Titan (submersible)

Titan (submersible)

3D modelling of the Titan at the start of the dive
History
United States
Name	Titan
Owner	OceanGate, Inc.
Operator	OceanGate, Inc.
Completed	2018
Homeport	Everett, Washington
Fate	Imploded on June 18, 2023; 1 years ago
General characteristics
Class and type	not classed
Displacement	10,432 kg (23,000 lbs)
Length	6.7 m (22 ft)
Beam	2.8 m (9 ft 2 in)
Height	2.5 m (8 ft 2 in)
Propulsion	Four Innerspace 1002 thrusters
Speed	3 knots (5.6 km/h) (max)
Endurance	96 hours (w/5 persons)
Test depth	Up to 4,000 m (13,000 ft)
Capacity	5 persons
Crew	1 pilot, 1 technical expert, 3 "mission specialists"

Titan (known as Cyclops 2 until 2018) was the second submersible designed and built by OceanGate, the first privately-owned submersible with an intended maximum depth of 4,000 m (13,000 ft). It also was the first completed crewed submersible that used a hull constructed of titanium and carbon fiber composite materials, as most other human-carrying submersibles are designed with an all-metal pressure vessel.

After testing with dives to its maximum intended depth in 2018 and 2019, the original composite hull of Titan developed fatigue damage and was replaced by 2021. In that year, OceanGate began operating a tourist service to visit the wreck of the Titanic, completing several dives to the wreck site in both 2021 and 2022.

On June 18, 2023, OceanGate lost contact with Titan during its first dive in 2023 to the Titanic. Loss-of-contact had occurred multiple times during previous test and tour dives, so OceanGate did not alert authorities until the submersible was overdue for its return. A massive international search and rescue operation ensued and ended on June 22, when debris from Titan, which had been destroyed in a catastrophic implosion, was discovered close to the bow of Titanic.

Design and construction

A March 2015 OceanGate video outlining the Cyclops program

OceanGate began developing a composite carbon fiber and titanium-hulled submersible in collaboration with the University of Washington's Applied Physics Lab (APL) in 2013, tentatively named Cyclops 2; the first titanium structural components were ordered in December 2016 from Titanium Fabrication Corp. (TiFab),Boyle, Alan (December 9, 2016). "OceanGate starts building submersible craft that can take crews 13,000 feet deep". GeekWire. Retrieved June 20, 2023.</ref> and OceanGate signed a contract with Spencer Composites in January 2017 for the carbon-composite cylinder.

Spencer previously had built the composite pressure hull for the single-person DeepFlight Challenger for Steve Fossett to a design by Graham Hawkes. Spencer Composites was given challenging performance targets for Cyclops 2, which was meant to withstand 6,600 psi (46 MPa; 450 atm) working service pressure with a factor of safety of 2.25× for its intended maximum depth of 4,000 m (13,120 ft), and provided six weeks to complete the design. In March 2018, Cyclops 2 was renamed to Titan, which the Rush described it "an amazing engineering feat" during her launch in 2018.

OceanGate's calculations showed the cylinder that formed the center section of the crew compartment should have a wall thickness of 114 mm (4.5 in), which they rounded up to 5.0 in (127 mm); it consisted of 480 alternating layers of pre-preg unidirectional cloth, laid in the axial direction, and wet-wound filament, laid in the hoop direction. The cylinder was built in 2017 and cured at 137 °C (279 °F) for 7 days. The entire pressure vessel consisted of two titanium hemispheres, two matching titanium interface rings, and the 142 cm (56 in) internal diameter, 2.4-meter-long (7.9 ft) carbon fiber-wound cylinder—the largest such device ever built for use in a crewed submersible. One of the titanium hemispherical end caps was fitted with a 380 mm-diameter (15 in) acrylic window. In addition to the crew compartment, Titan included a landing skid structure and outer glass fiber composite shell, both bolted to the titanium interface rings. Overall, the Titan was 670 cm × 280 cm × 250 cm (22.0 ft × 9.2 ft × 8.2 ft) and weighed 9,525 kg (21,000 lb) with a maximum payload of 685 kg (1,510 lb). It moved at up to 3 kn (5.6 km/h) using four electric thrusters, arrayed two horizontal and two vertical. The vessel carried sufficient oxygen to sustain a full complement of five people for 96 hours.

