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June 22, 2023 - Missing Titanic sub crew killed after 'catastrophic implosion'

By Helen Regan , Adam Renton, Rob Picheta , Aditi Sangal , Elise Hammond , Matt Meyer , Tori B. Powell and Maureen Chowdhury , CNN

Search teams are racing to find the sub before oxygen runs out. Here's what you need to know

The search for the missing Titan submersible is now in a critical stage, as rescue teams race to locate the vessel before oxygen supplies run out.

The submersible begins each trip with 96 hours of life support and has been missing since Sunday, setting up Thursday morning as a key target for finding the vessel and those on board. Officials fear the craft’s oxygen supply could run out this morning.

Medical personnel and search vessels with extra capabilities headed to the scene on Thursday, with time running out.

If you're just reading in now, here's the latest news this morning:

• "New capabilities" in search: New, high-tech vessels and medical personnel are moving to the search site as rescue efforts reach a pivotal moment, a Coast Guard official has said. That includes a Magellan ROV, a uniquely equipped vessel whose use was pushed for by the Explorers Club group early on in the search.
• Search vehicle reaches sea floor: A remotely operated vehicle “has reached the sea floor” and has begun searching for the missing Titanic submersible early Thursday morning, according to the US Coast Guard. It added that “The French vessel L'Atalante is preparing their ROV to enter the water.”
• Concern over low-tech features: A former OceanGate subcontractor who worked on the development of the Titan submersible said while  the game controller to operate the vessel may seem low-tech, it was actually by design. OceanGate tried to use as many “off-the-shelf" items as possible to cut down on research and development as well as costs, Doug Virnig told CNN Wednesday.
• How the sub went missing:  The vessel, operated by OceanGate Expeditions, began its two-hour descent to the wreck of the Titanic on Sunday morning. (See how deep the wreckage is here. ) It lost contact with the Polar Prince, the support ship that transported the craft to the location in the North Atlantic, 1 hour and 45 minutes into its descent, officials said. Search operations began later that day. It’s still not clear what happened to the submersible, why it lost contact, and how close it was to the Titanic when it went missing.
• What we know about the noises : Banging noises were identified by Canadian aircraft on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. Remotely operated vehicle (ROV) equipment was relocated to where the noises were detected, according to Capt. Jamie Frederick, the response coordinator for the First Coast Guard District. But searches in the area "yielded negative results," he said. Data from the plane that identified the noises was sent to the US Navy, but has so far been inconclusive, Frederick said, adding that the Coast Guard does not know what the sounds were.
• What it could be like onboard: Officials believe the five people on board have "limited rations" of food and water. Ret. Navy Capt. David Marquet, a former submarine captain, told CNN the near-freezing water at that depth is probably making the situation very uncomfortable. "There's frost on the inside of the parts of the submarine. They're all huddled together trying to conserve their body heat. They're running low on oxygen and they're exhaling carbon dioxide," he said.

British submariner and equipment are assisting search efforts for missing sub

From CNN's Sharon Braithwaite and Luke McGee in London

A British navy submariner and equipment from a UK firm will help the search for the missing Titan submersible , a Downing Street spokesperson said Thursday.

"At the request of US Coastguard, the UK has embedded a Royal Navy submariner to assist the search and rescue effort for the missing submarine," the spokesperson said, according to UK's PA Media on Thursday.

Lt. Commander Richard Kantharia "has significant knowledge of submarine warfare and dived operations and so he will obviously be bringing that experience to the search and rescue team," the spokesperson added. The officer was on exchange with the US Navy and has been seconded to the search and rescue team, according to PA.

A British C-17 aircraft will transport “specialist commercial equipment” provided by deep sea-mapping company Magellan to St. John’s to assist with the search-and-rescue effort, PA also reported.

A spokesperson for Britain’s Royal Air Force told CNN on Thursday: “Following a request overnight from the lead organisation, RAF air transport assets are assisting with the movement of additional commercial equipment. ”

Along with the C-17, an A400 aircraft is transporting specialist loaders and crew, the air force said. Both aircraft departed RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland for Canada earlier on Thursday. 

The missing submarine is carrying five people — a British adventurer, a French diver, a Pakistani father and son and the founder of OceanGate Expeditions, the company that operated the tour to the Titanic wreckage.

A massive search operation is underway in an area twice the size of Connecticut for the submersible that went missing Sunday —as officials fear the craft’s oxygen supply could run out this morning.

From Catherine Nicholls in London

Passengers on the missing sub would know to "take it easy" to save oxygen, friend of two onboard says

A friend of two passengers on board the missing submersible has said he still has hope the vessel will be found.

“I know that the adventurers on board are experienced, very experienced,” said Per Wimmer, an adventurer who was previously signed up for two canceled trips on the Titan.

Wimmer is an acquaintance of Hamish Harding and Stockton Rush, two of the five people on the missing vessel. He said Harding, a British businessman and trained jet pilot, and Rush, the CEO and founder of the company leading the voyage, are both very experienced adventurers who would know to conserve oxygen.

Wimmer said that the presence of OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush on board the vessel is helpful, as he knows “the ins and outs of how this submersible works.”

Officials fear the sub's oxygen supply would run out on Thursday, meaning the search is in a critical phase.

Medical personnel to join Titan search on Thursday, official says

From CNN's Kristina Sgueglia

New, high-tech vessels and medical personnel are moving to the search site as rescue efforts reach a pivotal moment, a Coast Guard official has said.

Rear Adm. John Mauger told NBC on Thursday that the search and rescue mission will continue with "new capability" arriving.

That includes a Magellan ROV, a uniquely equipped vessel whose use was pushed for by the Explorers Club group early on in the search. It has been questioned whether the Magellan should have been sent to the site much earlier in the search operation.

Mauger said they have been “overwhelmed by all the support that’s been provided by the international community” adding “we made some decisions to prioritize based on gear that was closest to the site and could get there.”

Mauger also said that medical personnel who have “deep sea medical expertise” are moving to the site, and a hyperbaric chamber is also en route.

“We continue to find in particularly complex cases that people's will to live really needs to be accounted for as well, and so we're continuing to search and proceed with rescue efforts by bringing this new capability online this morning,” he told NBC.

Search vehicle reaches sea floor as teams race to find sub

From CNN's Gloria Pazmino

A remote operated vehicle “has reached the sea floor” and has begun searching for the missing Titanic submersible early Thursday morning, according to the US Coast Guard.

“The Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic has deployed an ROV that has reached the sea floor and began its search for the missing sub,” the US Coast Guard tweeted .

It added that “The French vessel L'Atalante is preparing their ROV to enter the water.”

Titan submersible "is designed to come back up" after 24 hours, investor says

From CNN's Emma Tucker

The Titan submersible that went missing en route to the Titanic wreck was designed to return to the surface after 24 hours, according to Aaron Newman, an investor in OceanGate who visited the site on the vessel in 2021.

Titan is held underwater by ballast — heavy weights that helps with a vessel’s stability — built to be automatically released after 24 hours to send the sub to the surface, Newman said. 

Crew members are told they can release the ballast by rocking the ship or use a pneumatic pump to knock the weights free, Newman said. If all else fails, he said, the lines securing the ballast are designed to fall apart after 24 hours to automatically send it back to the ocean’s surface. 

Titan’s thrusters are powered by an external electrical system, while an internal system powers communications and a heater, Newman said.

Separately, Discovery Channel host Josh Gates , who went on a test dive on the Titan in 2021, said he learned that year that there were four ways for the vessel to shed weight and bring it back up to the surface in the case of an emergency.

There is a computer-controlled weight release, a manual-valve system that injects air into exterior ballast containers, a hydraulic system to drop weights and an ability to detach from the sled attached to the submersible and help move the vessel back to the surface.

Read more here .

"We need a miracle," Titanic exploration expert says

From CNN's Rob Picheta

Teams searching for the missing submersible “need a miracle” to find it before oxygen supplies run out, a leading deep-sea explorer told CNN.

“The good news there is that miracles can happen,” added David Gallo, the senior adviser for Strategic Initiatives at RMS Titanic Inc.

“We have to not think about the clock all the time, and just go as fast as possible,” Gallo told CNN’s “This Morning.”  “It’s tough because the oceans are pitch black — you can only use sound to image effectively, and you’ve got to be pretty much on top of the object to actually see it,” he said.

Gallo is a colleague of French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, one of the passengers on the sub. He said that Nargeolet, an experienced explorer, would ensure that the banging noises picked up by search teams “cannot be interpreted as anything but human,” if indeed the noises did come from inside the vessel.

Thursday morning was identified as a critical period for the search operation, with oxygen supplies on board the sub understood to be rapidly dwindling.

Future research at the Titanic wreck is unlikely after the Titan went missing, expert says

The chances of future research being carried out at the Titanic wreck have diminished after the Titan sub went missing on its journey to the site, an expert has said.

David Scott-Beddard, the CEO of Titanic exhibition company White Star Memories Ltd, told CNN that the tragedy has “without a doubt” impacted opportunities to visit and study the wreckage.

“The chances of any future research being carried out on the wreck of Titanic is extremely slim. Probably not in my lifetime,” Scott-Beddard told CNN’s “Early Start.” 

“I imagine there will be an inquiry no doubt after this disaster, and much more stringent rules and regulations will be put in place,” he said.

Concerns have been raised about the low-tech and controversial features of the OceanGate vessel . A former OceanGate subcontractor who worked on the development of the submersible Titan has said some of the construction materials and design choices were considered "controversial" at the time it was being made in 2018.

Enduring appeal: Several research trips were made to the Titanic site after it was discovered in 1985, and many of its artifacts have been controversially recovered and displayed around the world since. But commercial trips like those offered by OceanGate are a far more recent phenomenon. 

“Titanic is one of those unreachable, unattainable things for most of us, unless you’ve been working in research and have been lucky enough to dive to the wreck in the past,” Scott-Beddard said, explaining the enduring appeal of the ship. “She sits majestically on the sea bed; (it’s) incredibly rare for a ship that sunk to be sitting upright.”

The ocean's depths are so elusive that only 20% of the seafloor has been mapped

From CNN's Jackie Wattles, Ashley Strickland and Katie Hunt

The submersible vehicle currently  lost at sea  is part of a relatively new effort enabling tourists and other paying customers to explore the depths of the ocean, the vast majority of which has never been seen by human eyes.

Though people have been exploring the ocean’s surface for tens of thousands of years, only about 20% of the seafloor has been mapped, according to 2022 figures from  the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Researchers often say that traveling to space is easier than plunging to the bottom of the ocean. While 12 astronauts have spent a collective total of 300 hours on the lunar surface, only three people have spent around three hours exploring Challenger Deep, the deepest known point of Earth’s seabed, according to the  Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution .

There’s a reason deep-sea exploration by humans has been so limited:  Traveling to the ocean’s depths means entering a realm with enormous levels of pressure the farther you descend — a high-risk endeavor. The environment is dark with almost no visibility. The cold temperatures are extreme.

