Transcription
In 1912, the Titanic claimed 1,500 lives. In 2023, it claimed five more. I'm Stockton Rush, and I was the pilot today. to the to the Titanic.
Stockton was designing a mouse trap for billionaires. It's a race against time for the US Coast Guard. They're looking for a missing tourist submersible near the wreckage of the Titanic. Tonight, an international search operation is underway.
Like the Titanic, it was a disaster just waiting to happen. I broke some rules to make this. I think I broke them with logic and good engineering behind me. At some point, safety just is pure waste. This experimental submersible vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body. He quite literally and figuratively went out with the biggest bang. And who was the last person to murder two billionaires?
Stockton was supposedly a very smart boy, a graduate of Princeton University, and the youngest jet transport pilot in the world. Hey, I wanted to be an astronaut. That's why I got an engineering degree. I watched Star Trek, Star Wars, all the video, and I wanted to see those alien life forms. And I eventually I realized one, I wasn't going to go to space, and I wasn't going to get to Jupiter or Mars, but I did realize that all the cool stuff that I thought was out there is actually underwater.
Stockton had become an expert in aerospace engineering. He did this in hopes of becoming the first person to set foot on Mars. But unfortunately for Stockton, someone else was likely to beat him to it. And one day, we will indeed occupy Mars.
And maybe that's why Stockton decided to create the SpaceX of the ocean. We always called ourselves SpaceX for the oceans. When I first met Stockton, he struck me as a very intelligent person. He also struck me as a very savvy engineer. Elon's doing the same thing at SpaceX, right?
So, Stockton's obsession with space quickly became an obsession with the ocean. And what I wanted to do with the business was just move the needle. Get people excited about the ocean, explore the ocean, and discover what was out there. Stockton's philosophy was simple. Why would we use resources to explore space when we haven't even fully explored Earth and its oceans? There's so much to explore in the ocean as only 25% has been mapped with modern technology. There will be a time when people will go to space at much less cost and very regularly. I think the same thing's going to happen going underwater. It's going to get less expensive and much more accessible. That's where we're going to have cities and that's where people are going to be. They're going to be down there exploring. To me, we'll have cities underwater before we have them up in space. On the moon? Yeah.
And this was Stockton's vision, an underwater city that would provide humans with sustainable resources for generations. If you think about the Earth is really the landmass that we all occupy, then there are three planets worth of resources available in the ocean. Minerals, chemicals, biological. It is a vast, huge opportunity. An opportunity that was being overlooked in favor of space exploration. Establishing a self-sustaining base on Mars The future mankind is underwater. It's not on Mars. We're not going to have a base on Mars or the moon. You know, we'll try and waste a lot of money. We'll have a base underwater because when the sun when the sun extinguishes, there will still be hydrothermal vents and there will still be those life forms down there that are living off chemosynthesis that don't need the sun. You know, when we trash this planet, the best life boat for mankind is underwater.
But getting humans to the bottom of the ocean is a very difficult task. It's dangerous. It's expensive. There is the regulatory challenge. And the current regulations wouldn't allow Stockton to build a submarine that could go deeper than 150 ft. I think over time Stockton just realized that the only way we were going to be able to help humanity unlock the secrets of the ocean was to get past the regulations and just prove that it could be done as safely as possible. At some point safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed. Don't get in your car. Don't do anything. At some point you're going to take some risk and it really is a risk-reward question. I said, I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.
So, for the next few years Stockton continued breaking the rules. He'd go on to document his entire journey in 4K and he'd give lectures on submarine safety along the way. And one of the things I came up with are the myths. One is that subs are dangerous. And in the last 35 years there hasn't been a serious injury and there've been over 15 million people go in them. But they're statistically the safest vehicles on the planet.
