Washington (US):Representatives for NASA, Boeing Co. and the U.S. Coast Guard are slated to testify in front of investigators Thursday about the experimental submersible that imploded en route to the wreckage of the Titanic. OceanGate co-founder Stockton Rush was among the five people who died when the submersible imploded in June 2023. The design of the company's Titan submersible has been the source of scrutiny since the disaster.
The Coast Guard opened a public hearing earlier this month that is part of a high-level investigation into the cause of the implosion. Some of the testimony has focused on the troubled nature of the company. Thursday's testimony is scheduled to include Justin Jackson of NASA; Mark Negley of Boeing Co.; John Winters of Coast Guard Sector Puget Sound; and Lieutenant Commander Jonathan Duffett of the Coast Guard Office of Commercial Vessel Compliance.
Earlier in the hearing, former OceanGate operations director David Lochridge said he frequently clashed with Rush and felt the company was committed only to making money. "The whole idea behind the company was to make money," Lochridge testified. "There was very little in the way of science." Lochridge and other previous witnesses painted a picture of a company that was impatient to get its unconventionally designed craft into the water. The accident set off a worldwide debate about the future of private undersea exploration.
The hearing is expected to run through Friday and include more witnesses. The co-founder of the company told the Coast Guard panel Monday that he hoped a silver lining of the disaster is that it would inspire a renewed interest in exploration, including the deepest waters of the world's oceans. Businessman Guillermo Sohnlein, who helped found OceanGate with Rush, ultimately left the company before the Titan disaster.
In a still from from a video animation provided by the United States Coast Guard an illustration of the Titan submersible, right, is shown near the ocean floor of the Atlantic Ocean, as June 18, 2023 communications between the submersible and the support vessel Polar Prince, not shown, are represented at left. (AP) "This can't be the end of deep ocean exploration. This can't be the end of deep-diving submersibles and I don't believe that it will be," Sohnlein said. Coast Guard officials noted at the start of the hearing that the submersible had not been independently reviewed, as is standard practice. That and Titan's unusual design subjected it to scrutiny in the undersea exploration community. OceanGate, based in Washington state, suspended its operations after the implosion. The company has no full-time employees currently but has been represented by an attorney during the hearing.
During the submersible's final dive on June 18, 2023, the crew lost contact after an exchange of texts about Titan's depth and weight as it descended. The support ship Polar Prince then sent repeated messages asking if Titan could still see the ship on its onboard display. One of the last messages from Titan's crew to Polar Prince before the submersible imploded stated, "All good here," according to a visual re-creation presented earlier in the hearing.
When the submersible was reported overdue, rescuers rushed ships, planes and other equipment to an area about 435 miles (700 kilometres) south of St. John's, Newfoundland. Wreckage of the Titan was subsequently found on the ocean floor about 330 yards (300 meters) off the bow of the Titanic, Coast Guard officials said. No one on board survived. OceanGate said it has been fully cooperating with the Coast Guard and NTSB investigations since they began. Titan had been making voyages to the Titanic wreckage site going back to 2021.
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