If you want to see the wreckage of the Titanic, you can, but it will cost you. OceanGate provides you with that experience, deploying a five-person submersible to travel down 12,500 feet to the wreck of the famed ocean liner. It comes with a price tag of $250,000 per seat. It’s a luxury item for the wealthy, but one of those seacrafts has been lost. It occurred earlier today, they lost contact with one of the submersibles as it descended toward the Titanic wreck, and there are concerns that it has become stuck inside the wreckage (via NBC News):
The U.S. Coast Guard is searching for a missing Canadian research submersible that disappeared on Sunday after it went to explore the wreck of the Titanic.
The 21-foot submersible and its five-person crew, from the Canadian research vessel Polar Prince, started a dive on Sunday morning, according to the Coast Guard. But the Polar Prince lost contact with the vessel after an hour and 45 minutes.
The missing submersible was part of an OceanGate Expeditions tour exploring the Titanic wreckage, located 900 nautical miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The private company charters trips to explore the wreckage with its research teams. It is unclear whether any tourism passengers were on board.
Rear Admiral John Mauger, the commander of the Coast Guard district leading the search, said they received a call for help from OceanGate on Sunday afternoon, after the crew lost contact and the submersible missed its return time. He said the Coast Guard immediately launched a surface and aerial search to find or recover the submersible and any survivors.
"We really brought all assets that we have available to us to bear on finding the submersible and the people in it," Mauger said. "We understand from the operator of the submersible that there is a 96-hour reserve capacity on there, and so that gives us some time to affect a search. But when when something happens on the high seas, it gets complicated quickly."
More on the submersible, the travel package, and the challenges of locating/communicating with those inside if found (via BBC):
The submersible usually carries a pilot, three paying guests, and what the company calls a "content expert".
The trip sets sail from St John's in Newfoundland, which is around 370 miles (600km) from the wreckage site. Each full dive to the wreck, including the descent and ascent, reportedly takes around eight hours.
The OceanGate website lists three submersibles it owns, and only the Titan is capable of diving deep enough to reach the Titanic wreckage.
The vessel weighs 10,432 kg (23,000 lbs) and, according to the website, can reach depths of up to 4,000m and has 96 hours of life support available for a crew of five.
A vessel called the Polar Prince, which is used to transport submersibles to the wreckage site, was involved in the expedition, its owner told the BBC.
David Pogue, a CBS reporter who travelled in the Titan submersible last year, told the BBC about the issues that both the submersible crew and the land crew are likely to be experiencing, saying that there is currently "no way" to communicate with the vessel as neither GPS nor radio "work under water".
"When the support ship is directly over the sub, they can send short text messages back and forth. Clearly those are no longer getting a response," Mr Pogue said.
He added that because the passengers are sealed inside the vessel by bolts applied from the outside, "there's no way to escape, even if you rise to the surface by yourself. You cannot get out of the sub without a crew on the outside letting you out."
The clock is ticking, but the initial assessment isn’t promising.
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