Many of the factors that could make the vessel so difficult to locate and recover are also the reasons a comprehensive exploration of the ocean floor remains elusive.

“Aquatic search is pretty tricky, as the ocean floor is a lot more rugged than on land,” said Dr. Jamie Pringle, a reader in forensic geoscience at England’s Keele University, in a statement.

Read the full story here .

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Missing Titanic submersible live updates: Texts show OceanGate CEO dismissed concerns

Five people, including the company CEO, were aboard the sub when it imploded.

All passengers are believed to be lost after a desperate dayslong search for a submersible carrying five people that vanished while on a tour of the Titanic wreckage off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

The 21-foot deep-sea vessel, operated by OceanGate Expeditions , lost contact about an hour and 45 minutes after submerging on Sunday morning with a 96-hour oxygen supply. That amount of breathable air was forecast to run out on Thursday morning, according to the United States Coast Guard, which was coordinating the multinational search and rescue efforts.

Latest headlines:

Rcmp to investigate the deaths aboard titan sub, us taxpayer cost for search and rescue may be $1.5 million, expert says, oceangate ceo claimed sub was safer than scuba diving, texts show.

• OceanGate co-founder defends development of submersible
• Sub's carbon-fiber composite hull was the 'critical failure,' James Cameron says
• Probe seeks answers on why Titanic sub imploded
• Navy likely detected sound of the implosion on Sunday: Official
• All lives believed to be lost: OceanGate

Officials with Canada's Transportation Safety Board said at a press conference Saturday that they have begun speaking with people on board the Polar Prince, which launched the ill-fated Titan submersible.

The Polar Prince returned to its port, St. John's, Newfoundland, on Saturday morning.

"I would say that we've received full cooperation," TSB Director of Marine Investigations Clifford Harvey said. "It's been a really good interaction thus far and is really getting full cooperation with all the individuals involved."

In addition, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said they are "examining the circumstances" of the deaths on board Titan, and will launch a full investigation if "the circumstances indicate criminal, federal or provincial laws may possibly have been broken."

-ABC News' Matt J. Foster

A defense budget expert estimates once the U.S. military participation concludes, the cost for the search and rescue mission of the five passengers on board the Titan submersible will cost the U.S. around $1.5 million.

Mark Cancian, a senior advisor with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, came up with the estimate based on aircraft sorties, cross referencing the U.S. Department of Defense cost numbers, Coast Guard Cutter costs and flying hour costs. He said some costs have already been set aside in various budgets, with resources simply diverted to the site.

He emphasized that these are strictly well-informed guesses.

A spokesperson for the Coast Guard's District 1 in Boston would not give an estimate of costs so far, saying, "We cannot attribute a monetary value to Search and Rescue cases, as the Coast Guard does not associate cost with saving a life."

-ABC News' Jaclyn C. Lee

US Coast Guard to lead sub investigation

The U.S. Coast Guard will be the organization leading the investigation into the OceanGate sub incident.

The NTSB announced the news on Friday via Twitter, noting it will "contribute to their efforts."

A Las Vegas father and son told ABC News OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush pressured them for months into taking two seats on the now failed mission to the Titanic, making bold claims about the vessel's safety.

Financier Jay Bloom shared text messages between himself and Rush where Rush dismissed concerns from Bloom and his son Sean about taking the trip on the Titan submersible.

"While there's obviously a risk it's way safer than flying in a helicopter or even scuba diving," Rush texted.

"He sort of had this predisposition that it was safe," Bloom told ABC News. "And anybody who disagreed with him, he felt it was just a differing opinion."

Bloom added that Rush flew out to Las Vegas in a homebuilt plane to convince him to attend the voyage aboard the submersible.

"He flew it all the way to Vegas. And I was like, 'This guy is definitely down to take risk,'" Bloom said.

-ABC News' Sam Sweeney

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The Titan submersible imploded, killing all 5 on board, the US Coast Guard says

The race against time to find a submersible that disappeared on its way to the Titanic wreckage site entered a new phase of desperation as the final hours of oxygen left on board the tiny vessel ticked off the clock. (June 22)

A renowned Titanic expert, a world-record holding adventurer, two members of one of Pakistan’s wealthiest families and the CEO of the company leading an expedition to the world’s most famous shipwreck are facing critical danger aboard a small submersible that went missing in the Atlantic Ocean. (June 21)

A surveillance vessel has detected underwater noises in the area where rescuers are searching for a submersible that went missing in the North Atlantic while bringing five people down to the wreck of the Titanic, authorities said Wednesday. (June 21)

FILE - This undated image provided by OceanGate Expeditions in June 2021 shows the company’s Titan submersible. Rescuers are racing against time to find the missing submersible carrying five people, who were reported overdue Sunday night. (OceanGate Expeditions via AP, File)

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In this satellite image provided by Maxar Technologies, from top to bottom, the vessels Horizon Arctic, Deep Energy and Skandi Vinland search for the missing submersible Titan, Thursday, June 22, 2023 in the Atlantic Ocean. (Satellite image ©2023 Maxar Technologies via AP)

U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger, commander of the First Coast Guard District, center at microphone, talks to the media Thursday, June 22, 2023, at Coast Guard Base Boston, in Boston. The U.S. Coast Guard says the missing submersible imploded near the wreckage of the Titanic, killing all five people on board. Coast Guard officials said during a news conference that they’ve notified the families of the crew of the Titan, which has been missing for several days. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger, commander of the First Coast Guard District, talks to the media, Thursday, June 22, 2023, at Coast Guard Base Boston, in Boston. The missing submersible Titan imploded near the wreckage of the Titanic, killing all five people on board, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

This photo provided by OceanGate Expeditions shows a submersible vessel named Titan used to visit the wreckage site of the Titanic. In a race against the clock on the high seas, an expanding international armada of ships and airplanes searched Tuesday, June 20, 2023, for the submersible that vanished in the North Atlantic while taking five people down to the wreck of the Titanic. (OceanGate Expeditions via AP)

FILE - OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush emerges from the hatch atop the OceanGate submarine Cyclops 1 in the San Juan Islands, Wash., on Sept. 12, 2018. Rescuers are racing against time to find the missing submersible carrying five people, who were reported overdue Sunday night, June 18, 2023. (Alan Berner/The Seattle Times via AP, File)

FILE - Submersible pilot Randy Holt, right, communicates with the support boat as he and Stockton Rush, left, CEO and Co-Founder of OceanGate, dive in the company’s submersible, “Antipodes,” about three miles off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., June 28, 2013. Rescuers are racing against time to find the missing submersible carrying five people, who were reported overdue Sunday night, June 18, 2023. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee, File)

FILE - In this image released by Action Aviation, the submersible Titan is prepared for a dive into a remote area of the Atlantic Ocean on an expedition to the Titanic on Sunday, June 18, 2023. Rescuers are racing against time to find the missing submersible carrying five people, who were reported overdue Sunday night. (Action Aviation via AP, File)

U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger, commander of the First Coast Guard District, right, listens as Paul Hankins, U.S. Navy civilian contractor, supervisor of salvage, left, talks to the media, Thursday, June 22, 2023, at Coast Guard Base Boston, in Boston. The U.S. Coast Guard says the missing submersible imploded near the wreckage of the Titanic, killing all five people on board. Coast Guard officials said during the news conference that they’ve notified the families of the crew of the Titan, which has been missing for several days. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

FILE - The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Warren Deyampert is docked as a member of the Coast Guard walks past, Tuesday, June 20, 2023, at Coast Guard Base Boston, in Boston. Rescuers are racing against time to find the missing submersible carrying five people, who were reported overdue Sunday night, June 18, 2023. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)

FILE - The logo for an OceanGate Expeditions 2019 Titanic expedition is seen on a marine industrial warehouse office door in Everett, Wash., Tuesday, June 20, 2023. Rescuers are racing against time to find the missing submersible carrying five people, who were reported overdue Sunday night. (AP Photo/Ed Komenda, File)

CORRECTS SPELLING OF THE NAME TO HENRI, INSTEAD OF HENRY This photo combo shows from left, Shahzada Dawood, Suleman Dawood, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Stockton Rush, and Hamish Harding are facing critical danger aboard a small submersible that went missing in the Atlantic Ocean. The missing submersible Titan imploded near the wreckage of the Titanic, killing all five people on board, the U.S. Coast Guard announced Thursday, June 22, 2023. (AP Photo/File)

U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick, right, faces reporters as Royal Navy Lt Cdr Rich Kantharia, left, looks on during a news conference, Wednesday, June 21, 2023, at Coast Guard Base Boston, in Boston. The U.S. Coast Guard says sounds and banging noises have been heard from the search area for Titanic submersible. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick, left, faces reporters as Carl Hartsfield, director and senior program manager Oceanographic Systems Laboratory, center, and Paul Hankins, U.S. Navy civilian contractor, supervisor of salvage, right, look on during a news conference, Wednesday, June 21, 2023, at Coast Guard Base Boston, in Boston. The U.S. Coast Guard says sounds and banging noises have been heard from the search area for Titanic submersible. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

In this satellite image provided by Maxar Technologies, from top to bottom, the vessels L’Atalante, Horizon Arctic, Deep Energy, and Skandi Vinland search for the missing submersible Titan, Thursday June 22, 2023 in the Atlantic Ocean. (Satellite image ©2023 Maxar Technologies via AP)

U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick, center at microphone, faces reporters during a news conference, Wednesday, June 21, 2023, at Coast Guard Base Boston, in Boston. The U.S. Coast Guard says sounds and banging noises have been heard from the search area for Titanic submersible. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

FILE - This 2004 photo provided by the Institute for Exploration, Center for Archaeological Oceanography/University of Rhode Island/NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration, shows the remains of a coat and boots in the mud on the sea bed near the Titanic’s stern. Rescuers are racing against time to find the missing submersible carrying five people, who were reported overdue Sunday night, June 18, 2023. (Institute for Exploration, Center for Archaeological Oceanography/University of Rhode Island/NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration, File)

A submersible carrying five people to the Titanic imploded near the site of the shipwreck and killed everyone on board, authorities said Thursday, bringing a tragic end to a saga that included an urgent around-the-clock search and a worldwide vigil for the missing vessel.

The sliver of hope that remained for finding the five men alive was wiped away early Thursday, when the submersible’s 96-hour supply of oxygen was expected to run out following its Sunday launch and the Coast Guard announced that debris had been found roughly 1,600 feet (488 meters) from the Titanic in North Atlantic waters.

“This was a catastrophic implosion of the vessel,” said Rear Adm. John Mauger, of the First Coast Guard District.

After the craft was reported missing, the U.S. Navy went back and analyzed its acoustic data and found an anomaly that was “consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior Navy official told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive acoustic detection system.

