Billionaire Taking New Sub to Titanic Wreck Calls Titan a ‘Contraption’

Nearly a year after the implosion of the Titan submersible, a real estate investor has announced that he’ll travel in a submersible to the Titanic to prove it’s a safe journey.

In June 2023, an OceanGate submersible imploded underwater, killing the five people on board and raising alarms about the safety of extreme tourism. Not everyone’s given up on exploring the Titanic, though, and a new sub from Triton, a company that makes personal submarines, will take Larry Connor, a real estate investor, and the company’s CEO down 3,800 feet into the ocean depths to visit the iconic shipwreck.

“He called me up and said, ‘You know, what we need to do is build a sub that can dive to [Titanic-level depths] repeatedly and safely and demonstrate to the world that you guys can do that, and that Titan was a contraption,'” Patrick Lahey, co-founder and CEO of Triton, told The Wall Street Journal.

Lahey told the publication that the OceanGate submersible implosion had a “chilling effect” on interest in Triton’s vehicles. He added that it brought up “old myths that only a crazy person” would go underwater in one of the vehicles.

While the implosion made some weary of exploring the ocean’s depths, Lahey said Connor, a client of Triton’s, wanted to get started on a project days after the OceanGate disaster.

“I want to show people worldwide that while the ocean is extremely powerful, it can be wonderful and enjoyable and really kind of life-changing if you go about it the right way,” Connor told The Wall Street Journal.

The Titan submersible was designed to take tourists to the Titanic wreckage, located approximately 2.5 miles below the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean. It exploded during its descent, killing British entrepreneur Hamish Harding, Pakistani investor Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush.

An investigation into the implosion is still ongoing, but David Lochridge, OceanGate’s former director of marine operations, raised safety concerns before the implosion. In a 2018 lawsuit, Lochridge said he was fired for raising his concerns about the design and testing of the hull. He warned the testing system wouldn’t detect critical flaws and the failures could be catastrophic given the ocean pressure.

OceanGate has promised to cooperate with the investigation and suspended operations in the wake of the implosion.

The findings from the ongoing investigations by the U.S. Coast Guard and other agencies will be shared with the International Maritime Organization and other relevant bodies to enhance global safety standards for submersible operations.

Connor, who has a net worth of $2 billion according to Forbes, has traveled to space, raced cars, flown in a fighter jet and set the Guinness World Record for the highest HALO formation while skydiving, according to his company website. He’s also traveled with Lahey to the deepest parts of the oceans in a Triton submersible.

The two will make the journey in the Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer, although it’s unclear when the journey will take place.

Newsweek has reached out to Larry Connor and Patrick Lahey for comment but did not receive a response in time for publication.