Schematic of Titan, with human figures for scale

Titan was equipped with a real-time acoustic monitoring system, which OceanGate claimed could detect the onset of buckling in the carbon fiber hull prior to catastrophic failure. Rush held a patent on the system. Titan was controlled with a modified game controller, similar to Cyclops 1.

Limitations

Once the occupants were aboard, the hatch was closed and bolted from the outside; there was no way to open the hatch from inside the vessel. In addition, there was no on-board location system; the support ship which monitored the position of Titan relative to its target would send text messages to Titan providing distances and directions.

The Marine Technology Society's committee on Manned Underwater Vehicles drafted a private letter to Rush in March 2018, expressing concerns with the design of Titan and urging him to have the ship "classed" (certified by a ship classification society), partly because the marketing of the submersible, which stated it would meet or exceed the standards of DNV, was misleading because OceanGate had no intentions to have the vehicle tested by DNV. Although the letter was not sent, the chair of the committee said he had "a frank conversation" with Rush following which they "agreed to disagree".

Rob McCallum had consulted for OceanGate in 2009, but left over his concerns that vessel development was being hurried. In 2018, he emailed Rush, warning him the development cycle and refusal to have the ship classed was "potentially placing yourself and your clients in a dangerous dynamic", adding that in Rush's "race to Titanic you are mirroring that famous catch cry: 'She is unsinkable'". Rush's response called the email "a serious personal insult" and complained about "the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone'".

In 2019, OceanGate published a blog post explaining why Titan was not classed. In the post, OceanGate said "the vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure" and argued that classification focused solely on the physical state of the vessel and not its corporate actions, which it characterized as a "constant, committed effort and a focused corporate culture" of "maintaining high-level operational safety".

Journalist David Pogue, who rode in Titan to view the Titanic in 2022, noted that Titan was not equipped with an emergency locator beacon; during his expedition, the surface support vessel lost track of the Titan "for about five hours", and adding such a beacon was discussed. "They could still send short texts to the sub, but did not know where it was. It was quiet and very tense, and they shut off the ship's internet to prevent us from tweeting." Mike Reiss confirmed the submersible lost contact on each of his four dives and said "that seems to be just something baked into the system". As an example, Reiss reported that it took three hours to locate the Titanic during one dive, despite landing only 460 m (500 yd) from the wreck.

Testing and inspection

OceanGate claimed on its website as of 2023 that the Titan was "designed and engineered by OceanGate Inc. in collaboration [with] experts from NASA, Boeing, and the University of Washington." A 1⁄3-scale model of the Cyclops 2 pressure vessel was built and tested at the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory; the model was able to sustain a pressure of 4,285 psi (29.54 MPa; 291.6 atm), corresponding to a depth of approximately 3,000 m (9,800 ft). After the disappearance of the Titan in 2023, the University of Washington stated that the Applied Physics Laboratory had no involvement in "design, engineering, or testing of the Titan submersible." A Boeing spokesperson also said that Boeing "was not a partner on the Titan and did not design or build it." A NASA spokesperson said that NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center had a Space Act Agreement with OceanGate, but "did not conduct testing and manufacturing via its workforce or facilities". Rush had touted partnerships with NASA, Boeing, and UW to Pogue in 2022 in response to a question about the perceived "MacGyvery jerry-rigged-ness [sic]" improvisational design based on the use of off-the-shelf components.