The Navy passed on that information to the Coast Guard, which continued its search because the Navy did not consider the data to be definitive.

OceanGate Expeditions, the company that owned and operated the submersible, said in a statement that all five people in the vessel, including CEO and pilot Stockton Rush, “have sadly been lost.”

The others on board were two members of a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood; British adventurer Hamish Harding; and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” OceanGate said in a statement. “We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.”

OceanGate has been chronicling the Titanic’s decay and the underwater ecosystem around it via yearly voyages since 2021. The company has not responded to additional questions about the Titan’s voyage this week.

The company’s office was “closed indefinitely while the staff copes with the tragic loss of their team member,” according to a statement Thursday by the Port of Everett, which is about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of downtown Seattle and is home to OceanGate.

The Coast Guard will continue searching for more signs about what happened to the Titan.

While the Navy likely detected the implosion Sunday through its acoustics system, underwater sounds heard Tuesday and Wednesday — which initially gave hope for a possible rescue — were probably unrelated to the submersible. The Navy’s possible clue was not known publicly until Thursday, when The Wall Street Journal first reported it.

With a search area covering thousands of miles — twice the size of Connecticut and in waters 2 1/2 miles (4 kilometers) deep — rescuers all week rushed ships, planes and other equipment to the site of the disappearance.

Broadcasters around the world started newscasts at the critical hour Thursday with news of the submersible. The Saudi-owned satellite channel Al Arabiya showed a clock on air counting down to their estimate of when the air could potentially run out.

The White House thanked the U.S. Coast Guard, along with Canadian, British and French partners who helped in the search and rescue efforts.

“Our hearts go out to the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives on the Titan. They have been through a harrowing ordeal over the past few days, and we are keeping them in our thoughts and prayers,” it said in a statement.

The Titan launched at 6 a.m. Sunday and was reported overdue that afternoon about 435 miles (700 kilometers) south of St. John’s, Newfoundland. By Thursday, when the oxygen supply was expected to run out, there was little hope of finding the crew alive.

In 2021 and 2022, at least 46 people successfully traveled on OceanGate’s submersible to the Titanic site, according to letters the company filed with a U.S. District Court in Norfolk, Virginia, that oversees matters involving the shipwreck. But questions about the submersible’s safety were raised by former passengers .

One of the company’s first customers likened a dive he made to the site two years ago to a suicide mission.

“Imagine a metal tube a few meters long with a sheet of metal for a floor. You can’t stand. You can’t kneel. Everyone is sitting close to or on top of each other,” said Arthur Loibl, a retired businessman and adventurer from Germany. “You can’t be claustrophobic.”

During the 2 1/2-hour descent and ascent, the lights were turned off to conserve energy, he said, with the only illumination coming from a fluorescent glow stick.

The dive was repeatedly delayed to fix a problem with the battery and the balancing weights. In total, the voyage took 10 1/2 hours.

Nicolai Roterman, a deep-sea ecologist and lecturer in marine biology at the University of Portsmouth, England, said the disappearance of the Titan highlights the dangers and unknowns of deep-sea tourism.

“Even the most reliable technology can fail, and therefore accidents will happen,” Roterman said. “With the growth in deep-sea tourism, we must expect more incidents like this.”

Associated Press writers Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Ben Finley in Norfolk, Virginia; Frank Jordans in Berlin; Danica Kirka in London; and John Leicester in Paris contributed to this report.

Implosion of Titanic sub fuels grief as search for answers continues

As the families of the five men who lost their lives on the Titan submersible grieve, the focus has turned to finding out what caused the "catastrophic implosion" believed to have killed the explorers.

The U.S. Coast Guard said yesterday that debris had been discovered on the ocean floor near the bow of the wrecked Titanic after a frantic international search in the North Atlantic.

A U.S. Navy analysis of acoustic data had “detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion” near the Titan around the time it lost communications Sunday, a senior Navy official said. The sound was not definitive, but it was immediately shared with commanders, who decided to keep searching, the official said.

The investigation will now turn to determining what caused the implosion as questions remain about the fate of the submersible and the search that captivated people around the world.

What to know about the search for answers

• The submersible disappeared Sunday during a mission to survey the wreckage of the Titanic, which is 900 nautical miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
• The Coast Guard said Thursday that a "debris field" had been found in the search area, later saying the debris found on the ocean floor was "consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel."
• Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, the company behind the mission; British billionaire Hamish Harding, the owner of Action Aviation; French dive expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet; and prominent Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman, are all presumed dead.
• In the days before the Titan's mission, Suleman, 19, said he felt "terrified" about the journey, his aunt said in an interview with NBC News yesterday.

What was the ‘catastrophic implosion’ like for the passengers?

Alexander Smith

The five people aboard  the Titan submersible  most likely died instantaneously in what officials called a “catastrophic implosion.”

The deep-sea water pressure  that appears to have crushed the 22-foot craft  would have been roughly equivalent in weight to the 10,000-ton, wrought-iron Eiffel Tower, experts told NBC News today.

The colossal forces would have acted so quickly that it would be like the vehicle’s carbon-fiber hull “suddenly vanishing”  before anyone inside knew what was happening , one expert said.

“They would have known nothing — the minute this body of water hit them, they would have been dead,” said Paul White, a professor at England’s University of Southampton, who specializes in underwater acoustics and forces.

Read the full story.

Las Vegas businessman and son backed out of Titan trip over safety concerns

Marlene Lenthang

Las Vegas businessman Jay Bloom and his son Sean, 20, were supposed to be on the tragic Titan voyage that imploded. 

In a horrifying parallel, they believe their seats were taken by prominent Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman, 19.

Bloom said OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush contacted him a year ago to tell him about the opportunity to visit the wreckage of the Titanic. Bloom said he wanted to go with his son, who was a fan of the iconic sunken ship. 

“My son and his friend raised a lot of concerns about what kind of marine life we’re going to run into, there’s really no escape plan if something goes wrong,” Bloom told NBC News today. 

The father was also concerned about the Titan's hatch, which could be opened only from the outside, and the hull's carbon fiber material, which reacts differently to pressure than steel. 

Rush assured him the journey was “safer than flying a helicopter, safer than crossing the street,” Bloom recalled. 

Two planned voyages were canceled in May because of the weather and rescheduled to June 18, and Bloom ultimately decided they couldn't make it.

“I was just not comfortable with the kind of resources that he had to pull this off, that it could be done safely,” Bloom said. “Looking back, I’m very relieved and glad that my son and I did not go, just feel terrible for the people who did.”

Sean said he’s grateful his father listened to his concerns. 

“The more I stared to think about it, I was like, 'I don’t think this is a good idea,'" he said. “It’s really tragic. It’s crazy that the two people that took our seats were in a very similar situation, father-son. I can’t believe it happened.”

The Blooms said Rush had visited them to talk about the mission, traveling in a small plane he had built himself. 

“I love the confidence in his inventions, but he built a plane by hand and flew it," Sean Bloom said. "No way am I getting on a submarine to the bottom of the ocean, which is way more dangerous than flying an experimental plane." 

Jay Bloom, who shared text messages on Facebook that he exchanged with Rush, remembered the CEO as a “good man with a good heart” who “believed in what he was doing and just wanted to share his passion.”

NTSB to assist in Titan investigation, source says

Jay Blackman

The U.S. Coast Guard has asked the National Transportation Safety Board to assist in the investigation into Titan's implosion, a source close to the investigation told NBC News today.

The NTSB's office of Marine Safety, in conjunction with the Coast Guard, will attempt to find the potential cause of the deep-sea catastrophe, the source said. 

The Coast Guard will be the lead agency in the investigation.  

Time to consider ending visits to Titanic wreck, Titanic International Society says

“Titanic has claimed five additional victims 111 years after her loss,” Charles Haas, the president of the Titanic International Society , said following the deaths of the five people on board Titan. 

“It is time to consider seriously whether human trips to Titanic’s wreck should end in the name of safety, with relatively little remaining to be learned from or about the wreck," he said, noting further surveying can be left to autonomous underwater vehicles.

He called for an “extensive” investigation into the implosion, the submersible’s design and safety, and deep-sea rescue systems.

“Intensive pre-service inspection of deep-sea submersibles should be required by international regulation," he added. " Just as Titanic taught the world safety lessons, so, too, should Titan’s loss."

Titan passengers share accounts of safety issues on the sub's past expeditions

Melissa Chan

The Titan was touted as a groundbreaking submersible that could give tourists the extraordinary chance to visit the deep-sea grave of the Titanic — but past passengers have shared chilling accounts of safety issues, communication failures and design concerns.

The 21-foot,  carbon fiber and titanium submersible  fit five people, with no seats and a curtained-off area for a makeshift bathroom.

Brian Weed, 42, a camera operator for Discovery Channel’s “Expedition Unknown,” did a test dive on the Titan in May 2021 and said, “The moment we started the test dive, things started going wrong.”

The submersible descended, but not all the way to the shipwreck. The launch was “clumsy,” and less than a quarter of the dive in, “there were malfunctions with the propulsion system,” leaving the passengers like “sitting ducks in the water,” Weed said. 

But it was the allure of the Titanic — the ocean liner that sank on its maiden voyage from England to New York in 1912 — that drew him to the project.

Read the full story here.

Shahzada Dawood's relationship with son was a 'joy to behold,' obituary says

Mushtaq Yusufzai

Chantal Da Silva

The relationship between Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman, was a "joy to behold," an obituary from the father and son's family says.

"With profound sorrow, we mourn the tragic loss of Shahzada and his beloved son, Suleman, who had embarked on a journey to visit the remnants of the legendary Titanic in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean," the obituary, shared by The British Asian Trust, says. "In this unfathomable tragedy, we try to find solace in the enduring legacy of humility and humanity that they have left behind and find comfort in the belief that they passed on to the next leg of their spiritual journey hand-in-hand, father and son," it says.

"The relationship between Shahzada and Suleman was a joy to behold; they were each other’s greatest supporters and cherished a shared passion for adventure and exploration of all the world had to offer them," it says.

The family remembered Shahzada Dawood as someone who was "passionate about philanthropy and giving back because above all, he cared deeply about people and human development."

Suleman was remembered as someone who loved science fiction literature and volleyball, but whose "greatest quality was the humility he espoused which was a true reflection of his parents’ upbringing."

19-year-old Titan passenger was ‘terrified’ before trip, his aunt says

Daniel Arkin

In the days before the Titan vessel  went into the ocean  off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, the 19-year-old university student accompanying his father on the expedition expressed hesitation about going, his aunt said in an interview Thursday.

Azmeh Dawood — the older sister of Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood — told NBC News that her nephew, Suleman, informed a relative that he “wasn’t very up for it” and felt “terrified” about the trip to explore the wreckage of the Titanic.

But the 19-year-old ended up going aboard  OceanGate’s 22-foot submersible  because the trip fell over Father’s Day weekend and he was eager to please his dad, who was passionate about the lore of the Titanic, according to Azmeh.

