- Ocean Gate’s Titan exploded nearly a year ago, killing all five passengers, including the company’s CEO.
- The company’s co-founder, Guillermo Sonnlein, told BI that he thinks about the incident every day.
- Zonlein said the fatal explosion motivated him to continue his exploration efforts.
The OceanGate co-founder said he thinks about the Titan submersible’s tragic voyage every day and that the incident motivates him to continue pursuing his vision of accessible deep-sea exploration.
Nearly a year ago, on June 18, 2023, the Titan made its final voyage in the Atlantic Ocean, with five passengers, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, traveling to the site of the Titanic’s wreckage.
U.S. Coast Guard officials said the vessel suffered a “catastrophic implosion” and all on board were killed instantly.
The incident attracted national attention and was widely seen as a sign of Rush’s arrogance and determination to continue deep-sea exploration even if it meant bending a few rules.
“Few people have fatal flaws, but Rush did,” Travel Weekly editor-in-chief Ernie Weissman told Business Insider last year. “He thought he was right, or he wouldn’t have won.” [the submersible] I actually tried it and it was a fatal flaw.”
But for Guillermo Sonnlein, who co-founded OceanGate with Rush in 2009, death is an unfortunate part of innovation that explorers can only avoid.
“We always recognize that setbacks are just part of the expedition experience. It’s almost in the definition of exploration,” he told BI in a recent interview. “Setbacks are bound to happen, and we hope those setbacks don’t result in fatalities, but we know that’s a possibility.”
And when death becomes a setback, Sonnlein says, it’s time to try harder.
“Paradoxically, I think it gives me more motivation to keep going,” he said, “and I think it’s mainly because I want to make sure that my colleagues who lost their lives were not in vain. I want their deaths to have meaning, I want their legacies to live on.”
This sentiment is part of why Zonlein continues to think about Ocean Gate and Rush, a year after the Titan disaster.
“I think I think 10 times more about him and the company and everything else than I did before it happened,” he said.
Advances in human transportation systems
In the interview, Sonnlein spoke of no regrets, but rather of his desire to realize Ocean Gate’s original vision of “opening the oceans to humanity.”
He told BI the problem lies in the fact that deep sea diving is only available to billionaires who can afford to build submersibles, or researchers and government agencies with access to deep-sea research vessels.
“When Stockton and I sat down and looked at the state of the world in 2009, we thought, ‘This is a tragedy,'” he said. “The most important ecosystems on Earth are inaccessible only to national governments or billionaires. This is absurd.”
The Titan implosion remains under investigation, and a recent Wired magazine report revealed more details about how Rush pushed for the construction of a low-cost submersible and ignored warnings from his colleagues.
People inside and outside OceanGate have urged Rush to conduct more testing with Titan before taking passengers on board. Last year, BI reported that OceanGate had completed more than 14 expeditions and 200 dives using its two submersibles.
Zonlein said he had read the Wired article but didn’t want to comment because he felt it would involve speculation about its contents.
He also told BI that he hadn’t considered how many tests would be appropriate for a deep-sea vehicle, “as it varies from vehicle to vehicle, depending on the level of technological innovation.”
When asked if he had said anything different to Rush before the explosion, Zonlein again told BI he was only speculating.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there and only spoke to Stockton occasionally, so I can only speculate,” he said. “I didn’t have access to all the information. I wasn’t there every day. I never saw the submarines being built.”
“Ocean Gate has ceased all exploration and commercial activities,” a communications firm representing Ocean Gate said in a brief email to BI.
Last year, Zonlein told BI about his ambitious vision for sending 1,000 people to a floating colony on Venus, and after leaving Ocean Gate, he founded Blue Marble Exploration, which he describes as “an exploration-focused media company.”
In a recent interview with BI, he said one of the lessons learned from Titan’s implosion goes beyond submersibles and has implications for current advances in “human transportation systems,” from autonomous vehicles to suborbital flight, and can be applied to ongoing exploration efforts.
“At some point in the technology development cycle, you have to bring humans into the loop,” Sonnlein said, “but if you start putting humans in that transportation system, you have to have an appropriate level of comfort about the feasibility of that technology to do it as safely as possible. And I think that’s kind of a lesson learned for everybody.”
