Inside Titan, quarters are tight, with no escape hatch
Imagine sitting in a tubeshaped vessel, about the size of a minivan, with four other people. You’re bolted in, with no way to get out, while the pilot uses a video game controller to steer through the ocean depths of more than two miles.
This is Titan, the submersible vessel bound for the wreckage of the Titanic that went missing on Sunday. The cylinder-shaped craft is equipped with a small toilet and a first aid kit. Passengers who embark on the voyage typically bring a sandwich for lunch in a small bag, along with some water and extra layers of warm clothing.
The five-person sub was designed and built by OceanGate Inc., a private company based in Everett, Wash., according to the company’s website. The vessel is 22 feet long, just over 9 feet wide, and a little over 8 feet high, according to the website.
The trip to the Titanic, from start to finish, is supposed to take approximately 10 hours, according to an archived version of the OceanGate website. It takes the mini-sub about two and a half hours to reach the ocean floor, and the team can spend as long as four hours surveying the shipwreck before starting the ascent to the surface.
But that didn’t happen on Sunday. The submersible lost contact with the Polar Prince, the research vessel it was launched from, about an hour and 45 minutes into the dive, in depths of about 13,000 feet, or 2.4 miles. The vessel holds enough oxygen to sustain the people on board for as long as 96 hours in an emergency, officials said.
OceanGate was charging $250,000 per passenger for the voyage.
“Once the submersible is launched you will begin to see alienlike lifeforms whizz by the viewport as you sink deeper and deeper into the ocean,” the company’s website states. “The descent takes approximately two hours but it feels like the blink of an eye. You may assist the pilot with coms and tracking, take notes for the science team about what you see outside of the viewport, watch a movie or eat lunch. There is a private toilet at the front of the sub if nature calls.”
The custom-built unit is similar to a camping toilet, the company said.
“When the toilet is in use, we install a privacy curtain between the dome and the main compartment and turn the music up loud,” OceanGate’s website states. “We do recommend that you restrict your diet before and during the dive to reduce the likelihood that you will need to use the facilities.”
David Pogue, a correspondent for “CBS Sunday Morning,” experienced the submersible firsthand last year.
“I couldn’t help noticing how many pieces of this sub seemed improvised,” Pogue said in the story, which was broadcast in November.
Pogue got to sit inside the cramped quarters of the submersible, which is locked from the outside, meaning passengers couldn’t escape even if the vessel reached the surface.
“The crew closes the hatch from the outside with 17 bolts,” Pogue explained. “There’s no other way out.”
The sub is piloted with something similar to a video game controller, and the surface ship provides the pilot with directions on where to go.
“There’s no GPS underwater, so the surface ship is supposed to guide the sub to the shipwreck by sending text messages,” Pogue said. “But on this dive, communications somehow broke down. The sub never found the wreck.”
Pogue recalled that situation on Monday.
“You may remember that the @OceanGateExped sub to the #Titanic got lost for a few hours LAST summer, too, when I was aboard,” Pogue tweeted.
After Titan’s first dive to the Titanic wreck site in 2021, the company said the submersible had an “aerospace-grade carbon fiber hull mated with titanium endcaps and dome.”
The company also touted its innovative system for monitoring the health of the hull.
“Aerospace quality materials and manufacturing and OceanGate’s patented, real time, Acoustic Hull Health Monitoring System provide a robust safety factor,” the company said in a statement.
The company thanked a number of “industry partners,” including Boeing and NASA, for design and engineering support and Northrop Grumman for its deep-ocean test facility.
Titan is supposed to communicate with the surface vessel every 15 minutes, or more frequently if needed, “via text messages which are exchanged via a USBL (ultra-short baseline) acoustic system,” the website states. “Tracking of the sub’s position (lat/long and depth) is achieved through the same system but is controlled by the computer and updates the sub’s position every few seconds.”
But on Sunday, the mini-sub lost communications with its surface vessel about 380 nautical miles south of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canadian officials reported.