Implosion 'like crushing a can of Coca-Cola,' ex-Coast Guard commander says

As investigators look for answers on what caused the apparent implosion, experts are weighing in on what might have unfolded.

"From my understanding, the submersible imploded. In other words, the force of the water was so strong that it blew the back and the front of the submersible off," said Armin Cate, a former Commander in the United States Coast Guard Reserve and retired Senior Special Agent with the Department of Homeland Security.

"When you crush that tube in the middle it’s like crushing a can of Coca-Cola you might say," Cate said.

He said that in such an incident, "bolts are going to come free. And so the fact that they found the front cap and the back and different parts of the bottom and the middle tube no longer was connected to them tells me that’s what happened."

"And it appears to me that both the front and the rear cap were blown out about the same time. So, it was a catastrophic failure due to the outside pressure of the water ... on the actual hull or the canned part of the submersible."

Study of wreck could help us 'learn from this tragedy,' expert says

Learning what exactly happened in the suspected implosion of the Titan could help us "learn from this tragedy," a former Coast Guard Reserve commander said.

Armin Cate, a former commander in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve and retired senior special agent with the Department of Homeland Security said the mission the Titan embarked on was much "like going to the moon."

"The only difference is in the moon you don’t have that type of pressure," he said. "The remoteness of this location combined with the pressure of the water, there’s just so many points of failure that could occur."

"I think that’s why they’re trying to retrieve these objects so they can study them so they can determine you know where the weak areas were, so that people can learn from this tragedy and be able to make stronger more capable vehicles in the future," he said.

Organization launched by King Charles pays tribute to Dawood

Prince’s Trust International, a charitable organization founded by King Charles III, has paid tribute to Shahzada Dawood, who served as an adviser to the organization. His father, Hussain, was also one of the trust’s founding patrons.

“We are deeply saddened by this terrible news. Prince’s Trust International has had a longstanding relationship with Shahzada Dawood and his family, and we have valued their support of our work in Pakistan for many years," the organization said. "Our thoughts are with Shahzada’s family and all those on board at this immensely tragic time."

Dawood had been an advisor to Prince’s Trust International in various capacities, including work on its Global Advisory Board, with a focus on the organization's work in Pakistan, the group said.

Both he and his son, Suleman, were presumed dead in the submersible disaster.

Canadian assistance with 'recovery and salvage' under discussion

The "extent of Canadian assistance with recovery and salvage" was being discussed on Thursday, the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre and the Canadian Armed Forces said in a statement.

Offering "sincere condolences to the family and friends of the crew of the Titan for their tragic loss," they said: "This is a truly unfortunate outcome that concludes the great efforts and cooperation between countries, militaries and partners."

With the operation "transitioning to recovery and salvage," they said that "all JRCC rescue assets will return to base to regenerate search and rescue capability and prepare for future search and rescue events."  

Explorers might not have had 'time to realize what happened,' expert says

The five people who died on the Titan may not have "had the time to realize what happened" if the submersible imploded as believed, an expert said.

If the vessel did implode, it would likely have essentially "exploded inwards in a matter of a thousandth of a second," Will Kohnen, chairman of peer-review group Marine Technology Society’s committee on manned submersibles, told Reuters.

"And it’s probably a mercy because that was probably a kinder end than the unbelievably difficult situation of being four days in a cold, dark and confined space," he said. "So, this would have happened very quickly. I don’t think anybody even had the time to realize what happened," he said.

Photo: Titan search vessels seen from space

Max Butterworth

Satellite images courtesy of Maxar Technologies show deep-sea recovery vessels searching for the OceanGate Titan submersible near the Titanic wreck site on Thursday.

From top: The Canadian Horizon Arctic, Bahamian vessel Deep Energy and Canadian registered Skandi Vinland.

Friend of Rush describes the appeal of extreme adventures

Henry Austin

It’s not for everyone but, for a certain type of adventurer, descending to the depths of the ocean inside a small and cramped vessel means “doing something extraordinary,” a friend of two of the people aboard the missing  Titan submersible  told NBC News Thursday.

Per Wimmer, who describes himself as an astronaut, adventurer, explorer, philanthropist, global financier, author and private island owner, operates in those circles. 

The Danish national, 54, said in a telephone interview that he is friends with Stockton Rush, CEO of  OceanGate , the company that chartered the submersible, and British billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding, who were among the five aboard the vessel.

Describing them as “adventurers,” Wimmer said they tried to “test the boundaries” and “do something extraordinary.”

Focus turns to determining what caused 'catastrophic implosion'

The dayslong search for Titan has come to a devastating end as officials turn their focus to what caused the "catastrophic implosion" believed to have killed the five people onboard.

The U.S. Coast Guard said on Thursday that debris discovered in the search for the sub was consistent with a catastrophic explosion. The debris was found off the bow of the sunken Titanic, officials said.

A U.S. Navy analysis of acoustic data had “detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion” near the Titan around the time it lost communications, a senior Navy official said. The sound was not definitive, but it was immediately shared with commanders, who decided to keep searching, the official said.

Missing Submersible Rescuers Detect ‘Underwater Noise’ in Search Area and Redirect Efforts

The Coast Guard said in a brief statement on Twitter that some of the remote-operated vehicles involved in the search had been relocated in an attempt to determine the origin of the sounds.

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Mike Ives ,  Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs ,  Jenny Gross ,  Jenna Russell and Jesus Jiménez

Here’s the latest on the missing submersible.

A Canadian surveillance aircraft looking for the missing Titan submersible and the five people on board in the North Atlantic has “detected underwater noises in the search area,” the U.S. Coast Guard said early Wednesday.

The Coast Guard said in a brief statement on Twitter that remote-operated vehicles were still searching for the Titan. Officials in the United States and Canada did not immediately respond to requests for further comment late Tuesday.

An international team of rescuers has been racing to search for the Titan in an area of the ocean larger than Connecticut. Aircraft from the United States and Canada have been scanning the surface, and sonar buoys have been pinging the depths. The Titan was thought to have less than two days of oxygen remaining as of Tuesday.

Even if the Titan can be located — in a remote patch of ocean where the seafloor lies more than two miles below the choppy surface — retrieving it might not be easy . To recover objects off the seafloor, the U.S. Navy uses a remote-operated vehicle that can reach depths of 20,000 feet. But ships that carry such a vehicle normally move no faster than about 20 miles per hour, and the Titanic wreck lies about 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.

The submersible was more than halfway into what should have been a two-and-a-half-hour dive to the ruins of the Titanic when it lost contact with a chartered research ship on Sunday morning. Leaders in the submersible craft industry had warned for years of possible “catastrophic” problems with the craft’s design and worried that the Titan had not followed standard certification procedures.

Here’s what to know:

The vessel was operated by OceanGate Expeditions , which has provided tours of the Titanic wreck since 2021. Spots in the tours go for a price of up to $250,000 as part of a booming high-risk travel industry .

In 2018, more than three dozen people, including oceanographers, submersible company executives and deep-sea explorers, warned that they had “unanimous concern” about the craft’s design and worried that the Titan had not followed standard certification procedures. In a 2019 blog post, the company said that “bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.”

Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate Expeditions, was piloting the submersible, according to the company. The other four occupants are Hamish Harding , a British businessman and explorer; the British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman ; and Paul-Henri Nargeolet , a French maritime expert who has been on over 35 dives to the Titanic wreck site.

Victoria Kim , Salman Masood and Yonette Joseph contributed reporting.

Mike Ives and Yonette Joseph

A Canadian plane searching for the Titan ‘detected underwater noises,’ the U.S. Coast Guard says.

A Canadian surveillance aircraft looking for the missing Titan submersible in the North Atlantic “detected underwater noises in the search area,” the United States Coast Guard said early Wednesday.

The Coast Guard said in a brief statement on Twitter that some of the remote-operated vehicles involved in the search had been relocated in an attempt to determine the origin of the sounds. Those searches had so far “yielded negative results” but were continuing, the statement said.

Canadian P-3 aircraft detected underwater noises in the search area. As a result, ROV operations were relocated in an attempt to explore the origin of the noises. Those ROV searches have yielded negative results but continue. 1/2 — USCGNortheast (@USCGNortheast) June 21, 2023

The Coast Guard said the Canadian aircraft was a P-3 surveillance plane, a model that is used for maritime patrol and support operations around the world. Data from the aircraft has been shared with the U.S. Navy for further analysis, it said.

The Coast Guard, the Department of Homeland Security and the Canadian military did not immediately respond to requests for comment. News of underwater noises in the search area was reported earlier by Rolling Stone magazine and CNN .

An international team of rescuers has been looking for the Titan in area of water larger than Connecticut. Aircraft from the United States and Canada have been scanning the surface, and sonar buoys have been deployed in the water. The Titan was thought to have less than a day of oxygen remaining as of Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the president of the Explorers Club, a New York-based organization, sent club members a letter that said sonar in the search area had “detected potential ‘tapping sounds’ implying that the crew may be alive and signaling” at 2 a.m. local time. The club’s president, Richard Garriott de Cayeux, did not elaborate.

In a statement posted to Twitter later on Tuesday, he said that “likely signs of life have been detected at the site.” He added that the club was working for approval to deploy a remote-operated vehicle in the search area that was capable of descending to depths of 6,000 meters, or nearly 20,000 feet.

Trevor Hale, a spokesman for the club, declined to comment on the record in a brief phone interview early Wednesday morning. One of the five people aboard the Titan, the British explorer Hamish Harding , is a board member of the club.

Search Vessels Around the Titanic Wreckage

Polar Prince

newfoundland

North Atlantic

the Titanic

Skandi Vinland

Deep Energy

The Canadian vessel

Horizon Arctic deployed

a remote-operated vehicle

that discovered a debris field.

The Titanic wreckage

sits on the ocean

floor, approximately

12,500 feet down.

North Atlantic Ocean

that discovered a debris field

containing remains of the Titan.

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The New York Times

Titan by the numbers: 22 feet long with room for five.

The Titan submersible that went missing over the weekend in the remote North Atlantic is the most lightweight and cost-efficient deep-sea submersible ever made, according to OceanGate Expeditions , the Everett, Wash.-based company that developed it.

Here are details that the company has shared about the vessel.

Capacity: Five people (one pilot and four crew members)

Maximum depth: 13,123 feet

Dimensions: 22 feet long, 9.2 feet wide, 8.3 feet high

Weight: 21,000 pounds

Pressure vessel materials: Carbon fiber and titanium

Speed: 3 knots (about 3.45 miles per hour), with propulsion by four electric thrusters

Life support: 96 hours for five people

The doomed ocean liner Titanic continues to intrigue the public after more than a century.

The five people aboard the missing deep-sea submersible Titan are not the first to risk their lives for a chance to glimpse one of history’s most famous shipwrecks.

