“Our rule is, we risk capital — we don’t risk people.”
That was a guiding principle for Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate, as described by its CEO, Stockton Rush, in a talk at the GeekWire Summit in October 2022.
Rush’s engineering decisions, and his tolerance for risk, as reflected in his comments at our event, are getting new scrutiny after the apparent implosion of OceanGate’s Titan submersible this week, near the site of the Titanic wreck deep under the North Atlantic Ocean, killing Rush and four others on board.
On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we’re joined by Alan Boyle, GeekWire contributing editor, who has been covering OceanGate for the past seven years. He tells the story of Rush and OceanGate, discusses the Titan tragedy, and considers what’s next for the company and the larger world of ocean exploration.
We also listen to excerpts from Rush’s GeekWire Summit talk, including these:
Why Rush started OceanGate: “I didn’t understand why we were spending 1,000 times as much money to explore space as we were to explore Earth and the oceans. 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.”
The experience of being in a deep-sea submersible: “People don’t appreciate, the average depth of the ocean is 4,000 meters. … And yet, there’s all this life to be discovered. And as we go down to the Titanic, it’s amazing the creatures we see on the 2-and-a-half hour descent, the most bizarre things you can imagine.”
The user experience decision behind the Titan design: “When you get a researcher down there who just gets passionate about the fish or the crabs or the shipwreck that you’re on, that permeates the sub. It’s a must-have. So we said, OK, you’ve got to have a pilot, you’ve got to have a subject matter expert. And then you don’t do the coolest thing you’re ever going to do in your life by yourself. You take your wife, your son, your daughter, your best friend. You’ve got to have four people.”
Technical and materials decisions for the Titan sub: “Carbon fiber is three times better on a strength-to-buoyancy basis than titanium, and underwater, that’s what you care about — not strength to weight, it’s strength to buoyancy, and yet no one had done that.”
The role of certification agencies: “There are certifying or semi-certifying agencies, the Pressure Vessels for Human [Occupancy] committee that handles hyperbaric chambers and submarines, you have the SUBSAFE program in the Navy.
“These programs are over-the-top in their rules and regulations, but they had nothing with carbon fiber. So we had to go out 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 really are. And we were pretty far out there.”
Innovation and ‘breaking things’: “If you’re not breaking things, you’re not innovating. If you’re operating within a known environment, as most submersible manufacturers do, they don’t break things. To me, the more stuff you’ve broken, the more innovative you’ve been.”
OceanGate’s approach to safety: “If we were going to stretch this new material in a new environment, with people inside, we needed to know, well before it failed, that it failed. Our rule is, we risk capital — we don’t risk people.
“So if somebody comes to me and says, ‘Hey, here’s a new idea for the sub,’ if the end result of that failing is that we cancel a mission or we lose a little money, that’s fine. If it’s somebody gets hurt, then we go and find a different approach.”
The role of Titan’s safety system: “With the acoustic monitoring system, we can tell if the hull has had some problem over time. … If it’s making noises at that depth that it didn’t make on the last dive, we can stop the dive. We can go up. We can find out what might have happened.”
Listen to the podcast for a discussion of these comments in the context of what we know now about OceanGate’s design decisions, the loss of the Titan this week, and the passengers who died in the incident.
Related Links and Coverage
- Now what? OceanGate sub tragedy sets off a torrent of questions without answers
- OceanGate submersible and crew declared lost after discovery of debris near Titanic
- Watch the full video: Stockton Rush at the 2022 GeekWire Summit
- Read an archived version of Rush’s OceanGate bio, and a New York Times obituary.
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