Titan, previously named Cyclops 2, was a submersible created and operated by the American underwater tourism company OceanGate. It was the first privately owned submersible with a claimed maximum depth of , and the first completed crewed submersible with a hull constructed of titanium and carbon fiber composite materials.
After testing with dives to its maximum intended depth in 2018 and 2019, the original composite hull of Titan developed fatigue damage and was replaced by 2021. In that year, OceanGate began transporting paying customers to the wreck of the Titanic, completing several dives to the wreck site in 2021 and 2022. During the submersible's first 2023 expedition, which took place in June, all five occupants were killed when the vessel imploded. OceanGate lost contact with Titan on 18 June and contacted authorities later that day after the submersible did not return on schedule. A massive international search and rescue operation ensued and ended on 22 June, when debris from Titan was discovered about from the bow of the Titanic. The incident became widely discussed on social media as the story developed, and inspired grimly humorous Internet memes that ridiculed the submersible's deficient construction, OceanGate's perceived poor safety record, and the individuals who died. The memes were criticized as insensitive, with American TV presenter David Pogue deeming them "inappropriate and a little bit sick".
Industry experts, friends of OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, and OceanGate employees had stated concerns about the safety of the vessel. The subsequent investigation by the U.S. Coast Guard highlighted serious safety concerns, criticizing OceanGate's operational practices and identifying a "toxic workplace culture" in which safety warnings were suppressed. The report concluded that Rush "exhibited negligence that contributed to the deaths" and created a false impression of the submersible's safety.
Background Since the discovery of the Titanic wreckage in 1985, limited tours of the wreck have been conducted, including the (Finnish-made) Russian Mir-class submersibles in the 1990s, which captured the footage for the opening scenes of the eponymous 1997 film.
After carrying tourists to the wreck of Andrea Doria in 2016, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush said "there's only one wreck that knows... if you ask people to name something underwater, it's going to be sharks, whales, Titanic." OceanGate's Titan was used for several survey expeditions of the Titanic wreckage site, starting in 2021. Rush stated that Titan could be used to explore the debris field and build a 3-D model of the wreck.
Design and construction Features
Titan was and weighed with a maximum payload of . It moved at up to using four electric thrusters, arrayed two horizontal and two vertical. According to OceanGate, the vessel carried sufficient oxygen to sustain a full complement of five people for 96 hours.
The entire pressure vessel for the crew used five major components: two hemispherical titanium end caps, two matching titanium interface rings, and the internal diameter, carbon fiber-wound cylindrical hull. The forward hemispherical end cap could be detached from its interface ring, becoming a hatch that allowed crew members to enter the crew compartment before a mission, and exit at its conclusion. In addition to the crew compartment, Titan included a landing skid structure and an outer fiberglass composite shell covering mechanical equipment; both the skid and shell were bolted to the titanium interface rings.
OceanGate's calculations showed the cylinder that formed the center section of the crew compartment should have a wall thickness of , which they rounded up to ; it consisted of 480 alternating layers of pre-preg unidirectional cloth, laid in the axial direction, and wet-wound filament, laid in the hoop direction. Spencer Composites completed the design and assembly of the cylinder in 2017 after curing it at for 7 days.
Each titanium end cap had a wall thickness of . One interface ring was bonded to each end of the cylindrical hull, and the end caps were bolted to the interface rings. The penetrations for external cables ran through the interface rings. The forward end cap was fitted with an experimental acrylic window, shaped as a modified conical frustum thick. According to Rush, it would protrude into the cabin by during dives. The viewport was rated only to .
Titan was equipped with a real-time acoustic monitoring system, which OceanGate claimed could detect the onset of buckling in the carbon fiber hull prior to catastrophic failure. Rush held a patent on the system. Titan was controlled with a modified game controller, similar to Cyclops 1.
Once the occupants were aboard, the hatch was closed and bolted from the outside; there was no way to open the hatch from inside the vessel. In addition, there was no on-board location system; the support ship which monitored the position of Titan relative to its target would send text messages to Titan providing distances and directions.
Construction
OceanGate began developing a composite carbon fiber and titanium-hulled submersible in collaboration with the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory (APL-UW) in 2013, tentatively named Cyclops 2; the first titanium structural components were ordered in December 2016 from Titanium Fabrication Corp. (TiFab), and OceanGate signed a contract with Spencer Composites in January 2017 for the carbon-composite cylinder.