More than a century after the R.M.S. Titanic struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic during its first voyage from Britain to New York, the disaster continues to fascinate people like few other episodes in history.

The Titanic, the world’s largest steamship at the time, made headlines when it went down in the early hours of April 15, 1912, killing 1,500 people. It had been packed with glamorous guests and was called “unsinkable” by officials of the company that operated it.

For decades afterward, it was the holy grail of undiscovered shipwrecks and the subject of much storytelling, including “A Night to Remember,” Walter Lord’s best-selling 1955 book.

The mystique endured even after the wreck of the Titanic was found on the sea floor in 1985. Two years later, Mr. Lord was a speaker at a Titanic tribute event aboard a chartered yacht in New York that included a five-piece band like the one that had played for doomed passengers on the Titanic’s stern. In 1997, the James Cameron film “ Titanic ,” starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, introduced the tragedy to a new generation.

Today, young people are watching conversations about the Titanic unfold on social media — including on the short-form video app TikTok, where established facts about the disaster merge with misinformation and manipulated content .

Advances in deep-sea submersible technology have made it possible to travel to the wreck itself. With tickets for the Titan voyage priced at $250,000, the trip is not for everyone, and some critics object to the very idea of visiting an underwater gravesite. Even so, the trips are popular enough to sustain a booming mini-industry.

The company that owns the Titan submersible, OceanGate, has been taking tourists to the Titanic wreck since 2021. It said in a 2019 news release that slots were being booked by “citizen explorers seeking an adventurous, scientific and meaningful experience.”

This year, the company announced that five expeditions, each lasting eight days , were planned for 2023, and another five for 2024.

“This is your chance to step outside of everyday life and discover something truly extraordinary,” the company said. “Become one of the few to see the Titanic with your own eyes.”

Shawn Hubler

Aboard a submersible, you’re a ‘long way’ from help, a former Navy pilot says.

A former national security official who operated deep-dive submersibles for the U.S. Navy said on Tuesday that piloting a vessel like the one that rescuers are searching for in the North Atlantic was like navigating in outer space.

“You are a long way from anything that can give you help,” said Jeff Eggers, a former Navy commander who spent four years piloting military mini-submarines that were similar in size to the missing submersible, called the Titan, but more technologically sophisticated. “You’re incredibly reliant on the integrity of the vessel. And you’re dependent on the resources you’ve built into the craft.”

In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Eggers, who retired from the military in 2013 after two decades of service and served as special assistant for national security affairs in the Obama administration, said the public tended to underappreciate the perils inherent in excursions like the one undertaken by Titan, which went missing on Sunday en route to the ruins of the Titanic.

Among other things, he said, the civilian-operated submersible appeared to lack significant safeguards that the Navy requires, including an escape hatch, so that even if the Titan managed to surface, its occupants would be unable to exit the craft on their own.

Other risks are a constant concern in submersibles, he added, including potential malfunctions with the ballast systems; failures in the vessel’s inner pressure hull, which is shaped like a hot dog and can crack catastrophically under the extreme weight of the ocean; and electrical fires and failures, which tend to knock out the ability to communicate and maneuver.

“We had a lot of redundancy and safety engineered into our submersibles,” he said of the Navy submersibles that he operated. “There’s much less oversight in the civilian context.”

Leaders in the submersible craft industry have long warned that the Titan’s design posed potentially serious problems.

“The conditions at those depths are unforgiving,” Mr. Eggers said. “It’s like operating a small spacecraft.”

William J. Broad

Some experts fear an innovative submersible maker was ‘cutting corners.’

Many vessels that descend into the sunless depths of the sea for scientific exploration are sturdy behemoths with proven engineering and track records for safety.

But Titan , the lost submersible from the company OceanGate , is a technological maverick based on novel concepts that differ from standard designs. Moreover, unlike most deep-sea craft, Titan has undergone no certification by a reputable marine group that does such licensing work for other craft, including one built by OceanGate that dives to shallower depths.

“It suggests they were cutting corners,” said Bruce H. Robison, a senior marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, who has explored the ocean’s depths with more than a dozen different kinds of submersibles.

Alfred S. McLaren, a retired Navy submariner and president emeritus of the Explorers Club of New York City, agreed. “I’ve had three people ask me about making a dive on it,” he said in reference to the lost submersible. “And I said, ‘Don’t do it.’ I wouldn’t do it in a million years.”

When asked to respond to questions about the certification of Titan, a spokesman for OceanGate said in an email, “We are unable to provide any additional information at this time.”

As a class, submersibles go down for hours, not days or months, and rely on a mother ship for support, communications, sustenance for the crew, as well as sleeping bunks and proper toilets.

Whether dependable old designs or innovative newer models, all the craft face the crushing pressures of the abyss — at the level of the Titanic’s resting place, three tons per square inch. They thus face strict requirements for risk avoidance, if not the flat-out assurance of crew and equipment safety.

Private vessels — those used on superyachts, exploratory craft, tourists jaunts — are not formally regulated by any governmental or intergovernmental agency. Nor do they meet the rigorous standards that are applied to deep-sea craft used by the United States Navy and other government agencies.

Even so, the best of the private submersible class undergo extensive testing, certification and ratings for particular depths by such organizations as Lloyd’s Register , a British company that specializes in assessing the quality of oceangoing equipment for the maritime industry. In the industry this is known as classing.

Titan — the 22-foot long submersible that disappeared on Sunday while diving to the Titanic — is unlike most submersibles in that its passenger hull is made of two very different materials. It’s composed of a mix of carbon fiber and titanium, producing a craft significantly lighter than submersibles made primarily of steel or titanium, a lightweight, high-strength metal.

The dissimilar types of materials used in the craft’s hull construction “raise structural concerns,” said Dr. McLaren, who has twice dived on submersibles to the Titanic. “They have different coefficients of expansion and compression, and that works against keeping a watertight bond.”

On its website, the submersible’s owner, OceanGate, a private company in Everett, Wash., says the vessel’s light weight and its launch and recovery platform significantly cut transport and operating costs, making Titan “a more financially viable option for individuals interested in exploring the deep.” Even so, the passenger cost on the current Titanic dive was $250,000.

Titan’s novel construction features also make it incapable of being certified, according to the company . OceanGate explains the craft’s unlicensed (what the industry calls unclassed or uncertified) status on its website as reflecting the vessel’s cutting-edge technologies, rather than a sign of shortcuts or inadequacies that could jeopardize safety.

“The vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure,” the company said on its website. “As a result, simply focusing on classing the vessel does not address the operational risks. Maintaining high-level operational safety requires constant, committed effort and a focused corporate culture — two things that OceanGate takes very seriously and that are not assessed during classification.”

The company did, however, say that one of its other submersibles has completed a safety certification. Antipodes goes down 1,000 feet, a tiny fraction of the Titanic’s depth, which is some two and a half miles. Like Titan, it has been used for tourist dives. Its certification was performed by the American Bureau of Shipping , a marine industry giant based in Houston.

In an interview, Jennifer Mire, a spokesperson for the American Bureau of Shipping, said the company had done no evaluation of the larger submersible. “We don’t have any connection to the Titan,” she said.

OceanGate, in explaining Titan’s lack of certification on its website, said that groups like Lloyd’s Register and the American Bureau of Shipping “often have a multi-year approval cycle due to a lack of pre-existing standards, especially, for example, in the case of many of OceanGate’s innovations, such as carbon-fiber pressure vessels and a real-time hull health monitoring system.”

Dr. McLaren said the company’s line of reasoning was unpersuasive and that the innovative nature of the craft made certification even more important. Knowing that it was uncertified, he said, was enough to make him “run in the opposite direction.”

Triton Submarines , an American company that makes innovative submersibles with transparent hulls to give passengers a panoramic view of the abyss, calls vehicle certification one of the company’s founding principles.

“We are proud that every submersible delivered remains in active service and certified to its original design depth,” it says on the company’s website . “Every Triton ever completed has passed certification.”

Christine Chung

Extreme travel rescue operations are vast in scale and cost. Who foots the bill is murky.

The ongoing search and rescue effort for the missing Titan submersible with five people on board, involving a huge response from American, Canadian and French authorities, is vast in scale, including both the U.S. Navy and the Coast Guard.

The expense for such an endeavor is likely to be equally great, and it is unclear whether taxpayers in the countries involved, ultimately, will be required to pay it. The passengers aboard the submersible paid $250,000 each for the experience of diving to the Titanic.

“These people paid a lot of money to do something extraordinarily risky and hard to recover from,” said Chris Boyer, the executive director of the National Association for Search and Rescue , a nonprofit that focuses on wilderness rescues. The rescue mission, he said, would “probably cost millions.”

In the United States, search and rescue efforts — who conducts them and who pays for them — depend on where you get lost , Mr. Boyer said. Some states, like New Hampshire, charge individuals for rescues if the people are determined to have been reckless.

Cynthia Hernandez, a spokeswoman for the National Park Service , said in a statement that the agency does not charge for search and rescue operations that occur within its parks because it considers them a public service. The park service conducted 3,428 search and rescues last year.

But, she said, when the cost of search and rescue efforts “crosses a certain threshold, funds may be diverted from N.P.S. funds for other types of programs or projects.”

It is unknown whether OceanGate Expeditions, the company that provided the excursion to the Titanic ruins, required its participants to sign up for any trip insurance.

The organizers of risky and adventurous expeditions, including operators like Abercrombie & Kent and Black Tomato , said that they require extensive insurance policies. Peter Anderson, managing director of the luxury concierge service Knightsbridge Circle , said the company works with services like Covac Global that can “evacuate and repatriate our members for medical emergencies.” But even the minimum policy, $100,000, would not come close to paying for the current efforts.

The Coast Guard did not immediately respond to questions about the expense of past extensive search and rescue efforts.

In 2021, it rescued Cyril Derreumaux , an experienced kayaker who was about a week into an attempt to paddle 2,400 nautical miles from the California coast to Hawaii. The Coast Guard estimated his rescue, which involved a helicopter and at least one diver, cost $42,000, according to The San Francisco Chronicle .

Mr. Derreumaux, who lives in Marin County, Calif., and is now 46, emphasized in an interview that his goal was to fulfill a dream and that he was not a tourist who had undertaken the venture with minimal training. He received backlash after being rescued, he said, with some people saying that the effort was costly and unnecessary. A stranger even sent him a Venmo request for tens of thousands of dollars, Mr. Derreumaux said.

Mr. Derreumaux said he was thankful to the Coast Guard for saving his life, along with the lives of many others in need of its help.

“I would not have called the Coast Guard if it weren’t a life-threatening situation,” he said.

He attempted the trip again the following year. This time, he was successful.

“I knew I had what it takes to do it,” he said. “I think it’s part of the human spirit of trying to do things that are really hard for what it teaches us about human resilience, determination and to do things that maybe don’t make sense.”

