OceanGate 2.0? US billionaire plans $20 million expedition to wreckage of Titanic ship
Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer is a vessel worth $20 million designed by Patrick Lahey. Conner claimed that the two-person submersible can make repeated voyages in the deep ocean. "Patrick has been thinking about and designing this for over a decade.
But we didn't have the materials and technology. You couldn't have built this sub five years ago," Conner said. All five people, mostly billionaires, were killed onboard OceanGate's Titan submersible, which took the deep plunge last June.
The dead included OceanGate CEO, Stockton Rush. Patrick Lahey was among those who criticised the deep-sea adventure industry, including OceanGate. He said that Stockton Rush's approach is "quite predatory." Lahey joined other critics who questioned why the OceanGate CEO is not taking enough safeguards, like certifying the mission through a credible safety group or organisation.
But, after the OceanGate disaster, Larry Conner called Patrick Lahey and urged him to build a better submersible. "[He said], you know, what we need to do is build a sub that can dive to [Titanic-level depths] repeatedly and safely and demonstrate to the world that you guys can do that, and that Titan was a contraption,'" Larry Conner told Wall Street Journal. Milestone Alert!
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