Spencer previously had built the composite pressure hull for the single-person DeepFlight Challenger for Steve Fossett to a design by Graham Hawkes. Spencer Composites was given challenging performance targets for Cyclops 2, which was meant to withstand working service pressure with a factor of safety of 2.25× for its intended maximum depth of , and provided six weeks to complete the design. In March 2018, Cyclops 2 was renamed to "Titan"; and Rush described it "an amazing engineering feat" during its launch in 2018., reported by Eric Sorensen for Global News on 23 June 2023
In an interview published in 2020 with Teledyne Marine, a subsea technology company, it was noted that many Oceangate employees were recent graduates. Rush responded that he, unlike other submarine enterprises, "wanted [his] team to be younger, be inspirational" instead of including "ex-military submariners", who he described as "a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys".
Design issues In 2015, when Rush visited DOER Marine seeking lessons learned from "Project Deep Search", DOER's president, Liz Taylor, specifically warned him against using carbon fiber; in 2023, she recounted that carbon fiber specifically has "been shown to not be very happy when it's being immersed first of all and then being hollow on the inside or just one atmosphere on the inside and then having the tremendous pressure of the ocean trying to push in on it, it's not the right material".
The Marine Technology Society's committee on Manned Underwater Vehicles (now called Submarine Committee) drafted a private letter to Rush in March 2018, expressing concerns with the design of Titan and urging him to have the ship "classed" (certified by a ship classification society), partly because the marketing of the submersible, which stated it would meet or exceed the standards of DNV, was misleading because OceanGate had no intentions to have the vehicle tested by DNV. There were 38 people who agreed to have their signature on the letter. Although the letter was not sent, the chair of the committee, William Kohnen, said he had "a frank conversation" with Rush following which they "agreed to disagree".
Rob McCallum had consulted for OceanGate in 2009, but left over his concerns that vessel development was being hurried. In 2018, he emailed Rush, warning him the development cycle and refusal to have the ship classed was "potentially placing yourself and your clients in a dangerous dynamic", adding that in Rush's "race to Titanic you are mirroring that famous catch cry: 'She is unsinkable. Rush's response called the email "a serious personal insult" and complained about "the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone.'"
In response to the 2018 letter from MTS members, OceanGate published in 2019 a blog post explaining why Titan was not classed. In the post, OceanGate said "the vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure" and argued that classification focused solely on the physical state of the vessel and not its corporate actions, which it characterized as a "constant, committed effort and a focused corporate culture" of "maintaining high-level operational safety".
Journalist David Pogue, who participated in an OceanGate Titanic excursion in 2022, noted that Titan was not equipped with an emergency locator beacon; during his expedition, the surface support vessel lost track of Titan "for about five hours", and adding such a beacon was discussed. "They could still send short texts to the sub, but did not know where it was. It was quiet and very tense, and they shut off the ship's internet to prevent us from tweeting." Screenwriter Mike Reiss confirmed the submersible lost contact on each of the four dives he had made with OceanGate and said "that seems to be just something baked into the system". As an example, Reiss reported that it took three hours to locate Titanic during one dive, despite landing only from the wreck.
Testing and inspection
OceanGate claimed on its website as of 2023 that Titan was "designed and engineered by OceanGate Inc. in collaboration [with] experts from NASA, Boeing, and the University of Washington". A -scale model of the Cyclops 2 pressure vessel was built and tested at the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory; the model was able to sustain a pressure of , corresponding to a depth of approximately . After the disappearance of Titan in 2023, the University of Washington stated that the Applied Physics Laboratory had no involvement in "design, engineering, or testing of the Titan submersible". A Boeing spokesperson also said that Boeing "was not a partner on the Titan and did not design or build it". A NASA spokesperson said that NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center had a Space Act Agreement with OceanGate, but "did not conduct testing and manufacturing via its workforce or facilities". Rush had touted partnerships with NASA, Boeing, and UW to Pogue in 2022 in response to a question about the perceived "MacGyvery jerry-rigged-ness " improvisational design based on the use of off-the-shelf components. Documents leaked to Wired showed that partnerships with UW and Boeing dissolved and design recommendations and rigorous testing requirements were ignored.