Stockton didn't always have this attitude towards safety. The early days of OceanGate were an entirely different story. Only after a complete systems test is the OceanGate crew ready to dive. The company's first sub was a vessel called Antipodes and it was the perfect test sub for OceanGate. First sub Antipodes and we use that as our training sub. 58 in diameter, it is about 15 ft long. This sub had already been certified by the American Bureau of Shipping, so there was a very slim chance of it imploding. It was designed to withstand depths of around 1,000 ft, which is impressive but nowhere near the depth of the Titanic. This is where the Titanic is on the ocean floor below 12,500 ft of water. But OceanGate weren't ready for the Titanic just yet. At this point they were just a local submarine team, and in the early days, their eyes were set on some lesser-known shipwrecks. Local submarine team is exploring the wreck of a luxury passenger liner that sank 90 years ago this spring off the coast of Port Townsend. Today, we're doing our third day of diving on the SS Governor. The SS Governor was located in Washington, and it was often referred to as the area's mini Titanic. The Governor was a luxury liner that was on its way from San Francisco to Seattle on April 1st, 1921. Shortly after midnight, it collided with a freighter. Eight of the 240 people on board went down with the ship. For years, there have been rumors that it went down with a loaded safe. The safe, the infamous safe. That safe is believed to contain around $4 million worth of gold coins.
At first, I thought OceanGate was trying to pull off a $4 million submarine heist. You know, just like the opening scene in the first Titanic movie. It's payday, boys. But as it turns out, even if they did happen to find the treasure, they would have been forced to hand it over to the man who owns its salvage rights. So, I guess OceanGate weren't in this area for profit. They really just wanted to explore the area and test their new sub's capabilities. The crew of the sub is practicing its approaches to the Governor in 240 ft of water for a much more dangerous inspection of the Montebello at 900 ft down. After the mini Titanic, OceanGate would move on to a much deeper shipwreck. Their goal was to ramp up the depths of their dives one shipwreck at a time. It's part of our ramp up to a California expedition that we're doing in September to a shipwreck called the SS Montebello. The Montebello was a US oil tanker that was torpedoed by a Japanese sub off the coast of California during World War II. The SS Montebello was not another ship holding treasure. In fact, it was quite the opposite. It went down with an estimated 70,000 barrels of oil on board. And it's posing a huge environmental threat to California's coastline. Oceangate wanted to make a name for themselves by preventing this environmental threat. And their plan was to create a 3D map of the wreck using their new sonar technology. Team is also testing the latest in two and three-dimensional sonar equipment. And we're taking our sub and our blue view sonar system down there to create a 3D map of that wreck. Not many people know about these expeditions, but they were a critical part of Oceangate's early days. And after mapping out that oil spill, they were ready for phase two of their company's mission. An historic Washington state tragedy is helping head off a future one down the coast. In Seattle, Gary Chittim, King 5 News. This local submarine team was taking over the ocean. Stockton increases the budget and after 130 successful dives, investors were asking the same question. Was this team going to be the next SpaceX?
Name of the company, Oceangate Incorporated. It's a cutting-edge, high-tech firm out of the Midwest awaiting imminent patent approval on their next generation of submersible vehicles. Right now, the stock trades over the counter at 10 cents a share. But with the collaboration of one of hip-hop's biggest stars, our analysts indicate it could go a heck of a lot higher than that. Macklemore was on top of the world in 2014. It was the year he won four Grammy Awards. And the Grammy goes to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. But his most underrated win that year was his collaboration with Stockton Rush. I think we're going to find sharks. The pair would team up in search of the incredibly rare six-gill shark, a trait that was very uncommon amongst most shark species. What is the probability that we will see a shark today? Somewhere between zero and 100. Macklemore had been a fan of sharks his entire life and he was pretty skeptical that Stockton would find a shark as rare as the six-gill. If we don't see a shark, you'll buy me a shark. A little one. A baby shark. Yeah, a baby shark. That's a deal. That's a deal. Okay. But little did he know, they would find a shark in that yellow submarine under 400 ft of water. Stockton and Macklemore were going to create memories that would last forever. Oh my god. Six gill. Six gill. Six gill. Topside. Topside. We have a six gill at the view port. Very exciting. Didn't think it was going to happen. Pulled it out. Our mission is complete. And that was it. That was the business model at the time for OceanGate. We do dives looking for six gill sharks and things like that that are 5,000. It's a very unusual business. It's its own category. It's a new type of travel.