Of the Titan’s passengers, Mr. Derreumaux said: “Their lives are worth saving.”

Claire Fahy contributed reporting.

Anushka Patil and Jacey Fortin

Inside the Titan: Quiet and cramped, with a single porthole.

Passengers seeking a glimpse of the R.M.S. Titanic aboard the submersible that disappeared in the North Atlantic this week have endured hours in a dangerous drop to the ocean floor aboard a cramped craft with a single porthole.

Mike Reiss, a producer and writer for “The Simpsons,” boarded the vessel, known as the Titan, last summer. He said that passengers were required to sign a waiver that mentioned death three times on the first page.

Passengers on his 10-hour journey — a trip that can cost up to $250,000 — were composed but excited, he said. Sandwiches and water were available on the vessel, but he recalled being told that many passengers did not eat during the journey because of excitement, and that the rudimentary toilet on board had never been used.

OceanGate Expeditions, which operates the vessel, has described the trip on its website as a “thrilling and unique travel experience.” The company did not immediately respond to a request for more information on Tuesday.

The Titan is a tight fit. David Pogue, a CBS reporter and former New York Times tech columnist who has been on board, described the cylinder as “about the size of a minivan.”

Images from OceanGate show a vessel with an interior like a metal tube , where passengers can sit on the flat floor with their backs to the curved walls. There is some overhead lighting but no chairs, and little room to move or stand upright.

Still, Mr. Reiss, who had previously traveled with OceanGate Expeditions to see Hudson Canyon off the shores of New York City, described the journey to the Titanic as “very comfortable” and said he fell asleep during the quiet, dimly lit descent. “You just drop like a stone for two and a half hours,” he said.

As the submersible made its way to the Titanic, Mr. Reiss said, it was carried off course by underwater currents. The compass was “acting very weird,” he recalled, and the team knew only that they were about 500 yards from where they should have been.

Still, the Titan, which could spend only three hours on the ocean floor, managed to arrive at the wreck with roughly 20 minutes to spare for what Mr. Reiss called a quick “photo op.” He was able to see the sunken ship through the porthole, which he described as the size of a washing machine window.

The wreck was “the biggest thing in the world,” he said, “but you’re in such darkness, you just don’t know where it is going to be.”

Here’s how to search for the missing craft underwater.

The hunt for a deep-diving submersible last seen slipping beneath the waves to visit the wreckage of the R.M.S. Titanic on Sunday now involves the coast guards of both the United States and Canada. But finding a single object on the bottom of the ocean is no easy task.

The U.S. Coast Guard is facing extreme logistical challenges as it races to find and reach the Titan. The five people inside the submersible were believed to have roughly 40 hours of breathable air left as of early Tuesday afternoon, Coast Guard officials said.

While the U.S. and Canadian militaries have deployed rescue craft by both air and sea, the job of locating the Titan may ultimately fall to civilian undersea explorers, who typically use technologies in tandem to search the seafloor and identify objects.

To scan large areas of water, devices called autonomous underwater vehicles are often used. Before being placed into the water, these torpedo-like robots are programmed with the boundaries of a search area. They then dive and propel themselves at a preset altitude above the bottom, radiating sonar waves.

The emitters, called side-scan sonars, have evolved to produce fairly detailed imagery of objects on the bottom that can be analyzed once the vehicles are brought back aboard a mother ship and their data is downloaded. Those missions can take hours to complete, depending on the size of the area being searched.

Using the analysis of those sonar images, explorers may find areas of interest, often based on features like straight lines and right angles that indicate a man-made object.

The extreme depths involved pose a challenge. Divers wearing specialized equipment can safely reach depths of just a few hundred feet below the surface before having to spend long amounts of time decompressing on the way back up. A couple hundred feet deeper, and darkness reigns.

The Titanic lies at a depth in the North Atlantic that humans can reach only while inside specialized submersibles that keep their occupants warm, dry and supplied with breathable air.

Searchers can send down a type of uncrewed device called a remote-operated vehicle, which is controlled by a human operator on the surface and has optical cameras that send a constant video feed through an umbilical line to the mother ship. Such vehicles often have gripper arms that can pick up objects on the seafloor.

Advanced vehicles like the U.S. Navy’s CURV-21 can dive to 20,000 feet underwater and can use gripper arms to delicately thread straps and lifting lines to objects so they can be winched to the surface by cranes aboard a salvage ship.

But getting that kind of equipment to the site takes time. The Titanic’s wreck is about 370 miles south of Newfoundland, and the kinds of ships that can carry a vehicle like the Navy’s deepest-diving robot normally move no faster than about 20 miles per hour.

In many submersibles, the air inside is recycled — carbon dioxide is removed and oxygen is added — but on a long enough timeline, the vessel will lose the ability to scrub enough carbon dioxide, and the air inside will no longer sustain life.

If the Titan’s batteries run down and are no longer able to run heaters that keep the occupants warm in the freezing deep, the people inside can become hypothermic. Should the submersible’s pressure hull fail, the end for those inside would be certain and quick.

Daniel Victor

Stockton Rush, pilot of the Titan, is a booster of deep-seas tourism.

Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate Expeditions and one of the five occupants of the submersible missing this week in the North Atlantic, has advocated for deep-seas tourism in the face of criticism.

His company proceeded with its tours despite the “unanimous concern” expressed by three dozen industry leaders in 2018. In an interview last year , he told The New York Times that high-resolution footage gathered on the Titanic tours could benefit researchers.

“No public entity is going to fund going back to the Titanic,” Mr. Rush said. “There are other sites that are newer and probably of greater scientific value.”

In the interview, he defended the price tag — seats in the Titan cost up to $250,000.

“For those who think it’s expensive, it’s a fraction of the cost of going to space, and it’s very expensive for us to get these ships and go out there,” said Mr. Rush, who founded OceanGate in 2009. “And the folks who don’t like anybody making money sort of miss the fact that that’s the only way anything gets done in this world.”

By some accounts, Mr. Rush has been a charismatic booster of submersible trips. Mike Reiss, a writer and producer of “The Simpsons,” who took a trip in a different OceanGate submersible that was piloted by Mr. Rush, compared him on Tuesday to Henry Ford and the Wright brothers, describing him as “a magnetic man” who is “the last of the great American dreamers.”

Craig Howard, a longtime friend of Mr. Rush’s, said on Tuesday that just before he left Newfoundland for the Titanic site, Mr. Rush told him he was excited for this year’s dives.

“And there was always a ‘next dive,’” he said.

Mr. Rush is a descendant of two signers of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton. He graduated from Princeton with a degree in aerospace engineering in 1984, according to his company biography. In 1989, he personally built an experimental aircraft that he continues to fly, the company said.

In a segment on “CBS Sunday Morning” that aired in November 2022, Mr. Rush told the interviewer, David Pogue, that he grew up wanting to be an astronaut and, after he earned his degree, a fighter pilot.

“I had this epiphany that I didn’t want — it wasn’t about going to space,” Mr. Rush said. “It was about exploring. It was about finding new life forms. I wanted to be sort of the Captain Kirk. I didn’t want to be the passenger in the back. And I realized that the ocean is the universe.”

Anushka Patil and Emma Bubola contributed reporting.

Matthew Bloch ,  Keith Collins and Scott Reinhard

Multiple vessels assisted in the search Tuesday, with more on the way.

The Sycamore was

approximately 975 miles

from the wreckage

at 10:54 a.m. Wednesday.

Ann Harvey and

Terry Fox at

around 11:00 a.m.

Newfoundland

The Polar Prince , John Cabot

and three other vessels

were within 26 miles

of the wreckage by around

11:00 a.m. Wednesday.

at 10:50 p.m.

Atalante at

Glace Bay at

10:50 p.m. Tuesday

Sources: United States Coast Guard, MarineTraffic, GEBCO

Note: All times are in Eastern. Data as of 11:30 a.m.

The U.S. Coast Guard said on Tuesday that several more vessels were on their way to assist in the search for the Titan submersible, including its ship the Sycamore and a Canadian Coast Guard vessel, John Cabot. The French government said on Tuesday that it was also sending a research vessel, the Atalante, which is equipped with an exploration robot, to help with the search. They will join the M.V. Polar Prince and Deep Energy, a pipe-laying vessel flagged in the Bahamas.

The Polar Prince deployed the Titan submersible on Sunday and has been searching the area since losing contact with it less than two hours later. Deep Energy arrived at the scene earlier on Tuesday and launched a remotely-operated vehicle, or R.O.V., to aid in the search, the Coast Guard said. American and Canadian aircraft have also been scanning the search area by sight and radar, and have deployed sonar buoys.

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US navy says it picked up ‘anomaly’ hours after sub began mission – as it happened

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• Titanic sub live updates – latest news
• 23 Jun 2023 What we know so far
• 23 Jun 2023 James Cameron says his sources heard a 'loud bang' too
• 23 Jun 2023 Here's what we know
• 22 Jun 2023 US navy detected an ‘anomaly’ that was likely the Titan's implosion
• 22 Jun 2023 19-year old victim’s aunt: He was “terrified” prior to trip
• 22 Jun 2023 Titanic director James Cameron: "I'm struck by the similarity" of both incidents
• 22 Jun 2023 Summary of the day so far
• 22 Jun 2023 Vessels and personnel to be demobilised over next 24 hours, says US Coast Guard
• 22 Jun 2023 Size of the debris field consistent with implosion, says expert
• 22 Jun 2023 R Adm John Mauger says 'catastrophic implosion' of vessel would have been picked up by sonar
• 22 Jun 2023 Five different pieces of debris signalled it was Titan sub, says expert
• 22 Jun 2023 US Coast Guard confirms crew of Titan sub have died after 'catastrophic' event
• 22 Jun 2023 OceanGate says they believe passengers on missing sub 'have sadly been lost'
• 22 Jun 2023 Rescue expert claims debris is 'landing frame' and 'rear cover' of submersible
• 22 Jun 2023 'Debris field' discovered within search area by ROV, says US Coast Guard
• 22 Jun 2023 British billionaire's family accuse OceanGate of taking 'far too long' to report disappearance
• 22 Jun 2023 Missing crew have longer 'time window available' than others believe, says OceanGate co-founder
• 22 Jun 2023 Search teams 'remain hopeful at this point', says US Coast Guard
• 22 Jun 2023 Teenager on board missing sub is student at university in Glasgow
• 22 Jun 2023 Robot vehicles deployed as Titan's oxygen supplies estimate to be exhausted
• 22 Jun 2023 Two remote-controlled deep-sea diving vehicles deployed
• 22 Jun 2023 Experts caution against giving precise estimate of when breathable air may run out
• 22 Jun 2023 Experts warn time is running out with search area still vast
• 22 Jun 2023 Opening Summary

US navy detected an ‘anomaly’ that was likely the Titan's implosion

The AP reports:

The Navy went back and analyzed its acoustic data after the Titan submersible was reported missing Sunday. That anomaly was ‘consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost, ’ according to the senior Navy official. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive acoustic detection system. The Navy passed on the information to the Coast Guard, which continued its search.

