The 10 Wildest Moments of the Competing Titan Submersible Documentaries
Oligarchy Kills. Or: A Whale of a Time at the Bottom of the Sea.
Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the late aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.
—
A lot of the talk about the top .1% taking an ever-increasing share of the economic pie is framed around our ideas of justice, fairness, compassion. That’s not a bad framing, and anyone who doesn’t come from generational wealth should be rightfully pissed every time we look at a graph of our national productivity going up and up, basically since the 70s, while wages stay flat and all the actual gains go to the super-rich (with them poised to receive an even bigger tax break!). It’s not to say we shouldn’t be furious at the unfairness of it all, we should. It’s just not the only consideration.
Another, arguably underdiscussed aspect of oligarchy is that it’s not only unjust, it’s dangerous. The products all around us get demonstrably worse as good ideas are crowded out by rich people’s ideas, or ideas that flatter wealth. Oligarchy isn’t just unfair, it’s bad design.
This was my main takeaway from watching both of the competing documentaries about the Titan submersible that imploded in 2023 with five people onboard—including the CEO of OceanGate, the company that built it. Everyone loves to say “I told you so” and hindsight is 20/20 and “failure is an orphan” and all that stuff, giving the docs no shortage of subjects willing to talk — but even acknowledging that, it’s impossible to watch either movie without being dumbfounded by each successive revelation. Even being aware of the broad strokes of the story, that the mission was essentially doomed by its own hubris, every additional detail hits like a palm to the forehead.
As detailed in both Titan (Netflix) and Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster (Discovery/BBC, available on Max), OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush III (above) was a blue blooded, square-jawed graduate of Phillips-Exeter and Princeton who could trace his ancestry back to the Declaration of Independence. In fact he was named for them, Richard Stockton and Benjamin Rush. (Sidenote: If you’re the third guy in your family to be named “Stockton Rush,” what do your cousins and aunties call you to differentiate? Stocky? SR? Rushbo? Any eastern WASPs feel free to answer.) Rush looked like “test pilot” out of central casting, with a big mop of salt-and-pepper hair and a reassuring squint. He reminded me of a passage in The Right Stuff, about how airline pilots basically adopted Chuck Yeager’s soft West Virginia twang for the next 50 years, as his voice essentially became the sound of reassuring competence. Rush had the look and the resumé to generally avoid further scrutiny.
His wife’s great-grandparents, meanwhile, were the founders of Macy’s, and actually died on the original Titanic voyage (not to be confused with the shoddy reboot). Throughout the docs, especially the Netflix one (directed by Mark Monroe), Rush also embodies the never-take-no-for-an-answer indefatigability we love to associate with tech founders. He idolized Musk and Bezos — wanting to be “SpaceX for the oceans” was apparently one of OceanGate’s internal mantras — and adopted industry disruption as his new birthright. “Disrupting” doesn’t sound like a quality I particularly want in my deep-water submarine company, but again, hindsight.
Instead of SpaceX for the Sea, Oceangate went on to become something like the Theranos For Submarines, only worse: a thing that never really worked despite its CEO desperately wanting it to.
Probably you already know some parts of the story by now: Rush being so singularly focused on building economical submersibles out of carbon fiber (a material that was clearly not up to the task) that he ignored the risks right up until it killed him; the fact that he designed the Titan to be driven using an actual Playstation controller. But it’s one thing to know that and another to watch Rush casually listening to the deafening bangs coming from the sound of his own hull buckling as the carbon fibers snap from the pressure, while he’s deep underneath the water inside of it. At one point during the Netflix one, Rush tells a colleague that the sounds are just the hull “seasoning.” It’s not a cast-iron pan, man! Dead people inside don’t give it extra flavor!
It’s hard to decide which revelations from the docs are the craziest, because it seems like each one is more mind-blowing than the last. Even watching both, little of the information conveyed felt superfluous and they work surprisingly well as a double feature. Each covers slightly different material, and touches on some aspect of the story that seems crazy for the other to leave out.
A few that struck me:
1. The ship was unclassed and unflagged.
While being unclassed is fine for your mom, in the marine world being classed essentially means being certified by an outside agency. At some point between 2015 and 2018 (before the Titan had even been built), Rush apparently decided that regulating bodies could never understand the futuristic newfangledness of carbon fiber, and so OceanGate wouldn’t bother trying to get classed (which is basically a third-party audit). A handful of his collaborators and expert contractors left at this stage. By the time of the implosion in 2023, Titan was also operating as an “unflagged vessel,” which is even worse than being unclassed, in that it was essentially operating illegally without having registered with any nation. It was the “sovereign citizen” of submarines!