And eventually, they'd be selling tickets to the Titanic for up to $250,000 a person. However, it wasn't going to be in Antipodes. Remember, this yellow sub was only certified for dives that were 1/12 the depth of the Titanic. And unfortunately for Stockton, you couldn't just buy or rent a sub that was capable of going 12,500 ft. Stockton believed it was the strict laws and regulations that were preventing him from innovating the submersible industry. So, he came to the conclusion that he only had one reasonable option remaining, building his own sub. Initially, we didn't think we were going to build our own subs. We thought we were going to get somebody else to build our subs. The industry standard just wouldn't allow for them to build what we felt we needed and what we thought humanity needed to explore the ocean.
So, they did what a lot of companies do. They break the rules and act now, then they ask for forgiveness later. And the name they decided to give their first custom-built sub, Cyclops, a new manned submersible now undergoing sea trials. That's pretty good. That's pretty good right there. It was time to go all in. Stockton was going to ignore the industry's strict rules and regulations. It was time to prove them all wrong. Cyclops is going to be a very useful tool for any organization, company, or institution that needs to go underwater and perform tasks at depth. Cyclops is the newest creation of OceanGate, a for-profit private company in partnership with the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory. We couldn't have done it without that partnership. You know, the Applied Physics Lab has been effectively our engineering partner.
But this wasn't going to be a usual submarine. Stockton wanted to create the most simple and easy-to-use submarine on the market. Stockton is very interested in being able to quickly train pilots, have pilots be able to come in and use this thing without having to go through weeks of training on there. The solution? This video game controller. We use this game controller to drive the sub. First thing is there are two dead man switches. You have to press one of these buttons, and now it's ready to go. And in 2015, the sub was ready to go. So, Stockton organized the big reveal, and the christening ceremony was set to begin. Okay, on behalf of all OceanGate team and all the team members who are here tonight, I christen thee Cyclops. So, all of our test program has been about incremental testing. We started over 2 years ago with Cyclops 1 out here, where this is really focused on one thing, and that's the pressure vessel, and making sure that that component is safe and capable of handling depths down to 4,000 m repeatedly. I feel so lucky I got to do one dive while Cyclops was here.
But Cyclops wasn't the final product. Cyclops 2 began development a few years later. Although Stockton didn't like that name very much, so they rebranded to Titan. Hi, my name is Stockton Rush. I'm the CEO and founder of OceanGate. Let's take a look at Titan. If you thought Cyclops was simplistic, just wait till you see its successor. It's got one button. And that's it. We have our control screen here, our sonar screen here, and we can put any image we want in the back. It's one of the only subs that can hold five people. It's also the only one with a toilet. Sort of. There were some parts that kind of looked like they held together, and yet I couldn't help noticing how many pieces of this sub seemed improvised. We can use these off-the-shelf components. I got these from Camper World. We run the whole thing with this game controller. Come on. And so what if people laugh? Titan was fully operational in just a few years, and it was all made possible with the leadership of Stockton Rush. You did it, Stockton. There's some luck here. I got five white guys. Here we go. Okay. Maybe a win-win. Maybe. And as days became months, and months became years, that little sub was passing every test imaginable. This is why you want your pilot to be an engineer. He believed that building this sub would help him unlock the secrets of the ocean, but Stockton wasn't building his own submarine. He was building his own coffin. It's a miracle it can do what it does when you look at it there, because when you look at it is very small. It looks like it's put together with piece of string, but it's not, obviously. We can scale to multiple vehicles relatively quickly because we've used commercially off-the-shelf products for almost everything we do. We can bring additional vessels online in a matter of months as opposed to years or decades. So Stockton plans to create even more low-budget submersibles, and soon enough he was going to have his own fleet of submarines. The only question being, were they safe? Absolutely not. I'd like to be remembered as an innovator. Um I think it was General MacArthur said, "You're remembered for the rules you break." And you know, I've broken some rules to make this. I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind me.