David Lochridge, OceanGate Director of Marine Operations, inspected the Titan as it was being handed over from Engineering to Operations and filed a quality control report in January 2018 in which he stated that no non-destructive testing of the carbon fiber hull had taken place to check for voids and delaminating which could compromise the hull's strength. Instead, Lochridge was told that OceanGate would rely on the real-time acoustic monitoring system, which he felt would not warn the crew of potential failure with sufficient time to safely abort the mission and evacuate. The day after he filed his report, he was summoned to a meeting in which he was told the acrylic window was only rated to 1,300 m (4,300 ft) depth because OceanGate would not fund the design of a window rated to 4,000 m (13,000 ft). In that meeting, he reiterated his concerns and added he would refuse to allow crewed testing without a hull scan; Lochridge was dismissed from his position as a result. OceanGate filed a lawsuit against Lochridge that June, accusing him of improperly sharing proprietary trade secrets and fraudulently manufacturing a reason to dismiss him. The suit was settled in November 2018.

 Pogue: How many backup systems do you have for the thing collapsing?
 Rush: So the key on that one is, we have an acoustic monitoring system. Carbon fiber makes noise. There're millions of fibers there. [...] It makes noise, and it crackles. When the first time you pressurize it, if you think about it, of those million fibers, a couple of 'em are sorta weak. They shouldn't have made the team. And when it gets pressurized, they snap, and they make a noise. The first time you get to, say, 1,000 meters, it will make a whole bunch of noise. And then you back off, and it won't make any noise until you exceed the last maximum [depth]. And so when, the first time we took it to full pressure, it made a bunch of noise. The second time, it made very little noise.

 Pogue: Could you get three hours back to the surface in time [after the system provides an alert]?
 Rush: Yes. Yes, 'cause what happens is once you stop going down, the pressure, now it's easier. You just have to stop your descent.

 —Stockton Rush, 2022 interview series with David Pogue, published June 2023

Initial shallow dive testing with a crew was conducted in Puget Sound. OceanGate said that testing of Titan without a crew to 4,000 m (13,000 ft) was performed in June 2018 to validate the design, conducted near Great Abaco Island, near the edge of the continental shelf, as the platform would only need to be towed 10 nmi (19 km) to depths exceeding 4,600 m (15,000 ft). During a subsequent human-piloted descent, Rush became the second solo human to descend to 4,000 m (13,000 ft) on December 10, 2018, after James Cameron, who in 2012 dove to Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, approximately 11,000 m (36,000 ft). Partway through that solo dive in December 2018, Rush used the vertical thrusters to overcome unexpected positive buoyancy when descending past 3,000 m (10,000 ft), which caused interference with the communication system, and he lost contact with the surface ship for approximately one hour.

In April 2019, OceanGate announced that a crew of four had set a record by descending in Titan to 3,760 m (12,340 ft). Karl Stanley, who had participated in the April 2019 dive alongside Rush, later sent an email to Rush stating his concerns with loud cracking noises they had experienced during the dive. In Stanley's opinion, the noises were associated with a potential "flaw/defect in one area being acted on by the tremendous pressures and being crushed/damaged", adding he felt it meant there was "an area of the hull that is breaking down". In a later email, Stanley was more blunt in his assessment: "I think that hull has a defect near that flange, that will only get worse. The only question in my mind is will it fail catastrophically or not." Rush responded by stating more tests would be conducted.

After the tests were completed in January 2020, the hull of Titan began showing signs of cyclic fatigue and the craft was de-rated to 3,000 m (9,800 ft). The Spencer-built composite cylindrical hull either was repaired or replaced by Electroimpact and Janicki Industries in 2020 or 2021, prior to the first trips to Titanic. According to Rush, the carbon fiber materials had belonged to Boeing, but OceanGate had purchased them at a significant discount because they were past their shelf-life. Boeing stated they had no record showing they sold carbon fiber to OceanGate or Rush.

