In a 2019 interview with Smithsonian Magazine, Stockton Rush, the “daredevil inventor” and “maverick CEO” of OceanGate, expressed his frustration about the limitations placed on the commercial submarine business.
“There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown—because they have all these regulations.”
Rush was on his invention, the submersible “Titan,” when it imploded roughly 10,000 feet below the surface of the North Atlantic last Sunday. For some days it was thought that the Titan might actually be on the surface somewhere, the passengers still alive but unable to communicate or make themselves known. Or that the boat had lost power as reportedly happened on multiple previous missions, and settled slowly to the bottom, in the absolute darkness, slowly growing colder as the air inside ran out over the space of days. However, we now know that the submersible failed abruptly at depth. Under such pressures, the entire event would have ended in milliseconds, water rushing in at thousands of miles an hour. The conversion of potential energy in the form of pressure into kinetic energy in the form of movement would have momentarily heated the area of the Titan to a temperature well above that of the surface of the sun. Those on board may have been aware that something was going wrong, but they did not have time to feel pain, or terror. It was just over.
Taking a trip down to visit the wreck of the Titanic is just one of the adventures open to only those with the fattest of wallets. Many of these come with considerable price tags. And even when they don’t have someone as “innovative” as Rush at the controls, they can also come with a very high risk.
Whenever you see a safety regulation, whether it concerns your toaster or the way you do your daily job, there’s a very good chance that regulation exists for a reason. Few people are sitting around thinking “you know, we should really do something about this problem that has never happened,” because real dangers and real foolishness are abundant.
In the case of OceanGate, it certainly appears that some of the regulations that had kept the commercial submarine business incident-free for over 35 years existed for a very good reason. Bypassing those regulations has a price much greater than the $250,000 price tag of a trip in the Titan. In another interview, Rush bragged about violating the rules against placing titanium next to carbon fiber. The reason that there is such a rule is that the difference in electrical potential between the two materials generates corrosion. It’s not just something someone dreamed up. Electrochemistry does not care if you’re a “maverick.”
Taking a submersible 2 miles beneath the ocean is only one of many opportunities that the extremely wealthy have to indulge in something unavailable to most people. A ride in either Jeff Bezos’ unfortunately shaped rocket or in Richard Branson’s air-dropped rocket plane will also reportedly cost between $200,000 and $250,000. (Tip: If you have pockets so deep you’re seriously considering one or the other, there are reasons to be concerned about Branson’s system that go beyond just the death of a pilot in the crash of an earlier model.)
A similar check will buy a ride to the stratosphere on Space Perspective’s giant high-altitude balloon, but if you really want to make it to space for more than a few minutes, prepare to add a couple of zeros. A ride on Soyuz used to cost as little as $20 million when video game developer Richard Garriott visited the International Space Station in 2008, but more recent tickets have run to over $80 million per seat. Prospective space visitors can do a little better on the flights Axiom Space arranges on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. Those can reportedly deliver a week or more on the ISS for around $55 million.
Tech billionaire Jared Isaacman reportedly spent around $200 million to book an entire Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule for a four-person flight. How deep are Isaacman’s pockets? Deep enough that he has reportedly booked three more flights.
For the most part, these flights are exactly as safe as those being conducted on the same ship by NASA. They follow the same safety protocols, and they’re under some pretty intense scrutiny from agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration. That doesn’t make them by any means safe (see Challenger and Columbia), it just means they’re not notably less safe than their government-sanctioned counterparts.
But space is just the very lofty tip of the adventure travel iceberg. These days, just about anyone can visit Antarctica. (You can literally get there on a Disney cruise.) But if you want to pitch out $70,000, you can go to the actual South Pole for a six-day visit to the place so many explorers failed to reach in the previous two centuries.
For around $40,000 you can journey to Nepal, get taken up in a small plane, and then dropped from the same altitude as the top of Mount Everest to parachute above the Himalayas, although the drop may not be as long as expected since the landing zone is at an elevation of 15,000 feet.
And if just falling through the skies above the Goddess Mother of the World isn’t enough, $100,000 will buy you a spot on a guided expedition to reach the summit. Only three climbers died in 2022. That’s a good year. Outside Magazine set the average over the last 30 years at 6.2 climbers per year, with some years being much worse. The year 2023 is looking to shape up as one of the worst years, with at least 10 climbers dead just through mid-May.
When talking about these kinds of experiences, there’s probably no better reference than Jon Krakauer’s book “Into Thin Air.” Krakauer was sent to Everest by Outside in 1996 to cover the growing trend of guided trips up the mountain that all but promised to put wealthy clients on the summit. That year turned out to be a very bad year, with 15 climbers dying in a cascade of disasters.