The carbon fiber and titanium, there's a rule you don't do that. Well, I did. The controversial feature of Titan was its carbon fiber hull. This was considered controversial because the industry standard material was titanium. Engineers zero in on titanium, a super strong and lightweight material that would allow deep-sea vehicles to reach the Titanic. It is with this material that today's most inventive submarine builders continue to push technology forward to penetrate the ocean's deepest regions. But Stockton didn't like titanium. He believed carbon fiber was the better material. Carbon fiber is three times better on a strength to buoyancy basis than titanium. And underwater, that's what you care about. It's not strength to weight, it's strength to buoyancy. And yet, no one had done that.
Titan was able to skirt the law by operating in international waters. And although it passed multiple test dives, many believed the carbon fiber hull was slowly being damaged over time. If the sub passed its pressure test, it wasn't going to fail on the first dive, but it's going to fail over time. It might fail on dive seven, which is insidious. You don't get that with steel or with titanium. Carbon fiber is a great material. It's better than titanium, it's better than a lot of other materials. When I started the business, um old-timers in the industry told me I was nuts, and they continued to tell me that. So, Stockton continued operating his carbon fiber sub, recording the entire assembly process along the way. Oh yeah, so that will be the pressure vessel for Cyclops II. We will go to 4,000 m. It'll be the deepest diving carbon fiber sub ever built. If that goes to 4,000 m, it'll be the only one out there. I'm going to be the first guy in the sub, so we will see. It's pretty simple, but if we mess it up, there's not a lot of recovery.
With his goal being to explore the bottom of the ocean, you'd reasonably expect some sort of certification from a third-party agency. However, Titan was never certified by any regulatory body, and that's because Stockton believed that these agencies were uh over the top in their rules and regulations, but they had nothing with carbon fiber. So, we had to go out and uh and work on that. And one of the things I learned is, you know, when you're outside the box, it's really hard to tell how far outside the box you really are. And we were pretty far out there. So, we have a carbon fiber hull. His thoughts about breaking the rules is really about thinking outside the box and coming up with innovative solutions. I mean, anything when you're trying something outside the box, people inside the box think you're nuts. Same thing when Elon Musk was doing SpaceX. Inside the box, everything's scary.
Titan continued to pass every test that Stockton could throw at it. And eventually, Titan needed a new milestone, a new goal to reach. So, can you guess where it was headed next? The goal was where do you want to go in the in the ocean? What is the most known site in the ocean? And it's clearly the Titanic. It became a must-do dive. I read an article that said there are three words in the English language that are known throughout the planet, and that's Coca-Cola, God, and Titanic.
If you've ever watched the 1997 movie, you'd know it's a combination of both history and fiction. The film centers around the fictional love triangle of Rose, Jack, and Caledon. And when the fan hits the fan, Get back. What to him? What did you do to To gutter rat. I'd rather be his than your wife. But remember, this story was just fictional. However, on the other side of the ship, we'd get a glimpse of the story that kicks off our sequel, Titanic 2. Please, Ida, get into the boat. No. This is Isidor and Ida Straus, two passengers who were actually on board the Titanic in 1912. Their tale is well documented and has been recreated in various films and musicals. We've been together for 40 years, and where you go, I go. Don't argue with me, Isidor. You know it does no good. Isidor and Ida would go down with the ship in 1912, but not before having a number of descendants. One of them being the communications director at OceanGate, and who also just so happened to be married to a man named Stockton. And maybe that's why Stockton was so obsessed with continuously going down to the Titanic. And our goal is to go back to the Titanic year after year, scan it with sonar, and document the wreck and its decay, and discover what we can discover.
And so the stage was set for the adventure of a lifetime, but Stockton couldn't fund these expeditions on his own. So he began advertising his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to the public. And the now deleted promotional video was set to be released. OceanGate Expeditions offers you the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a specially trained crew member safely diving to the Titanic wreckage site. Get ready for what Jules Verne could only imagine. A 12,500-ft journey to the bottom of the sea. It's the OceanGate Titanic experience. We partnered with aerospace experts at the University of Washington, NASA, and Boeing on the design of our hull. It's very well engineered and very safe, but and the team is very focused on safety first. Not 1 second of me experiencing anything from OceanGate have I ever felt unsafe. As I pointed out on the bridge earlier, your safety plan is all around the vessel. Come join us on our next expedition. Don't miss the opportunity to be part of history. The OceanGate Titanic experience. There's truly nothing else like it.