2. To get around regulations, they just renamed “passengers” as “mission specialists.”
This struck me as one of the most tech industry of innovations. Since Rush could’ve gotten in trouble for taking passengers on his unclassed (not to mention unflagged) submarine, OceanGate just… never called them passengers. Instead they were renamed “Mission Specialists” and given a brief training (probably a Power Point??). Ta da! No longer “passengers.” Every time one of the tech industry’s stupid neologisms (“onboarding,” “calendarizing,” etc) makes it into general parlance, it’s worth asking why people started fiddling with the nomenclature in the first place (usually it’s just because they’re dumb, but sometimes they’re also trying to fool you).
3. The hull failed, and kept failing.
One of the most difficult tasks for both docs, it seems, is to get a clear timeline of the Titan’s hull, from design to testing to build to failure to redesign to rebuild, and who all was involved. There’s a fairly good reason for that, which seems to be that Rush was deliberately trying to muddy the waters to make the process seem a lot more rigorous than it actually was.
From a New Yorker piece about the company:
OceanGate kept selling tickets, but did not dive to the Titanic for the next three years. It appears that the company spent this period testing materials, and that it built several iterations of the carbon-fibre hull. But it is difficult to know what tests were done, exactly, and how many hulls were made, and by whom, because Rush’s public statements are deeply unreliable. He claimed at various points to have design and testing partnerships with Boeing and NASA, and that at least one iteration of the hull would be built at the Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Alabama. But none of those things were true. Meanwhile, soon after Lochridge’s departure, a college newspaper quoted a recent graduate as saying that he and his classmates had started working on the Titan’s electrical systems as interns, while they were still in school. “The whole electrical system,” he said. “That was our design, we implemented it, and it works.”
The docs both obtained a decent amount of footage, documenting much of the process (it helps when your main subject is a media whore desperately trying to lure investors). To this they add the expected interviews with a few folks from Boeing (not the greatest imprimatur of safety themselves these days!) as well as the Advanced Physics Laboratory at University of Washington, who were involved for time. Even if the timeline isn’t particularly clear, the anecdotes presented are timeless. One, in the Netflix doc, sees a 1/5th-scale model of the Titan’s hull being pressure tested (I believe at the APL). It explodes at a pressure above 3,000 meters (the Titanic is at almost 4,000). Rush, being filmed during the test, tries to play it off like some “failure is part of the process” anecdote, but he’s clearly pissed.
Apparently (detailed in the Netflix version), they started building the full-sized hull before they ever did another scale-model test. A lot of the ensuing timeline is fuzzy, but basically OceanGate separated from Boeing and the APL (presumably over costs) and tried to design the hull in-house instead. Another segment, depicting “Dive 39,” sees Rush taking the Titan down to 3,939 meters, and asking the cameraman to redo the take so he can just say it was it was 4,000.
“Close enough” seemed to be one of his operating mantras. Another of OceanGate’s innovations was that, rather than extensive testing, they attempted to pioneer an “acoustic monitoring system” that would supposedly hear carbon fibers snapping in time to alert the crew to abort missions.
Relevant passage from the New Yorker feature:
“He’s spinning the fact that his sub requires a hull warning system into something positive,” Jarl Stromer, Triton’s regulatory and class-compliance manager, reported to Lahey. “He’s making it sound like the Cyclops [later renamed “Titan] is more advanced because it has this system, when the opposite is true: The submersible is so experimental, and the factor of safety completely unknown, that it requires a system to warn the pilot of impending collapse.”
Even with no engineering background, the idea of hearing fibers snapping in time to get back to the surface on expeditions that take two hours to get down to Titanic depth seems absurd. The Netflix doc in particular does great work with the audio, showing graphs as the pops of the fibers snapping get louder and more frequent as the sub dives deeper, and also after a particular Titanic visit caused a big crack in the Titan’s original hull some time in 2022.
The Discovery/BBC version delves deeper into the actual cracking incident, during dive 80, after which the Titan’s first hull had to be replaced. Apparently Rush would say how many dives the Titan had been on, but would deliberately blur the line between the original hull and the replaced one, to the point that it was hard to get a bead on how many dives the current hull had actually been on, not including the previous hull that had to be replaced because it fucking cracked doing the same thing.
