OceanGate suspends all exploration after Titan implosion

OceanGate Expeditions, the embattled tourism company behind the Titan submersible tragedy, is suspending all exploratory and commercial operations — two weeks after its signature diving vessel fatally malfunctioned with five people on board.

The announcement was made quietly through a small banner header on OceanGate’s website.

Founded in 2009, the company offered well-heeled daredevils the opportunity to travel on submersibles to underwater shipwrecks and canyons.

The Washington state-based group, however, made headlines last month when its Titan submersible vanished June 18 in the North Atlantic Ocean en route to the wreck of the Titanic, sparking a massive, multi-day search effort helmed by US and Canadian authorities.

Five people — including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, 61 — were on board at the time. 

Officials now believe that the vessel imploded, killing the passengers instantly.

Remnants of the sub, including its tail cone, were found about 1,600 feet from the box of the Titanic on June 22.

Debris recovered in subsequent days also contained “presumed human remains,” according to the US Coast Guard.

In the weeks since the tragic incident, Rush and OceanGate have come under fire for what some perceive as cavalier attitudes about safety that may have contributed to the sub’s malfunction.

In one newly-unearthed correspondence, Rush compared the glue holding the Titan together to “peanut butter,” and admitted that the hull’s carbon fiber design was “pretty simple.”

OceanGate’s co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein, who is no longer with the company, has repeatedly defended Rush against accusations of hubris.

“The biggest thing I’ve always admired about [Rush] is his healthy respect for risk, and his healthy respect for the dangers of the deep ocean,” he told the BBC in the early days of the search. 

“Everything that we did was always very much focused on managing those risks.”

At the time of the implosion, OceanGate had conducted over 141 expeditions in addition to over 2,000 dives across the Pacific, Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, according to the company’s website.

A coveted spot on the doomed Titanic trip cost the passengers — including billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, 58, and Titanic expert Pierre-Henri Nargeolet, 77 — $250,000 each.