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Titan crashed OceanGate nearly a year ago, killing all 5 passengers including the company’s CEO.
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The company’s co-founder, Guillermo Söhnlein, told BI that he thinks about the incident daily.
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The fatal eruption encourages him to continue his exploratory ventures, Söhnlein said.
The OceanGate co-founder said he thinks about Titan’s deadly submersible every day, and the adventure pushes him to continue pursuing his vision of accessible deep-sea exploration.
Almost a year ago, on June 18, 2023, the Titan made its last entry into the Atlantic, where five passengers – including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush – went to the Titanic’s wreck site.
US Coast Guard officials said the vessel had suffered a “catastrophic accident”, killing all passengers instantly.
The incident attracted national attention and was widely seen as a reflection of Rush’s recklessness and relentless push to explore the deep sea – even if that meant bending some rules.
“Few of us have ever had a fatal flaw, and Rush did,” Arnie Weissmann, editor-in-chief of Travel Weekly, told Business Insider last year. “He thought he was right or he wouldn’t have gone in [the submersible] and a pilot did it, but that was a fatal flaw.”
But for Guillermo Söhnlein, who co-founded OceanGate with Rush in 2009, death is an unfortunate aspect of innovation that explorers can only hope to avoid.
“We’ve always known that difficulties are almost part of the exploration experience. It’s almost in the definition of exploration,” he told BI in a recent interview. “You’re going to have difficulties, and you hope the difficulties don’t include deaths, but you know there’s a chance.”
And when death becomes a “compensation,” Söhnlein said, that’s when you should push harder.
“I think in a paradoxical way, that the drive to continue has increased,” he said. “And I really think it’s because you want to make sure that your colleagues, who lost their lives, didn’t lose their lives in vain. You want their death to mean something, and it was you want to keep their legacies alive.”
This mindset is part of why Söhnlein hasn’t stopped thinking about OceanGate and Rush in the year since the Titan disaster.
“If anything I probably think about him and the company and everything 10 times more than I did before the incident,” he said.
Advances in human behavior systems
During the interview, Söhnlein expressed no regrets in those thoughts but a desire to achieve OceanGate’s early vision of “opening up the oceans to humanity.”
He told BI that he sees a question as to whether it is the billionaires who have the resources to build a submersible or the researchers and government agencies who have access to deep-sea vessels that appear to be able to go into the depths. of the sea.
“When Stockton and I sat down and looked at the state of the world in 2009, we thought, ‘That’s a tragedy,'” he said. “The most important ecosystem on the entire planet is one that we can only access if we’re a national government or a billionaire. And that’s ridiculous.”
The Titan explosion continues to be explored today. A recent Wired report revealed more insights into Rush’s push to build low-cost submersibles and how he ignored warnings from his peers.
People inside and outside OceanGate urged Rush to do more tests on the Titan before taking on passengers. Last year, BI reported that OceanGate had completed more than 14 trips and 200 dives using two submersibles.
Söhnlein said he had read the Wired report but didn’t want to comment because he felt it would lead to speculation about its contents.
He also told BI that he does not estimate how many tests are appropriate for deep-sea containment “because it is different for each sub, depending on the level of innovation.”
When asked if he would have said anything different to Rush before the explosion, Söhnlein told BI again that he would be speculating.
“I don’t know. I want to speculate since I was not at the company and I only spoke to Stockton from time to time,” he said. “I didn’t have access to all the information. I wasn’t there day to day. I didn’t see the sub being built.”
A communications firm representing OceanGate wrote in a brief email to BI that “OceanGate has suspended all exploration and commercial operations.”
Last year, Söhnlein told BI about his grand vision of sending 1,000 people to a floating colony on Venus. He also founded Blue Marble Exploration, which he described as an “exploration-focused media company,” after leaving OceanGate.
In a recent interview with BI, he said that one takeaway from Titan’s plough, which he would apply to his continued exploration ventures, goes beyond the wreckage and relates to current advances in the “human transportation system ,” from self-driving cars. to sub-crew flight.
“At some point in the technology development cycle, you have to get people in the loop,” Söhnlein said. “But if you’re going to start putting people in that transportation system, you have to have the right level of comfort with the viability of the technology to make it as safe as possible. And I think that’s just a lesson learned for all.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