But this wasn't just another episode of Black Mirror, nor was it an episode of The Twilight Zone. This was reality. And although quite a few people were eager to get themselves a ticket. There was still one question that remained. What's the level of danger with this type of expedition? Well, um surprisingly, the safest part of the expedition will be the submarine part. Uh in the last 35 years, uh there hasn't been an injury on a commercial private sub, although there've been uh over 15 million people go in them. Going to sea is intrinsically a a risky activity, um but we're doing everything we can to make sure that it's uh as safe and uh and uh as comfortable as possible. Well, Stockton Rush.
Stockton went on quite a few media runs during this period with the goal of highlighting OceanGate's mission. Our rule is we risk capital. We don't risk people. The media coverage before the incident flaunted a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It looks like there are these uh these rust formations. That's actually what's left over from the bacteria that's consuming it at a at a huge rate. Really? So, we may not be able to see it forever. So, go get in the submersible submersible now. Finally, the crew seemed to foster a culture of safety. There were checklists, inspections before and after every dive, and a three-strikes rule. If three things seemed out of the ordinary, no matter how minor, they'd cancel the dive.
But, the media coverage of the Titan's implosion was an entirely different story. Everyone I know keeps asking me the same question. Why would you get on that dangerous sub? A 60 Minutes special identifying over 30 members of the maritime community who warned Stockton about Titan's safety procedures and a chief submersible pilot who was fired and subsequently sued for speaking out against OceanGate. If someone raised a safety concern as the chief pilot did, they were not only not listened to, they were silenced.
But, with all that being said, if you did manage to get a ticket to the Titan expedition, you can't say that Stockton didn't warn you. This is an experimental sub. People are informed that it's very dangerous down there. It's an open book here. Do you have any questions about what's going on, about acoustic monitoring, about carbon fiber problems we had, rumors of problems we had, actual problems we had? You know, feel free to ask. You know, we're happy to show everything. We want everyone going into this fully informed. This is an experimental sub. This is a dangerous environment. It's 6,000 PSI. Very few people have been down there. And so we want to make sure that you're going in with an open eye and you understand what's going on. If you don't want to do it at any time, feel free to say, "Hey, I want to take a pass." We can work something out. We can bring you another year or something else. But, you know, really want to make sure you're you're aware of all this.
And as a last-ditch effort to limit their liability, you'd also have to sign OceanGate's waiver. An experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma, or death. Where do I sign?
June 18th, 2023, the OceanGate Titanic experience is set to begin. Reports are reporting the dive is a go. Please stand by. Five crew members are sealed into the submersible, and so is their fate. CEO Stockton Rush, businessman Hamish Harding, French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman were on the expedition as part of a Father's Day trip. Everything was going according to plan. So, one of the questions about this is how risky is going in the sub. Turns out in this expedition, the probably the safest thing will be once you're underwater. You know, I once I'm a couple of feet underwater, I know I'm coming back. I know everybody's coming back. This is a malfunction.
In just under 2 hours, Titan had lost communication with its mothership, but the crew at the surface did not file a missing report for nearly 8 hours. Finally, someone snapped. Call the Coast Guard. Vessel disappeared during an underwater mission to tour the Titanic wreckage. Tonight, an international search operation is underway. We will continue to put every available asset that we have in an effort to to find the Titan and the crew members. Every news station in the world was in on this story. They brought in experts, former passengers. Hell, they even got James Cameron on the line. Stockton Rush asked me if I wanted to go out there and dive this season. You know, I wasn't interested. And then came the rumors. A leaked transcript of the crew's final moments and a series of tapping sounds were supposedly heard around Titan's last known location. But of course, both of these rumors were declared fake by the feds. Tapping sounds are ridiculous. All that was left was a few hours of oxygen and a race against time. Have just hours of oxygen left now, heightening the race against time to rescue the five people inside. Time was running out. And well, they did end up finding that submarine. Debris from the Titan has been brought to the surface from the ocean floor, several pieces of the doomed vessel. Once the pressure vessel is you're certain it's not going to collapse on everybody, everything else can fail. Your thrusters can go, your lights can.