lab has been effectively our engineering partner but this wasn't going to be a usual submarine Stockton wanted

to create the most simple and easy to use submarine on the market Stockton is very interested in being able to quickly train Pilots have Pilots be able to come in and use this thing without having to go through weeks of training on solution this video game controller we use this uh game controller to drive the sub first thing is there two dead man switches you have to press one of these buttons and now it's ready to go and in 2015 the sub was ready to go so Stockton organized the big reveal and the christening ceremony

was set to begin okay on behalf of the whole Ocean Gate team and all the team members who are here tonight I Christen the Cyclops [Applause] so all of our test program has been about incremental testing we started over two years ago with Cyclops 1 out here where're this is really focused on one thing and that's the pressure vessel and making sure that that that component is uh safe and capable of handling uh depths down to 4,000 M repeatedly I feel so lucky I got to do one dive while the Cyclops was here but Cyclops

wasn't the final product Cyclops 2 began development a few years later although Stockton didn't like that name very much so they rebranded to Titan hi my name is Stockton rush I'm the CEO and founder of Ocean Gate let's take a look at Titan if you thought Cyclops was simplistic just wait till you see its successor it's got one button that's it we have our control screen here our sonar screen here and we can put any image we want in the back it's one of the only Subs that can hold five people it's also the only

one with a toilet sort of there were some parts that kind of look like they held together and yet I couldn't help noticing how many pieces of this sub seemed improvised we can use these off the-shelf components I got these from uh Camper World We Run the whole thing with this game controller come on and so what if people laughed Titan was fully operational in just a few years and it was all made possible with the leadership of Stockton Raj I think you did it Stockton there's some luck here five white guys here we go

okay may be a win-win maybe and his days became months and months became years that little sub was passing every test imaginable this is why you want your pilot to be an engineer he believed that building this sub would help him unlock the secrets of the ocean but Stockton wasn't building his own submarine he was building his own coffin it's a miracle it can do what it does when you look at it there because when you look at it it is very small it looks like put together with piece of string but it's not obviously

we can scale to multiple Vehicles relatively quickly because we've used commercially off-the-shelf products for almost everything we do we can bring additional vessels online in a matter of months as opposed to years or decades so Stockton plans to create even more lowbudget submersibles and soon enough he was going to have his own Fleet of submarines the only question being were they safe absolutely [ __ ] not I'd like to be remembered as an innovator um the I think it was General MacArthur said you're remembered for the rules you break and you know I've broken some

rules to make this I think I've broken them with with logic and good engineering behind me the carbon fiber of titanium there's a rule you don't do that well I did the most controversial feature of Titan was its carbon fiber Hull this was considered controversial because the industry standard material was titanium engineer zero win on titanium a super strong and lightweight material that would allow deep sea vehicles to reach the Titanic it is with this material that today's most inventive submarine Builders continue to push technology forward to penetrate the ocean's deepest regions but Stockton didn't

like titanium he believed carbon fiber was the better material carbon fiber is three times better on a strength to buoyancy basis than titanium and underwater that's what you care about it's not strength the weight it's strength the buoyancy and yet no one had done that Titan was able to skirt the law by operating in international waters and although it passed multiple test Dives many believe the carbon of fiber Hull was slowly being damaged over time if the subpass its pressure test it wasn't going to fail on the first diet but it's going to fail over

time might fail on dive seven which is Insidious you don't get that with steel with titanium carbon fiber is a great material it's better than titanium it's better than a lot of other materials when I started the business um oldtimers in the industry told me I was nuts and they continued to tell me that so Stockton continued operating his carbon fiber sub recording the entire assembly process of along the way oh yeah so that will be the pressure vessel for Cyclops 2 it will go to 4,000 M be the deepest diving carbon fiber sub ever

built when it goes to 4,000 M will be the only one out there I'm going to be the first guy in the sub so we will see it's pretty simple but if we mess it up there's not a lot of recovery with his goal being to explore the bottom of the ocean you'd reasonably expect some sort of certification from a third party agency however Titan was never certified by any regulatory body and that's because Stockton believed that these agencies were over the top in their rules and regulations but they had nothing with carbon fiber so

we had to go out and uh and work on that and one of the things I learned is you know when you're outside the box it's really hard to tell how far outside the box you really are uh and we were pretty far out there so we have a a carbon fiber Hull his thoughts about breaking the rules is really about thinking outside the box and coming up with innovative solutions I mean anything when you're trying something outside the box box people inside the Box think you're nuts same thing when uh Elon Musk was doing

SpaceX Inside the Box everything's scary Titan continued to pass every test that Stockton could throw at it and eventually Titan needed a new Milestone a new goal to reach so can you guess where it was headed next the goal was where do you want to go in the in the ocean what is the most known site in the ocean and it's clearly the Titanic ah yes the Titanic she really was the most beautiful ship in the world said to be Unsinkable but destined to go down on her maiden [Applause] voyage the Titanic has been a

symbol of excessive confidence for over a century and together with the irony of ocean Gate's failed Expedition it will probably remain relevant for another hundred years but why would anyone risk their life to see such an ancient shipwreck Well Titanic was the highest grossing film for many years and on top of that James Cameron the director of that movie he completed his own expedition to obtain real cinematic footage I actually made the film because I wanted to go and dive to the Titanic Rick and then I had to make this movie H okay all right

