You cannot possibly have missed this news. It is gobsmacking. It is also confounding. You want to say “What the what?”. For a cost of about $250,000, adventure tourists can pay for an eight-day trip to the wreck of the Titanic on a sort of submarine. The oceangoing vessel, Titanic, struck an iceberg and went down on April 15, 1912 and rests nearly 2.5 miles on the ocean floor. People have been obsessed ever since. I get outer space which is dangerous, but the ocean, seems even more so. Maybe there are valid reasons to play tourist there, but it all seems macabre. Here is some of what we know.

The company that conducts these sightseeing trips is called Oceangate and before this recent tour, they had conducted four tours this year. In all, over 150 trips have been made to decaying wreckage. While it takes eight days to make the trip, the Oceangate Titan submersible takes eight hours to go down to the wreck and another eight to come back up. The human body was not meant to survive in the intense pressure of the ocean. If you are claustrophobic, even if you have the $250k, this trip on the little submersible looks problematic:

Y’all please watch this. It’s a CBS story that aired a while back about that submarine that is now missing. The creators of that missing submarine are DEEPLY unserious. pic.twitter.com/B6JriITyZj

— Marie, MSN, APRN, FNP-C (@FnpMarieOH) June 19, 2023

One button, Camper World, game controller? NO. And, HALE No.

From MSN, here is a charming description of getting caught in the Titanic wreckage:

In 2000, Dr. Michael Guillen, then an ABC News correspondent, was filming from the wreck of the Titanic when his vessel became trapped in the propeller.
“When we collided with the propeller, and I started seeing those big chunks of metal raining down on us … the first reaction I had was, ‘This can’t be happening,'” he recalled to ABC News on Tuesday.
“We got caught by this underwater turn and just drove us right into the blades,” Guillen said.
“This voice came into my head and said, you know, ‘This is how it’s going to end for you,'” he recalled. “I’ll never forget those words.”
“I’m very aware of what these poor souls on board the ship the Titan are experiencing,” he said. “I am just heartbroken about it.”

Here is the list of those aboard:

Renowned explorers and a father-son duo were among the five people aboard a submersible that disappeared in the Atlantic Ocean on Sunday while touring the Titanic wreckage, ABC News has learned.
ABC News has confirmed that those aboard are: Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate; Hamish Harding, a British businessman, pilot and space tourist; Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French diver and Titanic expert; Shahzada Dawood, a Pakistani businessman, and his son Suleman Dawood.
-ABC News’ Victoria Beale, Miles Cohen, Laryssa Demkiw and Anna Rabemanantsoa

I will tell you more about Paul-Henri Nargeolet in just a moment.

Let’s talk about the search area. It’s big. Like really, really big. NPR is generally useless, but I like this description:

David Marquet, a retired U.S. Navy submarine captain, says there are many factors that make this search and rescue mission particularly challenging: It’s a “tiny sub, big ocean and extremely deep water and several hundred miles away from the coast.”
“It’s basically imagining a spacecraft disappeared on the far side of the moon,” he says. “A, you have to find it. B, you have to get to it. Even when you get to it … you still need to somehow get the people out of there to safety.”

But the U.S. Coast Guard has a plan:

BREAKING U.S. Coast Guard officials announce search plans for the next 24 hours for the #Missingsub with 5 people on board:

* search efforts have not yielded any results
* 40 hours of oxygen left on vessel
* search area as large as Connecticut
* ROV currently deployed…

— Rachel Acenas (@RachelAcenas) June 20, 2023

Or does the Coast Guard have a plan:

The United States Coast Guard has access to a highly capable rescue submersible called the Magellan, which is ready to deploy to rescue this lost submarine near the Titanic. But I’m hearing disturbing reports that U.S. Coast Guard officials are blocking or delaying the Magellan…

— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) June 20, 2023

On the other hand, this tweet was from Dan Crenshaw. Your mileage may vary. Remember I said I would tell you more about Paul-Henri Nargeolet. He has quite a fatalistic attitude.

From the New York Times:

While Mr. Nargeolet was born in Chamonix, in the French Alps, he has devoted his career to the ocean. He was an amateur diver in his youth before joining the French Navy in 1964, according to a biography published on the website of the Cité de la Mer, an oceanography museum in Cherbourg, France, that has hosted exhibitions of objects salvaged from the wreck and that has collaborated with Mr. Nargeolet.
During two decades in the Navy, he was a mine-clearing diver, a deep-sea diver, and a submarine pilot. That experience led him to work for IFREMER, a publicly funded French maritime research institute, where he was in charge of its submarine exploration crafts during early expeditions to the Titanic wreck. His first dive to the Titanic was in July 1987, about two years after the wreck was discovered.
“It was a pretty unforgettable moment,” Mr. Nargeolet said in an interview last year with HarperCollins France, which had just published a book he had written about the Titanic.
He described how the small team inside the craft was chatty until it reached the wreck. Then, he said, “for the next 10 minutes there wasn’t a sound in the submarine.”
“We didn’t know at that time that we would return several times, and that I would return as often as I have been able to,” he added.

Not an adventure tourist. He is a serious researcher and knew what he was getting into.

Lessons:

1. Life is Dangerous
2. A Fool and His Money Can Get Into Real Trouble.
3. Oceans are Freaking Big.

Featured Image: karydwenphotography/flickr.com/cropped/Creative Commons