The submersible that went missing with five people on board during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic on Sunday (June 18) was built with NASA’s help.
Washington-based company OceanGate consulted engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama throughout the development of the deep-sea submersible, which is known as Titan.
The collaboration got here via a Space Act agreement with the agency, based on OceanGate.
“NASA’s expertise within the design and automatic fiber placement lay up of composite hulls was extremely priceless on this project,” OceanGate founder and CEO Stockton Rush said in a March 2022 statement.
“The flexibility to construct Titan’s pressure hull with aerospace-grade carbon fiber and manufacturing protocols leads to a submersible which weighs a fraction of what other deep-diving crewed submersibles weigh,” he added. “This weight reduction allows us to hold a significantly greater payload which we use to hold five crewmembers: a pilot, researchers and mission specialists.”
The NASA assistance is not the missing submersible’s only space connection. One in all the people on board, for instance, is businessman and explorer Hamish Harding, who flew to suborbital space with Jeff Bezos’ rocket company Blue Origin in 2022.
One other crewmate on board the troubled Titan is Shahzada Dawood, vice chairman of the Pakistan-based conglomerate Dawood Hercules Corporation. Dawood is a trustee of the SETI (Seek for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California.
The opposite three crewmembers are Rush, Dawood’s 19-year-old son Suleman and explorer and former French Navy diver Paul-Henry Nargeolet, based on the BBC.
Titan (which shares its name with Saturn’s largest moon) has made quite a lot of successful dives to and from the wreck of the Titanic, which famously went down within the North Atlantic during its debut voyage in 1912.
Planetary scientist Alan Stern, who leads NASA’s Latest Horizons mission to Pluto and the outer solar system, went on one in every of those dives. Former NASA astronaut Scott Parazynski has made the Titanic-wreck trip as well, and he joined OceanGate’s board of directors last yr.
As well as, OceanGate said last week that SpaceX’s Starlink megaconstellation could be providing web service for this most up-to-date Titanic dive.
The Titanic struck an iceberg and went down about 400 miles (640 kilometers) off the coast of Newfoundland, killing about 1,500 of the roughly 2,200 people on board. The wreck sits 2.4 miles (3.8 km) beneath the North Atlantic waves, making it difficult to get to. Indeed, the ship’s final resting place wasn’t even discovered until 1985.
Contact with the Titan submersible was lost Sunday about an hour and 45 minutes after it departed from its mother ship to descend into the depths, based on the BBC. (Submersibles corresponding to Titan should be hauled to and from their drop zones, whereas submarines could make such trips on their very own).
It’s thought that the submersible had enough oxygen to sustain its crewmates for about 96 hours when it went missing. It’s unclear what went flawed or where Titan is now, though an intense search is underway.