The Titan submersible disaster shocked the world. The exclusive inside story is more disturbing than anyone imagined

Marine sciences The University of Washington building in Seattle is a very modern four-story structure, with large glass windows reflecting the bay across the street.

On the afternoon of July 7, 2016, it was gradually locked.

Red lights began flashing at entrances as students and faculty filed out under overcast skies. Ultimately, only a handful of people remained inside, preparing to unleash one of the most destructive forces in the natural world: the crushing weight of approximately 2½ miles of ocean water.

In the building’s high-pressure testing facility, a black, pill-shaped capsule hung from a hoist in the ceiling. About 3 feet long, it was a model of a submersible called Cyclops 2, developed by a local startup called OceanGate. The company’s CEO, Stockton Rush, had co-founded the company in 2009 as a submarine charter service, anticipating a growing need for commercial travel and research on the ocean floor. Initially, Rush acquired older steel-hulled submarines for its expeditions, but by 2013, OceanGate had begun designing what the company called “a revolutionary new manned submersible.” Among the submarine’s innovations was its lightweight hull, constructed of carbon fiber and able to accommodate more passengers than the spherical cabins traditionally used in scuba diving. In 2016, Rush’s dream was to take paying customers to the most famous shipwreck of them all: the Titanic3,800 meters below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

The engineers carefully lowered the Cyclops 2 model into the test tank nose first, like a bomb loaded into a silo, then screwed onto the tank’s 3,600-pound lid. Then they began pumping water, increasing the pressure to mimic the dive of a submersible. If you’re hanging out at sea level, the weight of the atmosphere above you exerts 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi). The deeper you go, the stronger this pressure; At TitanicAt the depth of, the pressure is approximately 6,500 psi. Soon the pressure gauge in the UW test tank read 1,000 psi, and it kept rising: 2,000 psi, 5,000 psi. After about 73 minutes, as the pressure in the tank reached 6,500 psi, there was a sudden roar and the tank shuddered violently.

“I felt it in my body,” an OceanGate employee wrote in an email later that night. “The building rocked and my ears rang for a long time. »

“I scared everyone,” he added.

The model had imploded thousands of feet short of the safety margin OceanGate had designed for.

In the high-stakes, high-cost world of crewed submersibles, most engineering teams would have gone back to the drawing board, or at least ordered more models to test. Rush’s company did neither of these things. Instead, within months, OceanGate began building a large-scale system. Cyclops 2 based on the imploded model. This submersible design, later renamed Titanfinally reached the Titanic in 2021. He even returned there for expeditions the following two years. But almost a year ago, on June 18, 2023, Titan plunged towards the infamous wreck and imploded, instantly killing all five people on board, including Rush himself.