I'll make the movie and then that worked out well and so then I could afford to go some more there was this powerful almost magnetic attraction to find out what's down there Titanic sort of is like a black hole it sucks you in and the next person to be sucked into this black black hle was of course yeah so the the Titanic is just such a huge draw it became a mustu dive I read an article that said there are three words in the English language that are known throughout the planet and that's Coca-Cola God

and Titanic if you ever watched the 1997 movie you'd know it's a combination of both history and fiction the film centers around the fictional love triangle of Rose Jack and Kellan and when [ __ ] hits the fan get back we'd get to see the character's True Colors Dam what gutter rat I'd rather be his than your wife but remember this story was just fictional however on the other side of the ship we'd get a glimpse of the story that kicks off our sequel Titanic 2 please Ida get into the boat no this is isor

and Ida Strauss two passengers who were actually on board the Titanic in 1912 their tail is well documented and has been recreated in various films and musicals we've been together for 40 years and where you go I go don't argue with me Isidor you know it does no good Isidor an Ida would go down with the ship in 1912 but not before having a number of descendants one of them being the communications director at Ocean Gate and who also just so happened to be married to a man named Stockton and maybe that's why Stockton was

so obsessed with continuously going down to the Titanic and our goal is to go back to the Titanic year after year scan it with sonar and document the wreck and its Decay and discover what we can discover and so the stage was set for the adventure of a lifetime but Stockton couldn't fund these Expeditions on his own so he began advertising his once in a-lifetime opportunity to the public and the now deleted promotional video was set to be released Ocean Gate Expeditions offers you the once in a-lifetime opportunity to be a specially trained crew member

safely diving to the Titanic wreckage site get ready for what Jules Vern could only imagine a 12,500 ft Journey to the Bottom of the Sea it's the Ocean Gate Titanic experience we partnered with Aerospace experts at the University of Washington NASA and Boeing on the design of our Hall it's very well engineered and very safe but and the team is is very focused on safety first not 1 second of me experiencing anything from Ocean Gate have I ever felt unsafe as I pointed out on the bridge earlier your safety plans all around the vessel come

join us on our next Expedition don't miss the opportunity to be part of History the Ocean Gate Titanic experience there's truly nothing else like it but this wasn't just enough another episode of Black Mirror nor was it an episode of The Twilight Zone this was reality and although quite a few people were eager to get themselves a ticket there was still one question that remained what's the level of danger with this type of expedition well um surprisingly the safest part of the Expedition will be the submarine part uh in the last 35 years uh there

hasn't been an injury on a commercial private sub although there've been over million people going in them going to sea is intrinsically a a risky activity um but we're doing everything we can to make sure that it's uh as safe and uh and uh comfortable as possible well Stockton Rush Stockton went on quite a few media runs during this period with the goal of highlighting ocean Gate's Mission our rule is we risk Capital we don't risk people the media coverage before the incident flaunted a once in A- lifetime opportunity it looks like there are these

uh these rust formations that's actually what's left over from the bacteria that's consuming at at a huge rate really so we may not be able to see it forever so go get into a submersible now finally the crew seemed to foster a culture of safety there were checklists inspections before and after every dive and a three strikes rule if three things seemed out of the ordinary no matter how minor they'd cancel the dive but the media coverage off the Titans implosion was an entirely different story every everyone I know keeps asking me the same question

why would you get on that dangerous sub a 60-minute special identifying over 30 members of the maritime Community who warn Stockton about Titan safety procedures and a chief submersible pilot who is fired and subsequently sued for speaking out against Ocean Gate if someone raised a safety concern as the chief pilot did they were not only not listen to they were silenced but with all that being said if you did manage to get a ticket to the Titan Expedition you can't say that Stockton didn't warn you this is an experimental sub people are informed that it's

very dangerous down there it's an open book here do you have any questions about what's going on about uh acoustic monitoring about uh carbon fiber problems we had rumors of problems we had actual problems we had you know feel free to ask you know we're happy to show everything we want everyone going into this fully informed this is an experimental sub this is a dangerous environment it's 6,000 PSI very few people have been down there and so we want to make sure that you're going in with an open eye and you understand what's going on

if you don't want to do it at any time feel free to say hey I want to take a pass we can work something out you know maybe bring you another year or something else but you know really um want to make sure you're you're aware of all this and is a lost each effort to limit their liability you'd also have to sign ocean Gates waiver an experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and could result in physical injury disability emotional trauma or death where do I sign June

18th 2023 the Ocean Gate Titanic experience is set to begin are reporting a DI as a go please stand by five crew members are sealed into the submersible and so is their fate CEO stockt in Rush businessman Hamish Harding French explorer paulon re net businessman Shazad awood and his 19-year-old son SU were on the Expedition as part of a Father's day trip everything was going according to plan it's one of the questions about this is how risky is going in the sub turns out in this Expedition the probably the safest thing will be once you're

underwater you know I once I'm a couple of feet underwater I know I'm coming back I know everybody's coming back malfunction in just under 2 hours Titan had lost communication with its mother ship but the crew at the surface did not file a missing report for nearly 8 [Music] hours finally someone snapped call the [ __ ] Coast Guard vessel disappeared during an underwater mission to tour the Titanic wreckage tonight an international search operation is underway we'll continue to put every available asset that we have in an effort to to find the Titan and the

crew members every new station in the world was in on this story they brought in experts former passengers hell they even got James Cameron on the line Stockton Rush asked me if I wanted to go out there and dive this season you know I wasn't interested and then came the rumors a leak transcript of the crew's final moments and a series of tapping sounds were supposedly heard around Titan's last known location but of course both of these rumors were declared fake by the feds tapping sounds ridiculous all that was left was a few hours of

oxygen and a Race Against Time have just hours of oxygen left now heightening the Race Against Time to rescue the five people inside time was running out and well they did end up finding that submarine debris from the Titan has been brought to the surface from the ocean floor several pieces of the doomed vessel once the pressure vessel is you're certain it's not going to collapse on everybody everything else can fail your thrusters can go your lights can