The co-founder of the company behind the Titan sub that imploded, killing all five of its passengers last year, says he is undettered from his ambition for high risk missions.
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush and his four passengers died instantly when the sub suffered a catastrophic implosion on this day last year, during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic.
Stockton perished in the catastrophic breach alongside Hamish Harding, pilot Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and father-son duo Shahzada and Suleman Dawood.
Guillermo Sohnlein, who co-founded OceanGate with Rush back 2009, now says the tragic deaths of the Titan’s passengers hasn’t dampened his enthusiasm for deep ocean exploration and interplantery adventures.
He told The Sun: “The interesting thing with the exploration community is that we know that what we do carries a certain level of risk.
“And we know that as much as we try mitigating that risk and managing that risk, things will go wrong. You hope that when they go wrong they won’t be fatal. But you know that there’s risk, and things will go wrong.
“The exploration community is a little bit strange in that we go in knowing that there’s going to be risks. We know there’s going to be setbacks. And when setbacks do occur, instead of deterring explorers, it seems to motivate explorers to continue forward and continue with their pursuit.”
Sohnlein, a former US marines captain, said tragedies like the one that befell Titan force explorers to “reflect and have a reality check” and use the lessons learned in future missions.
“But once you’ve done that, you’re fully committed to continuing to go forward and that seems to be even more heightened in a perhaps macabre kind of way,” he told the outlet.
“It seems to be even more heightened when that setback leads to fatalities, because I think part of it is, the rest of the exploration community wants to make sure that the legacies of the people who lost their lives are honored by continuing to go forward. You don’t want their lives to be lost in vain. You want to make sure that their sacrifice was worth whatever it was that they were trying to do.”
Sohnlein left OceanGate in 2013, long before the tragedy, as the firm began development of the predecessor to Titan, Cyclops.
He reportedly retained a minority stake in the company, but decided to step back when the firm transitioned from its initial start-up phase into Rush’s speciality, engineering.
Since the implosion, concerns have been raised about whether the Titan was destined for disaster because of its unconventional design and its creator’s refusal to submit to independent checks that are standard in the industry.
The US Coast Guard quickly convened a high-level investigation into what happened, but officials said the inquiry is taking longer than the initial 12-month time frame, and a planned public hearing to discuss their findings won’t happen for at least another two months.
OceanGate has suspended all its operations, and Sohnlein says Rush would have been frustrated at the move, insisting that he was commited to safety.
“I think if Stock had survived and was with us today, I think the regrets he would have, one would be obvious – which is any setback or problem with the sub causing fatalities or injuries,” he said.
“He was very much focused on safety. I think the next regret he would have is the company not continuing operations and not being able to keep going and getting beyond Titanic because Titanic was really just a means to an end for business.
“It was really to get to a point where the subs would be chartered by people all over the world to do all sorts of interesting projects and learn more about our oceans.”
He noted that fifteen years after he and Stockton founded Oceangate, the ocean depths remain largely inacessible.
“The problem that Stockton and I saw is still around today in 2024, 15 years later, and that is that humans do not have access to the deep oceans.
“There’s no ready fleet of submersibles that can take people underwater at least to a significant depth.”
Sohnlein has now set his sites on “safely” sending humans to Venus. In a blog post in April that humans could one day live and work on the planet due to its proximity to earth – despite its intense heat and acidic conditions.
Major barriers to life on the planet like high levels of carbon dioxide and clouds of sulfuric acid “can be overcome with breathing apparatus and acid-resistant materials,” he has argued.
Söhnlein hopes to build a community including scientists, explorers and private investors to realise his dream reaching Venus, while other space firms including Elon Musk’s SpaceX are focussed on Mars.
The goal may be some way off, as crewed interplantary is still in its infancy, and no human beings have ever physically travelled further than the moon.
