THE co-founder of the firm involved in the Titan implosion that killed five has vowed to plough on with more perilous projects.
OceanGate boss Stockton Rush and his four passengers were killed instantly one year ago today when their homemade sub suffered a catastrophic implosion on a dive to the Titanic wreck.
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Titan – which was steered with a gaming controller – vanished from radars on June 18 and failed to resurface from the £195,000-a-head voyage 12,500ft down to the wreckage.
Hopes of a miracle faded by the hour, and then the day, as desperate rescue crews worked around the clock to find any signs of life.
Five days after the sub was supposed to return, debris was found on the ocean floor.
British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son Suleman all died on board.
Rush, OceanGate Expedition’s CEO who was leading the mission in the North Atlantic, was also killed in the tragedy that gripped the world.
Now, one year on, Guillermo Sohnlein, who co-founded OceanGate with Rush in 2009, has vowed to keep pursuing wildly ambitious and dangerous new projects.
Driven by an unstoppable desire to explore, he told The Sun that the shocking deaths of the five on board Titan has not dampened his ambitions.
Instead, the disaster has inspired the explorer to redouble his efforts with more high-risk missions – including deep ocean and space exploration.
Ex US-Marines Captain Sohnlein, 58, said: “The interesting thing with the exploration community is that we know that what we do carries a certain level of risk.
“And we know that as much as we try mitigating that risk and managing that risk, things will go wrong.
“You hope that when they go wrong they won’t be fatal. But you know that there’s risk, and things will go wrong.
“The exploration community is a little bit strange in that we go in knowing that there’s going to be risks. We know there’s going to be setbacks.
“And when setbacks do occur, instead of deterring explorers, it seems to motivate explorers to continue forward and continue with their pursuit.”
Sohnlein said such tragedies force explorers to “reflect and have a reality check” and apply lessons learned to future projects.
“But once you’ve done that, you’re fully committed to continuing to go forward and that seems to be even more heightened in a perhaps macabre kind of way,” he said.
“It seems to be even more heightened when that setback leads to fatalities, because I think part of it is, the rest of the exploration community wants to make sure that the legacies of the people who lost their lives are honored by continuing to go forward.
“You don’t want their lives to be lost in vain. You want to make sure that their sacrifice was worth whatever it was that they were trying to do.”
How the Titan tragedy unfolded
ONE year ago, five men plunged beneath the surface of the North Atlantic in a homemade sub in the hopes of exploring the Titnaic wreckage.
But what was supposed to be a short trip spiralled into days of agony as the doomed Titan vanished without a trace on June 18, 2023.
The daring mission had been months in the making – and almost didn’t happen at the hands of harsh weather conditions in Newfoundland, Canada.
In a now chilling Facebook post, passenger Hamish Harding wrote: “Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023.
“A weather window has just opened up and we are going to attempt a dive tomorrow.”
It would be his final Facebook post.
The following morning, he and four others – led by Stockton Rush – began the 12,5000ft descent towards the bottom of the Atlantic.
But as it made its way down into the depths, the vessel lost all contact with its mother ship of the surface, the Polar Prince.
It sparked a frantic four day search for signs of life, with the hunt gripping the entire world.
There was hope that by some miracle, the crew was alive and desperately waiting to be saved.
But that sparked fears rescue teams were in a race against time as the sub only had a 96-hour oxygen supply when they set out, which would be quickly dwindling.
Then, when audio of banging sounds were detected under the water, it inspired hope that the victims were trapped and signalling to be rescued.
It heartbreakingly turned out that the banging noises were likely either ocean noises or from other search ships, the US Navy determined.
Countries around the world deployed their resources to aid the search, and within days the Odysseus remote-operated vehicle (ROV) was sent down to where the ghostly wreck of the Titanic sits.
The plan was for the ROV to hook onto the sub and bring it up 10,000ft, where it would meet another ROV before heading to the surface.
But any hopes of a phenomenal rescue were dashed when Odysseus came across a piece of debris from the sub around 1,600ft from the Titanic.
The rescue mission tragically then became a salvage task, and the heartbroken families of those on board were told the devastating news.
It was confirmed by the US Coast Guard that the sub has suffered a “catastrophic implosion”.
An investigation into the disaster is ongoing.
OceanGate has suspended all its operations.
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Sohnlein and Rush set up OceanGate in 2009 as they saw underwater exploration as the closest thing to further their vision for space travel – without actually going off Earth.
They both had a common ambition – to make deep sea exploration more available to those outside the small industry.
Sohnlein said: “We were both frustrated astronauts, we grew up wanting to be astronauts but both of us had our eyesight go bad, so we couldn’t become pilots and then atsronauts.
“But we were still driven by this need to explore.
“We came across this world of human submersibles, using technology to take humans into an extreme environment here on Earth, basically going underwater into the deep pressure of the ocean.
When setbacks do occur, instead of deterring explorers, it seems to motivate explorers to continue forward and continue with their pursuit
Guillermo Sohnlein
“The problem that Stockton and I saw is still around today in 2024, 15 years later, and that is that humans do not have access to the deep oceans.
“There’s no ready fleet of submersibles that can take people underwater at least to a significant depth.”
Sohnlein – who has aspirations to send 1,000 people to Venus by 2050 – left OceanGate in 2013 as the company began developing Titan’s predecessor, Cyclops.
He retained a minority stake, but decided to up sticks when the firm left its initial start-up phase and transitioned into Rush’s speciality of engineering.
Dad-of-three Sohnlein insisted Rush would be frustrated that OceanGate had suspended all its operations.
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The company came under fire when questions were raised over the safety of Titan and whether it should have been allowed to carry commercial passengers.
It was unclassed and made of carbon fibre, which had prompted experts including Rob McCallum to implore Rush to let an independent agency test his vessel.
But Sohnlein asserted that Rush was always committed safety.
He added: “I think if Stock had survived and was with us today, I think the regrets he would have, one would be obvious – which is any setback or problem with the sub causing fatalities or injuries.
“He was very much focused on safety.
“I think the next regret he would have is the company not continuing operations and not being able to keep going and getting beyond Titanic because Titanic was really just a means to an end for business.
“It was really to get to a point where the subs would be chartered by people all over the world to do all sorts of interesting projects and learn more about our oceans.”
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