Even though the guides on Krakauer’s expedition were both experienced and conscious of the danger, they—and their clients, including Krakauer—made some very bad decisions when caught between extreme circumstances and reaching their goals.
Those decisions might be best illustrated by the story of Doug Hansen, one of the few people on the expedition who was not extremely wealthy. Hansen worked for the Postal Service, sorting mail by night, and he picked up construction work during the day, saving up the tremendous cost necessary to satisfy his Everest dream. In 1995, Hansen made the trip to Nepal and joined a team lead by experienced New Zealand guide Rob Hall, paying $65,000 (the equivalent of $131,000 in 2023) for permits, supplies, and for Hall and a team of sherpas to lead him to the top. Then, at an altitude of 28,800 feet, less than 300 feet from the summit, the weather closed in and Hansen was forced to turn back.
Hall was so upset about Hansen’s near-miss that he called him repeatedly from New Zealand, urging him to join the 1996 expedition. He even offered Hansen a steep discount to make a second try on a team otherwise populated by lawyers, doctors, and corporate CEOs who could easily afford the hefty price. On May 10, 1996, as the team started its final ascent toward the summit, Hanson told the group he was not feeling well, hadn’t slept, and was thinking of going down. However, after a conversation with Hall, he decided to keep going.
The team started off in pre-dawn darkness with a “drop dead” time of 2 PM to reach the summit. But crowded conditions on the mountain, worsening weather, and Hansen’s own fading strength meant that when 2 PM came, he was still some distance from the summit. Hall then ignored the warnings he had given everyone just that morning. He put his arm around his client and helped Hansen reach the summit of Everest at 4 PM, May 10, 1996.
Neither man survived.
Out of oxygen and with Hansen both mentally and physically exhausted, Hall left him around 6 PM in an effort to reach supplies at a lower level. Hansen’s body was never discovered, but it’s speculated that he fell over 7,000 feet from the side of the mountain in his confusion. Hall reached the South Summit of the mountain, located oxygen, and was able to radio to people further down the mountain, who connected him by phone with his pregnant wife back in New Zealand. He spoke to her in a series of heartbreaking messages before dying, suffering from too much frostbite and hypothermia to make his way down the ropes.
Hall has often been put forward as the villain of some of the events on that disastrous day, but no one who knew him seems to feel that he set out to do harm, or even to take unnecessary risks. Hall loved the mountain. His trip to the top with Hansen was his fifth visit to the summit. There’s every indication that he only wanted to help Hansen fulfill his dream, to make his client happy. To have something to toast and cheer about when they were both safe down at base camp.
Those events on Everest make it all too easy to imagine something happening, not high up on the mountains, but a mile or more beneath the sea in the small passenger chamber of the submersible Titan. Maybe a light began to blink on the screen. Maybe there was a sound that didn’t seem quite right. But then … maybe they were only 300 feet from being down at the Titanic. Maybe Stockton Rush was so close to giving his clients what they wanted. Making them happy. Sharing with them an adventure they would all be excited to talk about when back aboard the surface ship.
It’s rarely malice that generates the events that lead to a safety regulation. Carelessness will do. So will pushing onward just one step too far because you want to show someone that you can deliver on your promises. That you can give them what they paid for. That you can make them happy.
Unfortunately, the high cost can be even higher. Learning of Hansen and Hall’s predicament on Everest, guide Andy Harris, who had already summitted the mountain hours earlier, took the extraordinary step of trying to go back up to find them and help them down. His ice ax and jacket were later discovered near Hall’s body. His own body was never recovered.
If the Titan had been discovered still intact somewhere beneath the sea, people would certainly have placed their own lives at risk in an effort to recover it. That’s okay. More than okay. The instinct to save those in extremis, even at risk to ourselves, should be cultivated, not repressed. That the people inside were capable of footing an enormous bill, and that the guy who was at the controls thought he was smarter than all those regulations may not make them lovable. It doesn’t make them less worth the effort of saving.
As someone who likes to take solo hikes, I’m certainly not going to complain when I know that on any given day a bad fall or a heart attack could have me drawing rescuers into the wilderness. I admire those people, even if I never need them.
But that’s another reason to never be incautious, never take unnecessary risks, and never try to skirt the safety rules, even if they are “obscene.” The cost can be not just your life or the lives of others who depend on you, but the lives of wonderful people who would try to save you, creating a cascade of costs that can’t be paid off … even for those who can afford to buy a space shot.
We are joined by Christina Reynolds of Emily’s List. Reynolds is the Senior Vice President of Communications and Content at the progressive organization that works on getting women elected to office. Reynolds talks about what she is seeing up and down the ballot this election cycle on the anniversary of the outrageous Supreme Court Decision to take away the reproductive protections of Roe v. Wade.