This blog is closing now, but you can continue to follow live coverage on our new liveblog . Thank you for reading.

James Cameron has also spoken to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, saying how he feels “heartsick” from Thursday’s news. He said that when he heard on Monday that the Titan had lost communications and tracking data simultaneously, the only scenario he could come up with was “an implosion, a shockwave event so powerful that it actually took out a secondary system that has its own pressure vessel and its own battery power supply”, referring to the tracking system.

Cameron said that once he heard from the deep-submergence community that a loud noise had been picked up on Sunday, he told everyone that “we had lost comrades and I encouraged everybody to raise a glass in their honour.”

You can watch more of the interview here.

What we know so far

Five crew members aboard the submersible Titan were probably killed instantly in a “catastrophic implosion” as it descended to the wreck of the Titanic two miles below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, US Coast Guard officials said.

A large debris field containing five major pieces of the vessel were spotted by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) scouring the seabed near the Titanic wreck site 400 miles south of St John’s, Newfoundland, officials said. The debris was “consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber”, they said.

It is too early to tell exactly when the implosion occurred, officials said, noting that nothing was detected on sonar buoys deployed in the ocean in recent days.

Those aboard the submersible were British adventurer Hamish Harding, 58; French veteran Titanic explorer Paul Henri Nargeoloet, 77; British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son Suleman; and 61-year-old American Stockton Rush, co-founder of OceanGate, the company that operated the lost sub.

The US Navy says it recorded a sound “consistent with an implosion” just after the Titan was reported to have lost communications with its support ship on Monday. The navy passed this information onto the Coast Guard which continued the search because it did not consider the information to be “definitive”.

Banging noises heard earlier in the week have been attributed to other vessels operating in the area.

The friends and family of those killed have thanked those engaged in the search and paid respect to their loved ones. The families of Dawood said they were overwhelmed by the support they have received; Nargeoloet’s son remembered him as a larger than life figure and an aviation company operated by Harding’s family described him as a “larger than life figure”.

Officials could not confirm whether they will be able to recover the bodies of the crew members. The US Coast Guard will continue to investigate the site of the debris field, while vessels and personnel will be demobilised over the next 24 hours.

Film director James Cameron says he had concerns about the construction of the submersible but trusted the issues had been addressed by others. He says friends heard the bang that was later detected by the US navy.

Though some robots will remain on site to continue to collect evidence, the US Coast Guard has begun “demobilising personnel”

Officials say that now the fate of the Titan is known the search operation will be wound down though some vehicles will still be deployed to continue to gather evidence.

U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger told reporters on Thursday that robotic craft on the seabed will continue to gather evidence but it was not clear whether gathering remains will be possible given the nature of the accident and the extreme conditions.

We will begin to demobilize personnel and vessels from the scene over the course of the next 24 hours.

The Reuters report on the potential legal situation facing OceanGate going forward also highlights some interesting quirks about how maritime law works in these situations.

For instance, the report notes that under maritime law, owners of vessels involved in an accident may ask a court in the US to limit damages claims by family members to the current value of the vessel.

Since the Titan was destroyed, Reuters notes, “that would be zero”.

But to do this, OceanGate would need to prove it had no knowledge of potential defects with the submersible and would carry the burden of proof, which is a hard standard to meet.

Another maritime law, the Death on the High Seas Act, limits the amount people who were financially dependent on another who died in a naval accident to only a portion of their future earnings. Plaintiffs also cannot recover losses for pain and suffering.

Amazon has begun to clear bad-taste reviews of the game controller used to steer the lost Titan sub.

Users began posting black-humour reviews of the controller to Amazon after news about the missing sub broke including images showing a Logitech F710 game controller used to control the vessel.

It is not unusual for game controllers to be used to pilot drones, ROVs, and sometimes vessels but users have posted reviews critical about its role in steering submarines.

Now the fate of the sub is known, the BBC reports that Amazon has begun deleting these reviews as they do not comply with community guidelines.

Tributes have poured in for the five people who are now believed to have been instantly killed in a “catastrophic implosion” of the Titan submersible during its dive to the Titanic.

On Thursday, after days of aerial and underwater searches, a robotic diving vehicle deployed from a Canadian ship discovered a debris field from the submersible Titan on the seabed 1,600 feet (488 metres) from the bow of the Titanic.

Five major fragments of the 22-foot (6.7-metre) Titan were located in the debris field left from its disintegration, including the vessel’s tail cone and two sections of the pressure hull, Coast Guard officials said.

“The debris field here is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vehicle,” Rear Admiral John Mauger of the US coast guard said.

The Titan, operated by the US-based company OceanGate Expeditions, had been missing since it lost contact with its surface support ship on Sunday morning about an hour and 45 minutes into what should have been a two-hour dive to the world’s most famous shipwreck.

The White House said the loved ones of the five men had endured a “harrowing ordeal” over the past week.

For more on the reactions to this grim tragedy, read the full report by Guardian International’s site editor Graham Russell.

John Nathanial Paschall , stepson of famed French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet says he “thought nothing of it” in the lead up to the trip owing to his step-father’s past experience visiting the wreck of the Titanic.

Speaking to MSNBC , Paschall said he and other families have been shocked by the news of the fate of the Titan.

We’ve been living a nightmare this week. I think that goes for all the families. We can speak about PH but it has been truly is a nightmare of an experience. And I hope no one ever has to go through it again.

Paschall remembered his Nargeolet as a “really great step-father to me” with a big heart, a great sense of humour and a love of pranks.

There are so many ways I was just blown away by his love and care for me.

The ocean, Paschall said, was his step-father’s “home away from home”.

It was so cool. He talked about it so much, I almost became numb to it, in a way because of how much he talked about it. Oh, another expedition you get to go on. That’s so cool. But he was just such an inspiration in terms of the amount of work he put in and his fearlessness with everything.

His big question for OceanGate however was: Were the safety procedures followed as close as possible? Was anything going on?

James Cameron says his sources heard a 'loud bang' too

Filmmaker and underwater enthusiast James Cameron has told Reuters in a Zoom interview that his sources reported hearing a “loud bang” on Sunday, similar to the US Navy’s report that it heard an underwater “anomaly” near the wreck of the Titanic on Sunday.

Cameron said he knew the Titan submersible was lost from the start, suspecting it imploded at the time the Titan’s support vessel lost communications one hour and 45 minutes into the mission.

“We got confirmation within an hour that there had been a loud bang at the same time that the sub comms were lost. A loud bang on the hydrophone. Loss of transponder. Loss of comms. I knew what happened. The sub imploded,” Cameron said.

He added that he told colleagues in an email on Monday, “We’ve lost some friends,” and, “It’s on the bottom in pieces right now.” The five who died mark the first deep-sea fatalities for the industry, Cameron said.

Former US President Barrack Obama has contrasted the media attention on the Titan sub with that given to the loss of 700 asylum seekers who died in near Pylos, Greece.

Obama was speaking at an event with the Stavros Niarchos Foundation where he pointed out the disparity.

You think about what’s happening this week. there’s a potential tragedy unfolding with a submarine that is getting, you know ,minute to minute coverage, all around the world And it’s understandable because we all want and pray for those folks to be rescued. But the fact that’s got more attention than 700 people who sank is –- that’s an untenable situation.

Impressive remarks from @BarackObama today at @SNForg as he courageously draws a parallel between the media's focus on the #TitanicSubmarine and the tragic loss of approximately 700 asylum seekers in a recent shipwreck near #Pylos | #RefugeeWeek #Titanic pic.twitter.com/6cIqqJ8XAk — Makis Mylonas (@MylonasMakis) June 22, 2023

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Here's the latest on the missing Titan submersible and the race to rescue passengers

Emily Olson

Ayana Archie

U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick speaks during a press conference about the search efforts for the submersible that went missing near the wreck of the Titanic in Boston on Tuesday. Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick speaks during a press conference about the search efforts for the submersible that went missing near the wreck of the Titanic in Boston on Tuesday.

For the latest updates on the search for the missing submersible, head here.

As of Tuesday night, five passengers aboard a submersible in the North Atlantic are the subject of an international search. The vessel is owned by OceanGate, and designed to explore the site of the Titanic.

Authorities estimate there's only enough oxygen in the submersible to last for less than two days.

Here's what we know:

When and where did the vessel go missing?

Missing submersible: Rescuers race to find Titan after detecting underwater noises

The 21-foot vessel, which is named Titan , lost communication with its control center on Sunday morning, roughly 1 hour and 45 minutes into its scheduled dive, the U.S. Coast Guard wrote on Twitter.

Titan had been deployed by a Canadian expedition ship, the Polar Prince, about 435 miles (380 nautical miles) south of St. John's in Newfoundland, not far from the site of the iconic shipwreck.

Why was the submersible diving?

The missing vessel is owned by OceanGate, a company based in Washington state that offers underwater voyages to explore the remains of the Titanic from the seafloor.

'Tiny sub, big ocean': Why the Titanic submersible search is so challenging

OceanGate is a major chronicler of the ship's decay and shared the first-ever full-size digital scan of the wreck site in May.

OceanGate is also a pioneer in the deep sea tourism economy. For $250,000 a person, the company takes adventurers on a deep sea tour lasting eight days and stretching hundreds of miles.

From St. John's in Newfoundland, Canada, explorers travel 380 miles offshore and 2.4 miles below the surface.

A remarkable new view of the Titanic shipwreck is here, thanks to deep-sea mappers

If successful, they can catch a glimpse of what's left of the 1912 iceberg-crash disaster, which took the lives of all but 700 of the Titanic's 2,200 passengers and crew. Today, the ship is slowly succumbing to a metal-eating bacteria , which may cause it to fully disintegrate in a matter of decades.

Mike Reiss , who joined OceanGate to glimpse the deteriorating wreck in 2022, said the trip is less tourism than it is true exploration — and the people who dare to try it are made well aware of the risks.

"You sign a massive waiver that lists one way after another that you could die on the trip," he told the BBC in an interview Tuesday. "They mention death three times on page one. So it's never far from your mind. As I was getting on to the sub, that was my thought: That this could be the end."

'You sign a massive waiver that you could die on the trip' As search teams race against time to find the small sub that went missing during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic, writer Mike Reiss told #BBCBreakfast about taking the same trip last year https://t.co/FNeiSyZfLl pic.twitter.com/2STvm7YDbz — BBC Breakfast (@BBCBreakfast) June 20, 2023

Who was on board?

The Titanic-touring vessel contained one pilot and four paid passengers called "mission specialists," according to the U.S. Coast Guard. "Mission specialists" take turns operating sonar equipment and performing the tasks necessary to complete a dive.

Among those paid passengers was British businessman Hamish Harding, according to a statement from Action Aviation , a company where Harding works as chairman.

