Titan Submarine Owner Stockton Rush Goes Missing on Titanic Tour
The owner of the 'Titan submarine, Stockton Rush, missing on the Titanic Tour, is the CEO and founder of OceanGate Expeditions who is also the owner of the 'Titan submarine reportedly disappeared on Sunday (06/18/2023).
Along with British billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, renowned French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, and the latter's son, Sulaiman Dawood, the Oceangate has broken contact.
The submarine was on its way to the wreck of HMS Titanic, located about 370 miles east of the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.
Currently, the U.S. and Canadian Coast Guards are engaged in rescue efforts to find the ship that was carrying tourists and paid scientists to a depth of 12,500 feet in the Atlantic to see the wreckage of a luxury ocean liner that sank after hitting an iceberg on April 15, 1912.
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| Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate (Photo: newsweek.com) |
Stockton Rush is known to have developed a reputation as a sort of modern Jacques Cousteau, a nature lover, adventurer, and visionary.
Citing CNN Business, Thursday (06/22/2023), Rush has approached his dream of exploring the deep sea with childlike passion and antipathy to rules, a pattern that has been evident since Sunday night, when his ship, Titan, went missing.
"At some point, safety is just rubbish. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed. Don't get in your car. Don't do anything," Stockton told journalist David Pogue in an interview last year.
In another interview, Stockton also boasted that he had "broken some rules" in his career.
"I think it was General MacArthur who said that you are remembered for the rules you broke. And I've broken some rules to make this. I think I've broken it with good logic and technique behind me," Rush said in a video interview with Mexican YouTuber Alan Estrada last year.
Get to know Stockton Rush
According to a Smithsonian interview in 2019, Rush graduated from Princeton in 1984 with a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering. He said that Rush never really grew out of his childhood dream of becoming an astronaut, but his eyesight wasn't good enough.
After college, he moved to Seattle to work for McDonnell Douglas Corporation as a flight test engineer on the F-15 program. According to his company bio, he earned his MBA from UC Berkeley in 1989.
He nursed his space travel dreams for years, imagining he would join commercial flights as a tourist. But in 2004, he told the Smithsonian, that dream changed after Richard Branson launched the first commercial plane into space.
"I had an epiphany that this was not what I wanted to do at all. I don't want to go to space as a tourist. I want to be Captain Kirk in the Enterprise. I want to explore," Rush told the magazine.
Also read: Today, a submarine cruiser wrecking the Titanic is missing.
Rush founded OceanGate in 2009, with the mission of "Improving access to the deep ocean through innovation". As CEO, Rush oversees the "financial and engineering strategy" of the Everett, Washington-based company and provides a "vision for the development" of manned submarines.
OceanGate currently operates three submarines to conduct research, film production, and "exploratory trips," including tours of the Titanic site more than 13,000 feet below sea level. A seat on the eight-day mission costs $250,000 per person.
Rush, who is 61, said he strongly believes that the sea, not the sky, offers humans the best chance of survival when Earth's surface becomes uninhabitable.
"The future of humanity is underwater, not on Mars. We will have an underwater base... If we destroy the planet, the best ship of life for mankind is underwater," he told Estrada. “
In his desire to explore, Rush often seemed skeptical, if not dismissive, of regulations that might slow innovation.
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