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The United States Coast Guard has revealed one of the final messages sent from the doomed OceanGate Titan submersible as well as a photo displaying some of the wreckage.
Back in June 2023, the OceanGate Titan went missing as it was making its descent to view the wreck of the Titanic.
It was later discovered that the Titan had suffered a “catastrophic implosion” that claimed the lives of the five people on board the vessel including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush.
This week, one of the final messages sent from the crew of the Titan submersible was revealed by United States Coast Guard investigators during a hearing on the incident.
“All is good,” one of the Titan crew members relayed back to its mother ship, the Polar Prince, at around one hour into their dive.
The Titan crew’s final message, saying they had dropped two weights, was sent at 10:47 local time when the sub was at a depth of around 11,000 feet.
Less than two hours into their dive, they were all dead.
An image shown at the hearing, taken by a remotely operated vehicle, shows the OceanGate Titan’s tail section sitting on the sea floor after the submersible imploded.
US Coast Guard
BBC reports that the Coast Guard inquiry into the experimental watercraft’s implosion is expected to last two weeks.
In May of 2024, a team of researchers at the University of Houston and the University of Minnesota published a paper that suggested the Titan submersible was a ticking time bomb that was destined to fail.
“The material used for the Titan’s hull was a carbon fiber composite. It is well known that under compression loading the fibers in such composites are susceptible to micro-buckling,” said University of Houston department chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering Roberto Ballarini.
If the Titan’s hull experienced such damage under the extreme compressive pressures during its dives, then its stiffness and strength would have significantly decreased. Together with the inevitable geometric imperfections introduced during its manufacturing, [that] may have contributed to its buckling-induced implosion.”
In July of 2024, a former friend of OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush accused him of creating a “mousetrap for billionaires.”
“He definitely knew it was going to end like this,” the friend told 60 Minutes in Australia.
Shortly thereafter, OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Sohnlein (he left the company in 2016) announced plans to send 1,000 people to a floating space colony on Venus by the year 2050.
Of note: Venus has an atmospheric pressure 92 times that of Earth with a mean temperature of 867°F – conditions that would crush and melt down anything that entered its atmosphere.