Harding holds three Guinness World Records, including the longest duration (4 hours, 15 minutes) at a full ocean depth (2.88 miles) by a crewed vessel. He has also trekked to the South Pole, circumnavigated the Earth in less than 48 hours and visited space in Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket .

Newly released footage of a 1986 Titanic dive reveals the ship's haunting interior

Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, two members of a prominent Pakistani family known for investing, were also on board the vessel, according to a statement shared with outlets such as The Associated Press .

A fourth person on board is Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French expert on the Titanic, his agent has confirmed to several outlets, including The New York Times . Nargeolet serves as director for RMS Titanic Inc. , the U.S. company that owns the salvage rights to the Titanic site. The Times reports that Nargeolet has completed over 35 dives to the wreckage, including a previous Titan expedition.

Titan's pilot and the fifth person has been identified as OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush.

Why did the vessel go missing?

This 2004 photo shows the remains of a coat and boots in the mud on the sea bed near the Titanic's stern. Institute for Exploration, Center for Archaeological Oceanography/AP hide caption

This 2004 photo shows the remains of a coat and boots in the mud on the sea bed near the Titanic's stern.

It's still unclear why the submersible lost communication with its control crew on the expedition ship.

Ahead of its launch, OceanGate said it would rely on the satellite-based internet company Starlink for the communications necessary for carrying out the expedition. A text-message-based system relying on underwater acoustic positioning normally allows the Titan to communicate with the control ship, according to an Australian researcher writing for The Conversation.

OceanGate says its vessels are "equipped with some basic emergency medical supplies and 96 hours of life support," according to the company's website .

Pop Culture Happy Hour

'titanic' was king of the world 25 years ago for a good reason.

And for good reason: This is not the first time an OceanGate submersible has gotten lost, according to David Pogue, a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning .

Pogue, who traveled on an OceanGate expedition to see the Titanic last summer, recalled that the control room was unable to help the submersible locate the wrecked liner for roughly three hours due to technical difficulties.

James Cameron aims to finally put that 'Titanic' door debate to rest, 25 years later

"The difference this year is that it seems like they lost contact with the ship," Pogue told NPR. "They can't even reach the sub and that's really scary."

He added that factors like bad weather and mechanical issues mean the submersible vessels rarely make it to the Titanic, despite the expensive price tag. This season has seen zero successful dives, Pogue said.

What's it like inside the Titan?

Videos from Pogue's initial CBS Sunday Morning report on OceanGate show him reading from the "mission specialist" waiver, which points out that Titan has not been approved or certified "by any regulatory body."

"I couldn't help noticing how many pieces of this sub seem improvised," Pogue adds.

“Hope is quickly fading” to find the missing submersible that left for a mission to the wreckage of the Titanic, says @Pogue , who went on board the same sub last year. He says it could be impossible to rescue the passengers if the sub is still underwater. pic.twitter.com/n0NTsLYkIJ — CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) June 20, 2023

A single plastic bottle and some Ziploc bags stand in for a toilet. An Xbox game controller and an elevator-esque up/down button serve as the vessel's primary controls. The interior lighting is from Camping World, notes OceanGate founder Stockton Rush.

In whole, the space inside is about the size of a minivan, not tall enough for someone to fully stand.

In an interview with NPR's All Things Considered , Pogue said there are seven different ballast mechanisms that can help the Titan rise from great depths.

"Some of these work even if the power is out or even if everyone on board is passed out," Pogue said.

The fact that rescue crews haven't spotted the vessel on the ocean's surface might mean that the Titan is snagged or its 5-inch-thick carbon fiber hull was penetrated, Pogue said.

Either situation could be catastrophic for the people on board.

What's the latest on the search efforts?

As of Tuesday at 1 p.m. ET, the Titan had about 40 hours of oxygen left, said Capt. Jamie Frederick, a response coordinator for the U.S. Coast Guard overseeing the search.

A unified command including the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy, the Canadian Coast Guard and OceanGate are working together to steer the search efforts, but so far, has come up unsuccessful, Frederick said during a press conference.

TED Radio Hour

Robert ballard: what hidden underwater worlds are left to discover.

"We wouldn't be searching and putting all effort out there" if the submersible wasn't recoverable, Frederick said, adding that the crews contain the "nation's best experts."

Several Canadian Coast Guard vessels were en route to the scene, as were several additional private vessels.

The teams in place are continuing to use aircraft to scan the ocean, an effort that may get easier on Tuesday as Monday's heavy fog was lifting, said a Coast Guard spokesperson.

Sonar devices are also being employed to detect possible underwater sounds coming from the submersible. Crews have covered 7,600 square miles — an area bigger than the state of Connecticut.

How (and why) this man plans to live underwater for 100 days

The teams also expanded their underwater search capability on Tuesday by adding a remotely operated vehicle in order to reach lower depths. That search is ongoing.

But even if the crews can locate the vessel at a low depth, hauling it up to the surface is another task. The Titan could be at a depth of over 13,000 feet and a distance of over 900 miles offshore. Frederick said the search and rescue crews did not yet have salvage equipment in place.

David Marquet, a retired U.S. Navy submarine captain, told NPR's Morning Edition that the odds of survival are "about 1%."

A former OceanGate executive voiced safety concerns years ago

A fired OceanGate employee urged for additional testing on the hull of the Titan years earlier, according to a 2018 lawsuit. Former director of marine operations David Lochridge sent a report he authored in January 2018, which voiced concerns that the hull used carbon fiber and not a metallic composition. The Titan was being designed to travel 4,000 meters below the surface, which had never been done by an OceanGate vessel with a hull made of carbon fiber, Lochridge stated in court documents.

Furthermore, Lochridge said vessel's viewport, which allows passengers to look outside, was only certified by the manufacturer to withstand pressures at 1,300 meters below the surface. That was due to OceanGate's design of the vessel, which did not meet federal standards, according to the complaint.

Lochridge said he encouraged a nondestructive scan of the hull to check for any defects, rather than solely relying on acoustic monitoring. According to Lochridge, acoustic monitoring only detects a problem in the hull right before it fails.

Lochridge said his concerns were ignored and he was told equipment did not exist for the type of test he was asking for. "The paying passengers would not be aware, and would not be informed, of this experimental design, the lack of non-destructive testing of the hull, or that hazardous flammable materials were being used within the submersible," court documents state. Lochridge was fired in January 2018. In its lawsuit against Lochridge, OceanGate said they did not hire him to do engineering work. However, Lochridge says he made the report at the request of CEO Stockton Rush because the plans for the Titan were being passed from the engineering team to his operations department. Lochridge, who has experience as a submersible pilot and diver, was hired by OceanGate in May 2015 as an independent contractor and later became an employee, according to documents. OceanGate sued Lochridge for fraud, breach of contract, misappropriation of trade secrets and nearly $24,000, claiming that he repeatedly violated the nondisclosure agreement he signed by talking to at least two people about plans for the Titan.

The agreement stated he would not disparage the company and would "hold [OceanGate's] confidential information in strict confidence, and not disclose or use it except as authorized by [OceanGate] and for [OceanGate's] benefit." Lochridge denied violating the NDA, saying it was not properly executed and that his report was not critical of the company. He countersued for wrongful termination, though the parties ultimately reached a settlement.

NPR's Juliana Kim and Tovia Smith contributed reporting.

Correction June 20, 2023

A previous version of this story stated that the submersible has a 5-foot-thick carbon fiber hull. In fact, the hull is 5 inches thick.

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There are still secrets to be found on Titanic. These graphics explore them

It sank 112 years ago Monday, but our obsession with the RMS Titanic continues.

History's most famous ship slipped beneath the North Atlantic at 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912 , but we continue to explore its maiden voyage, iceberg, sinking and undersea decay through a seemingly endless stream of photographs, books , documentaries and movies , and museum exhibits.

Fascination has led to tragedy. A submersible carrying five passengers to view the Titanic imploded near the wreck , killing all aboard, in June 2023.

It also has brought technological advances. In May 2023, a new type of digital scanning, using multiple images, gave us a three-dimensional view of the ship as it would look if it were lifted out of the water .

Why are people drawn to Titanic?

"There isn’t a simple answer," says Karen Kamuda, president of the Titanic Historical Society , which operates the Titanic Museum in Indian Orchard, Massachusetts.

Those who join the society are of "all ages and occupations, and their interests are multivariable," Kamuda says. Aside from their fascination with Titanic and its passengers and crew, their curiosity might include the sister ships Olympic and Britannic, the White Star Line, artifacts, and TV and movies.

"James Cameron’s 1997 film, ' Titanic ,' opened up a brand-new interest," Kamuda says. "The internet has helped spread the story worldwide."

Here are a few things you may not know about Titanic:

Titanic traveled less than 3,000 miles

Titanic was built at the Harland & Wolff shipbuilding company in Belfast, Ireland. After outfitting and sea trials, the ship left port for her maiden voyage.

From Belfast to the fatal iceberg strike, Titanic traveled about 2,555 nautical miles, or 2,940 land miles:

April 2, 1912 | 8 p.m.: Titanic leaves Belfast, sails to Southhampton, England (577 nm).

April 10, 1912 | noon: Titanic leaves Southhampton, sails to Cherbourg, France (88 nm).

April 10, 1912 | 8:10 p.m.: Titanic leaves Cherbourg, sails to Queenstown ( now known as Cobh ), Ireland (341 nm).

April 11, 1912 | 1:30 p.m.: Titanic leaves Queenstown for New York.

April 14, 1912 | 11:40 p.m.: Titanic strikes iceberg 1,549 nm from Queenstown.

April 15, 1912 | 2:20 a.m.: Titanic sinks about 400 miles south of Newfoundland, Canada.

Titanic's lifeboats were not filled to capacity

15-ton piece of wreckage recovered.

The largest piece of wreckage recovered from Titanic, above, is a 15-ton section of the hull measuring 26 feet by 12 feet. It's on display at Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas

The hull section was part of the starboard side of the ship , between the third and fourth funnels. It was lifted to the surface in 1998.

Museums keep Titanic's memory alive

A  number of museums offer visitors a look at hundreds of objects recovered from the wreck site. Here are a few:

And if you can't get to a Titanic museum, a traveling exhibit, Titanic. The Exhibition , with 200 items, may be coming to you after it leaves New York.

Thousands of artifacts have been salvaged

Titanic was much smaller than today's cruise ships, want to learn more about titanic.

Historical associations are a good source of information.

• Titanic Historical Society:  https://titanichistoricalsociety.org/
• Titanic International Society:   https://titanicinternationalsociety.org/
• Belfast Titanic Society:   https://www.belfast-titanic.com/
• British Titanic Society:   https://www.britishtitanicsociety.com/

SOURCE USA TODAY Network reporting and research; Titanic Historical Society; titanicfacts.net; titanicuniverse.com; National Geographic; encyclopedia-titanica.org