If we're talking about underwater adventures, is there anything that can match the discovery of the Titanic? Stockton Rush, OceanGate president, intends to find out.
Over the past two years, OceanGate has transformed the Titanic into a place of tourist pilgrimage. As? Sending many manned submarines to take a look into the depths at the luxury liner that tragically sank on her first voyage in 1912 (someone had foreseen it, Moreover).
An activity so intense (and potentially profitable) that it caught the attention of the BBC, which made a documentary on diving. What will the next step be?
The abyss is the “next space”
It all started in 2010. Rush, who was trained as an aerospace engineer and dreamed of becoming an astronaut, reflected on the similarities between the space frontier and the deep sea frontier.
“We've had great films about space and not as many about the ocean,” he says. Apart from things like “The Abyss”, coincidentally by James Cameron, the director of Titanic.
What I wanted to do with the company was move the needle, get people excited about the ocean and find out what's down there
Stockton Rush, president of OceanGate
Over the next few years, Rush and his OceanGate team built ever more efficient submarines, and most importantly they developed an efficient business model.
Depth tourism
There are people who love high-end adventure tourism. Who spend $100.000 to climb Everest or go to Antarctica, and now start paying $250.000 to go into space. Rush bet on these horses, and he could only win.
Winning move: increase the capacity of its submarines. Done. The Titans of Ocean Gate Expeditions they were brought from just two to five people: a pilot and four tourists, one million per trip (250.000 dollars per ticket, even here only wealthy tourists).
Do the math yourself: 6 dives into the depths in 2021 and seven in 2022. Also add the missions that Oceangate will ensure for researchers, to monitor the deterioration of the wreck and the ecosystem that surrounds it every year.
Beyond the Titanic
They will not have the same charm as the famous shipwreck, but the new adventures are still worth a big ticket.
OceanGate has already organized dives in Hudson Canyon, an underwater abyss off the coast of New York. There are also plans to search for underwater wrecks in the depths off the coast of Rhode Island and elsewhere.
Starters of an even more ambitious future. The next wreck in the sights is that of the Bismarck, the German battleship from the Second World War sunk in 1941 by the British. She now lies in the depths of the Atlantic, further down than the Titanic itself.
“The Oceangate submarine will need to be upgraded,” Rush says, but we'll get there. And in any case that is not the real objective.
The real goal? You would never have guessed: the hydrothermal vents
Hydrothermal vents are hot spots in the icy depths, where water superheated by volcanic activity bubbles from the Earth's crust. Scientists think life on Earth originated there. And if the Sun went out, it would probably survive there for a while longer.
Here's something extreme! What is different from a visit to other planets? The environment is home to strange varieties of marine life, and it will be fantastic to discover it.
