Ocean Gate Submarine Disaster - What REALLY Happened

On June 18, 2023, Titan, a submersible operated by Ocean Gate went missing in the international water in the North Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Newfoundland Canada. The submersible was on a tourist expedition to view the wreckage of the RMS Titanic with five individuals on board, including the founder and CEO of Ocean Gate Stockton Rush.

Due to the estimated three days of oxygen supply, there was a huge rescue effort by the U.S. Coast Guard and Canada's Coast Guard which was unsuccessful until early on June 22nd when evidence of the wreckage of the vessel started to emerge leading to the tragic conclusion that the vessel imploded in the ocean depths and there were no survivors.

As an engineer, I'm furious about what happened and the different shortcuts that were taken. We'll go through all of that today so let's try to figure out what exactly happened and what we can learn from this. I'm Ricky and this is Two Bit Da Vinci. Let's start with what we know about the company operating the Titan and Submersible.

Ocean Gate Incorporated is a privately held U.S. company operating out of Everett Washington that provides crude submersibles for the tourism industry and research exploration. The company was founded in 2009 by Stockton Rush and Guillermo Solen.

Stockton Rush wanted to be an astronaut so he got his commercial pilot license, but because of bad eyesight, he could never be a military pilot. Instead, he moved from San Francisco to Seattle to work at McDonald Douglas as a flight test engineer for the F-15 Eagle after attending the launch of Spaceship 1 in the Mojave Desert in 2004.

He decided he didn't want to go up to space as a tourist; he wanted to be like Captain Kirk on the Enterprise. He wanted to explore and pivot his pursuit to undersea exploration. He was married to Wendy Rush, a descendant of Isidore and Ida Strauss – two people who passed away on the sinking of the Titanic which ties into the story here today.

The tragic events happened during a deep-sea tourism expedition to explore the wreckage of the Titanic which sunk in Northern Atlantic in 1912. Before we get to the specifics of this particular tragedy, let's put just how difficult deep-sea exploration is into context. It's easy to be in awe of aviation and space exploration because breaking free of gravity and flying through the air seem like such a feat, but in many ways, deep-sea craft is the much greater engineering challenge.

It all Comes down to pressure. We don't think about air pressure because at sea level it's just 14.7 pounds per square inch. That pressure is the result of the column of air that reaches above us, all the way into outer space. All that molecules above us pushing down result in that pressure.

But water is a much more dense fluid than air so for every 10 meters or 32.8 feet you dive, the pressure increases by one atmosphere or 14.7 PSI. The Titanic is sitting on the ocean floor at about 12,500 feet below sea level. The two broken part of the ship – the bow and the stern – are more than 2,600 feet apart and surrounded by debris after over 100 years of being in the bottom of the ocean. The wreckage is 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland in Canada.

Let's put this depth into perspective – imagine laying on your back with a one foot by one foot board and how much weight you would feel on that board. At 100 meters (328 feet), the size of a soccer or football field, we have the pressure of 10 atmospheres or 145 PSI which means on that one-by-one footboard we would feel the weight of 20,880 pounds – that is 4.7 Tesla Model Wise.

At 381 meters, 1250 feet, we have the height of the Empire State Building in New York – at this depth, we would feel 37.4 atmospheres of pressure and that one-by-one footboard would feel 80,000 pounds.

At 490 meters, 1,670 feet, we have the max dive depth of the C-Class of U.S. Navy submarine.

Here we'd feel 48.5 atmospheres of pressure – that one by one footboard would feel the weight of 94,800 pounds. At 828 meters we have the height of the Burj Khalifa. Here we'd feel 82 atmospheres – that weight on the board would be 173,520 pounds.

Now this is around the same depth as the deepest diving submarine in operation today. The Oscar-class submarine in the Russian Navy. At 3,800 meters sets the wreckage of the Titanic – here the pressures are 376 atmospheres – that one by one footboard on our chest would have the weight of 797,900 pounds.