Titan’s stunning loss begs the question: who is responsible for its safety?

When Victor Vescovo started building Limiting Factor, a submarine that can dive almost 11,000 meters below the ocean’s surface, he was faced with a choice.

It was not a difficult choice for the former US naval officer and extreme explorer. But it ultimately turned out to be a choice that seems extremely wise in the aftermath of this week’s Titan disaster, which left five people dead when the submarine imploded as they plunged to view the Titanic’s wreckage.

“I realized it would take more time and money to get it commercially certified, but it was important to me for several reasons,” Vescovo said in a 2019 article on the site of DNV-GL, a risk management company that provides safety ratings for underwater vessels.

Certification would make it easier to convince passengers, including other explorers, researchers and ocean scientists, to board. It would also make it easier to resell the submarine when the time came.

But for Vescovo, a man who has climbed into space and explored the depths of the seas, personal was the biggest motivator.

“I was going to be chief pilot during testing and during the expedition, and I really wanted to go home,” he said.

There’s little consolation this week when we look back at earlier warnings about the Titan disaster – and there were many.

But looking to the future, the case for oversight, standards and regulation seems to be the big winners amid the stunning and catastrophic loss.

Labeled as the killer of invention and innovation by right-wingers, corporate titans, forward-thinking makers and futurists, the need for a secure, steady hand on a cash register that looks to the unknown and strives for the extremes has never seemed more essential.

In the annals of adventure tourism, to the poles, through the deserts, up the mountains and under the seas, five lives may seem like a small change in the great count.

As one person wrote a comforting letter to a member of the OceanGate team while mourning the dead, risk is exactly what makes adventure special.

“Greetings to the brave who knew the risks and went on an adventure anyway.”

But tell that to the governments of Canada, the US, France and Britain as they begin calculating how much money was spent on the intensive, four-day search and rescue operation.

It is even harder for some to swallow the exorbitant costs as more is learned about the relatively small community of underwater explorers – a community that has known for many years that Titan’s owner, OceanGate Expeditions, and Stockton Rush, the company’s CEO, company (and a victim of the implosion), were risky outliers.

Rush was warned in a 2018 letter from colleagues and competitors that the submersible’s “experimental approach” and the decision to get safety certification could have “negative results (from minor to catastrophic)” – and that they could lead to backlash for the entire industry.

He was urged by the Marine Technology Society, an association of scientists, engineers and other underwater enthusiasts, to get the Titan certified. But this was something that Rush viewed as a hindrance to his business plans by most accounts.

In a 2019 article in the Smithsonian Magazinehe criticized U.S. construction and inspection requirements for tourist submersibles, as well as restrictions that prevent them from diving below 150 feet.

“There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial aid industry for more than 35 years,” said Rush. “It’s obscenely safe because they have all those rules. But it hasn’t innovated or grown either – because they have all these rules.”

They are infamous last words, but we could apply them broadly to any number of industries or technologies that exist on the cutting edge. Those in the rapidly changing digital world may be most applicable.

Artificial intelligence has so stunned the world with its capabilities that panicked policymakers are calling for it to be brought under government control. Canada has recently introduced legislation that would, among other things, criminalize the “reckless and malicious use of AI”.

Elon Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, has taken more than a few dents over problems with its self-driving car mode, though the head of the US National Transportation Safety Board recently criticized US regulators for setting lax standards.

Musk, for the record, favors government regulation for artificial intelligence. But on space innovation, which he also has a great interest in, he has uttered such OceanGate-esque phrases as “If the rules are such that you can’t progress, then you have to fight the rules.”

Cryptocurrency, another frontier, is headed for government regulation as it may be the only way to protect against the wild rises and falls in the value of the digital dollar.

Even governments cannot be trusted to follow their own rules and have repeatedly proven that they need oversight to keep agencies and officials in check. Anyone familiar with the shortcomings and violations of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service will understand this necessity.

So does it make sense that those who would offer adventurous tourists a ride to the bottom of the ocean – an important and mysterious and beautiful and oh-so-hostile place – are for some reason exempt?

Not according to film director James Cameron, who has visited the site of the Titanic shipwreck dozens of times and even designed his own submarine that he piloted in the Pacific.

Like OceanGate’s Titan, Cameron’s ship — named Challenger Deep — was not certified by either of the two safety-testing agencies, DNV-GL and the American Bureau of Shipping.

But he told the New York Times that he chose to take that risk.

“You can’t have that attitude when you put paying customers in your submarine — when you have innocent guests who trust you.”

Regulations, however, carry a risk that the most extreme adventurers in particular may find distasteful.

In 2020, Alain Adrien Grenier, a professor specializing in the sociology of tourism at the Université du Québec à Montréal, warned that developing a “safety net” for adventure tourists — people who pay for a life-affirming thrill — may only end up denying them exactly that what they are looking for.

It is possible, he wrote, “to regulate adventure tourism, but only by formalizing customs and practices in such a way that accidents become the exception, not the rule. Otherwise, an over-regulating adventure will eventually kill it.

That certainly wasn’t the case for those who have traveled and will travel into space in the future as paying customers of Blue Origin, billionaire Jeff Bezos’ private spaceflight company.

Between July 2021 and August 2022, six flights of passengers took off, with one reportedly remarking on the way down from the most recent suborbital tour: “Wohoo! We’re not dying!”

But when an engine failed during a launch without passengers in September 2022, the Federal Aviation Authority, which oversees commercial space transportation, stepped in and grounded flights until an investigation could be completed. The probe found the problem in an overheating engine component.

Blue Origin hopes to be back on the air before the end of the year.

The Transport Safety Board of Canada announced this on Friday open an investigation in the Polar Prince, the Canadian-flagged ship chartered from St. John’s, NL, to transport the Titan and its crew to the North Atlantic.

In the US, the Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board also announced an investigation into the submarine disaster.

But the signs of trouble have been lurking beneath the ocean waters for years. And perhaps this great and costly tragedy could have been averted, if those who watched, who understood, who cared, had a higher power to call upon.

People like Vescovo – the explorer, submariner and friend of Paul-Henri Nargeolet, the veteran pilot of the Titan, and Hamish Harding, another of the five victims.

He and Harding went into space last year aboard the Blue Origin shuttle. The two men also share an underwater world Guinness World Record.

Risk-taking is in Vescovo’s blood, but even he admitted he was wary.

Did he know about the ill-fated OceanGate submarine? Did he trust it?

Vescovo responded on Twitter and was brief, but to the point.

“Yes and no.”

Allan Woods is a Montreal-based staff reporter for the Star. He deals with global and national affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @WoodsAllan

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