RMS Titanic tourism

The wreck of RMS Titanic was discovered on September 1, 1985 by Robert Ballard with support from Argo and RV Knorr. In 1986, Ballard and two companions conducted detailed photographic surveys and inspections of Titanic wreckage using Alvin, Jason Jr., and the support ship RV Atlantis II. Since then, limited tours of the wreck of the Titanic have been conducted, most notably by the Russian Mir-class submersibles, which had been contracted in the 1990s for that purpose, including the capturing footage for the opening scenes of the eponymous 1997 film.

After carrying tourists to the wreck of the Andrea Doria in 2016, Rush said "there's only one wreck that everyone knows... if you ask people to name something underwater, it's going to be sharks, whales, Titanic." OceanGate's Titan was used for several survey expeditions of the Titanic wreckage site, starting in 2021. Rush stated that Titan could be used to explore the debris field and accurate scans could be used to build a 3-D model of the wreck.

When OceanGate's initial plans for the Titanic expeditions were announced in 2017, the first trip was scheduled for 2018, and each tourist's seat was priced at US$105,129, a price OceanGate chose because it was the price of the ticket for the Vanderbilt suite on Titanic in 1912, adjusted for inflation. Continued testing of the novel hull precluded operations in 2018. By 2019, the cost of a ticket on Titan to view Titanic had risen to $125,000; 54 tourists had signed up for one of six voyages that were scheduled to begin on June 27, but those plans were delayed until 2020 because permits could not be secured for the surface support vessel. The proposed operation involved MV Havila Harmony (sailing under a non-Canadian flag), and would have violated the Coasting Trade Act, which prohibits foreign-flagged vessels from conducting commercial voyages with origin and destination ports in Canada, analogous to the United States' Jones Act. In January 2020, the original hull was de-rated to 3,000 m (9,800 ft) maximum depth after signs of fatigue were found, and the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States delayed the procurement of carbon fiber filament needed to build a replacement hull. In November 2020, Rush announced the first voyage to Titanic would be delayed to May 2021.

AHTS Horizon Arctic at Port aux Basques (August 2022)

For the 2021 season, OceanGate selected Canadian-flagged AHTS Horizon Arctic as the surface support vessel. The first Titanic survey expedition aboard Titan was scheduled to start in late June 2021; the first dive was completed in mid-July. A second dive followed in early August, and Titan returned to Seattle in November.

By 2022, the cost of a ticket had doubled to $250,000. Horizon Arctic again served as the support vessel for the planned dives. According to OceanGate court filings, 28 persons visited the Titanic on the Titan in 2022, 21 of whom were "mission specialists", i.e., non-staff passengers. In total, OceanGate undertook six dives to Titanic in 2021 and seven in 2022.

Wreck expert Paul-Henri "P.H." Nargeolet, who was also onboard, told me he wasn't worried about what would happen if the structure of the Titan itself were damaged when at the bottom of the ocean. "Under that pressure, you'd be dead before you knew there was a problem." He said it with a smile.

 — as recounted by Arnie Weissmann, in Travel Weekly article published June 22, 2023

For the 2023 survey expedition, OceanGate secured MV Polar Prince as its support vessel, making plans to begin in May. According to Rush, the cost of leasing Horizon Arctic had increased to $200,000 per week; the switch to Polar Prince meant the launch and recovery platform would need to be towed to the site, rather than carried on board. Challenging weather conditions kept the initial set of dives from occurring in May.

2023 incident and destruction

Main article: 2023 Titan submersible incident

On June 18, 2023, contact with Titan was lost during the first dive that year to view the wreckage of RMS Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean about 400 nautical miles (740 km) south-southeast of the coast of Newfoundland. The submersible was carrying tourists Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood, and his son Suleman Dawood, the Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and OceanGate founder Rush, who was the submersible's pilot. After the submersible was overdue to return, extensive search and rescue efforts began. On June 22, 2023, it was confirmed that Titan had imploded, likely during the descent, killing all five occupants on board instantly. The exact cause remains under investigation; future cause evaluations and research will focus on setting standards for construction, safety requirements, and testing for submersibles.