Let’s try that Titanic thing again…
Nearly a year after the implosion of the Titan submersible, a real estate investor has announced that he’ll travel in a submersible to the Titanic to prove it’s a safe journey.
In June 2023, an OceanGate submersible imploded underwater, killing the five people on board and raising alarms about the safety of extreme tourism. Not everyone’s given up on exploring the Titanic, though, and a new sub from Triton, a company that makes personal submarines, will take Larry Connor, a real estate investor, and the company’s CEO down 3,800 feet into the ocean depths to visit the iconic shipwreck.
“He called me up and said, ‘You know, what we need to do is build a sub that can dive to [Titanic-level depths] repeatedly and safely and demonstrate to the world that you guys can do that, and that Titan was a contraption,'” Patrick Lahey, co-founder and CEO of Triton, told The Wall Street Journal.
Lahey told the publication that the OceanGate submersible implosion had a “chilling effect” on interest in Triton’s vehicles. He added that it brought up “old myths that only a crazy person” would go underwater in one of the vehicles.
Titan, Triton… near enough as makes no difference? From what I can see, Lahey seems to be doing this mostly out of spite that the OceanGate debacle hurt his business, so I hope for his sake (and for the sake of real estate dude) that spite drives him to do a better job of things than Stockton Rush did; Lahey was one of the latter’s many critics (and Rush evidently deserved them, of course) after the Titan expedition went tits up, so he’d better be doing his best to avoid the same outcome. Not that I actively wish harm on them, but I also wouldn’t be shedding many tears if history repeats…