Also unclear, how they actually “fixed” it so it wouldn’t crack again, which seems like an important point. Either way, you will never forget the sight of Stockton Rush being curiously blasé about the sound of his submarine hull audible weakening with him inside it while deep under the sea.
“Carbon fibre makes noise,” Rush told David Pogue, a CBS News correspondent, last summer, during one of the Titanic expeditions. “It crackles. The first time you pressurize it, if you think about it—of those million fibres, a couple of ’em are sorta weak. They shouldn’t have made the team.” He spoke of signs of hull breakage as if it were perfectly routine. “The first time we took it to full pressure, it made a bunch of noise. The second time, it made very little noise.” [New Yorker]
This dude was doing social Darwinism with the carbon fibers in his boat!
4. The ship had 18 bolts, and at one point during one of the hearings after the implosion, it was revealed that before one dive, they had only actually bolted four of them.
Because a traditional hatch would’ve added too much material and weight (I think?), the Titan was constructed like a carbon fiber tube with steel-titanium end caps. Which meant that you had to be bolted into this thing from the outside (covered in greater detail in the Discovery/BBC version). And then it would take two hours to get down to Titanic depth. Even knowing nothing about carbon fiber as a building material or how it hadn’t been properly tested, you couldn’t have gotten me into this thing at gunpoint.
During one incident, four bolts just sheared off, presumably from the weight of the end cap, at which point the whole end cap fell off the Titan onto the “sled” (luckily while the sub wasn’t actually in the water). The cap slid down the sled and stopped just shy of the edge before it could sink to the bottom of the ocean. The interviewee (one of OceanGate’s wealthy “mission specialists”) made the great point that, at depth, the pressure alone would keep the cap attached and you wouldn’t have been able to pry it off with a nuke.
Which I suppose is a great point, if one that ignores all the parts of expedition that don’t happen at the bottom of the ocean. Personally, I would’ve liked to see further explanation of why they didn’t just tighten all 18 bolts. Was it to save time? Are the bolts expensive? Were the techs just that careless? Is this really the time to be stingy with bolts??
5. Stockton Rush freaked out a TV Host so bad that he scrapped his own segment rather than go down to the Titanic.
Both documentaries interview media folks who were supposed to ride down to the Titanic on the Titan, who either backed out, like Expedition Discovery’s host Josh Gates, or didn’t make it down because of the weather — like a Scuba Youtuber who was interviewed in the Netflix doc. The Discovery/BBC version uses a lot of footage from the ultimately-scrapped Discovery segment (for obvious rights reasons), which turns out to be probably the best part of this version.
I don’t generally imagine television hosts to be the smartest group of people in the world (no offense!), nor the least credulous towards startups and square-jawed tech guys. TV weatherman love to get pounded by sleet or blown across the street just for some extra camera time. Hell, Theranos had Errol Fucking Morris shooting videos for them. (I’m talking shit, but full disclosure: I once agreed to go skydiving with Peter Berg for a piece, though it ultimately never happened).
And yet, even a guy who was interested enough in the OceanGate project on his own to pitch the segment, bring along his crew, and go there to film stuff on his own company’s dime, saw enough of the lay of the land in just a few days with Stockton Rush to say Yeah thanks but no thanks, bro, ain’t no way I’m getting on your death trap. They backed out, even though it meant declaring all the money they spent getting there and all the footage they shot worthless.
And seeing the footage, it’s easy to see why.
“The dive was interesting, in that nothing really worked right. Nothing. The sub didn't really do anything it was asked to do. We took it underwater, and then there was just a cascade of problems. Then there was an issue with the software. The system crashed at one point. At one point three of the thrusters weren't working.”
The navigation would turn off. The sub would lose contact with the launch ship. Various propulsion systems (controlled by Rush with a literal Playstation controller) would be offline. This inside a tiny submarine that he was supposed to be inside for at least two hours.
You know that thing that happens about every seven to ten days, where some bluetooth accessory just refuses to work? That seems like the basic conflict in trying to be a tech company for deep-sea diving. The tech industry loves to make cool new products that just kind of don’t work 10% of the time.
6. Oh yeah, the Titan actually operated via fucking BlueTooth.
This probably shouldn’t count as a bullet point, since I don’t remember seeing it in either doc and I only found the following passage after I wrote the above.