![]() This particular expedition trip, OceanGate’s third to the Titanic wreckage, cost $250,000 per passenger and was scheduled to last eight days with each dive lasting about ten hours between trips to the surface. The company has been conducting tours of shipwrecks and underwater canyons since 2009 when it was founded by a Princeton grad named Stockton Rush with the purported goal of making deep-sea tourism more accessible. The 22-foot submersible, made of carbon fiber and titanium, was operated by a Washington-based private company called OceanGate. Instead, it was deployed and retrieved by a mother ship, which needed some kind of contact with the submersible in order to recover it. The missing vessel (called, of all things, the Titan) was not actually a submarine but a submersible, which means it couldn’t power itself into and out of the ocean. Let’s try and wade through this together, shall we? Surely, being a regular person uninterested in touring the ruins of 100-year-old naval catastrophes, you have questions. As crews dredged up the debris this week, the Coast Guard shared another development: They found “presumed human remains” mingled with the mechanical evidence on the seafloor. Coast Guard announced that it had located wreckage from the sub, which looked consistent with a “catastrophic” - and evidently fatal - implosion. ![]() ![]() As the search for the five passengers onboard dragged on, Twitter memes about the irony of the situation reached royal-funeral levels, and details trickling in about the logistics of the expedition suggested it might not have been a great idea to begin with. On June 18, an underwater vessel touring the wreck of the RMS Titanic went missing in the North Atlantic shortly after being deployed. Photo: Ocean Gate/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
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