Billionaires and explorers, who’s on the missing submarine

There is only first class aboard the submarines going to the Titanic. The model adventure 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea costs $250,000. The people on board the submarine that disappeared between Sunday 18 and Monday 19 June would have paid that much. There are just five of them on the Titan submarine, from OceanGate Expeditions, lost off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. They are three tourists, plus the pilot and an assistant who would also be a guide.

According to the BBC and other Anglo-Saxon sites on board are the CEO of the company that organizes the trips, OceanGate Expeditions, the British billionaire Hamish Harding and the French explorer Paul Henry Nargeolet.

Contact with the submarine disappeared it was lost about an hour and 45 minutes into the dive and, making calculations from Monday afternoon, for five people on board, there were at most four days of oxygen. Search times are therefore very limited.

The presence of Hamish Harding would be confirmed by a message written in recent days on social media. «I am proud to finally announce that I will be part of the mission that will explore the wreck of the Titanic». She wrote that she was “in the company of a pair of legendary explorers who have dived to see the Titanic thirty times since the 1980s”. He also wrote that due to the harsh winter in Newfoundland this would likely be the first and only crewed one in 2023. Harding, known as an aviator and explorer, is a British billionaire not new to extreme adventures. Last year he participated in the fifth commercial flight into space of Blue Origin, the company of Jeff Bezos.

The Guardian reports the presence of the Frenchman Paul Henri Nargeolet, former ship’s commander, deep-sea diver and submarine pilot. He is likely responsible for the trip as he is the director of the underwater research team for E/M Group and RMS Titanic, Inc. He is considered to be among the most knowledgeable of the wreck site.

Also indicated among the participants Stockton Rush, Chief Executive Officer of OceanGate. There are those who report that the Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman could be on board.

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«Someone dreams of buying a Ferrari, others a house, I wanted to go and see the Titanic. And dreams are priceless,” said Renata Rocas, who made this trip last year, according to reports from the Corriere della Sera. The adventure lasts 8 days. Depart by ship from St. John’s, the capital of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Thus we arrive at the point of immersion. You board after signing a release because the vessel “has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and could cause physical injury, emotional trauma or death”.

The Titanic is located approximately 600km off the coast of Newfoundland, in Canada. Here she sank by hitting an iceberg in the night between 14 and 15 April 1912 during her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. Nearly 1,500 of the more than 2,200 people on board died. She is now 3,800 meters deep and about 640 kilometers away from the Canadian island of Newfoundland.

The wreck was discovered in 1985 and since then extensively explored in reality and in cinema, above all with the film by James Cameron. It is divided into two parts: bow and stern are separated by about 800 meters. There is debris all around. Just a month ago the first full-size digital scan of the wreck was made using deep sea mapping.