OceanGate touted NASA's role in building the Titan. NASA says they barely helped at all

OceanGate co-founder Stockton Rush said the carbon fibre hull used in an experimental submersible that imploded en route to the wreckage of the Titanic was developed with help of NASA and aerospace manufacturers, but a NASA official testified Thursday that the space agency actually had little involvement at all.

OceanGate and NASA partnered in 2020 with NASA planning to play a role in building and testing the carbon fibre hull.

But the COVID-19 pandemic prevented NASA from fulfilling its role, other than providing some consulting on an early mockup, not the ultimate carbon fibre hull that was used for people, said Justin Jackson, a materials engineer for NASA.

"We provided remote consultations throughout the build of their one third scale article, but we we did not do any manufacturing or testing of their cylinders," Jackson said.

At one point, Jackson said NASA declined to allow its name to be invoked in a news release by OceanGate.

"The language they were using was getting too close to us endorsing, so our folks had some heartburn with the endorsement level of it," he told a Coast Guard panel that's investigating the tragedy.

Rush was among the five people who died when the submersible imploded in June 2023. The design of the company's Titan submersible has been the source of scrutiny since the disaster.

The Coast Guard opened a public hearing earlier this month that is part of a high level investigation into the cause of the implosion. Some of the testimony has focused on the troubled nature of the company.

In addition to Jackson, Thursday's testimony was to include Mark Negley of Boeing Co.; John Winters of Coast Guard Sector Puget Sound; and Lt. Cmdr. Jonathan Duffett of the Coast Guard Office of Commercial Vessel Compliance.'

WATCH | From Wednesday, former Titan passenger Karl Stanley testified he would never have boarded if he had known truth about submersible: 

'Oceangate came very, very close to killing me': Titan passenger tells hearing

2 months ago

Duration 3:19

Karl Stanley of the Roatan Institute of Deepsea Exploration told the U.S. Coast Guard of his trip inside the Titan submersible, and says if he had known the truth, he would have never boarded the vessel. The CBC's Heather Gillis reports on the findings from Tuesday's hearing.

Earlier in the hearing, former OceanGate operations director David Lochridge said he frequently clashed with Rush and felt the company was committed only to making money. "The whole idea behind the company was to make money," Lochridge testified. "There was very little in the way of science."

Lochridge and other previous witnesses painted a picture of a company that was impatient to get its unconventionally designed craft into the water. The accident set off a worldwide debate about the future of private undersea exploration.
The hearing is expected to run through Friday and include more witnesses.

The co-founder of the company told the Coast Guard panel Monday that he hoped a silver lining of the disaster is that it will inspire a renewed interest in exploration, including the deepest waters of the world's oceans. Businessman Guillermo Sohnlein, who helped found OceanGate with Rush, ultimately left the company before the Titan disaster.

"This can't be the end of deep ocean exploration. This can't be the end of deep-diving submersibles and I don't believe that it will be," Sohnlein said.

Coast Guard officials noted at the start of the hearing that the submersible had not been independently reviewed, as is standard practice. That and Titan's unusual design subjected it to scrutiny in the undersea exploration community.

OceanGate, based in Washington state, suspended its operations after the implosion. The company has no full-time employees currently, but has been represented by an attorney during the hearing.

During the submersible's final dive on June 18, 2023, the crew lost contact after an exchange of texts about Titan's depth and weight as it descended. The support ship Polar Prince then sent repeated messages asking if Titan could still see the ship on its onboard display.

One of the last messages from Titan's crew to Polar Prince before the submersible imploded stated, "all good here," according to a visual re-creation presented earlier in the hearing.

When the submersible was reported overdue, rescuers rushed ships, planes and other equipment to an area about 700 kilometres south of St. John's. Wreckage of the Titan was subsequently found on the ocean floor about 300 metres off the bow of the Titanic, Coast Guard officials said. No one on board survived.

OceanGate said it has been fully cooperating with the Coast Guard and NTSB investigations since they began. Titan had been making voyages to the Titanic wreckage site going back to 2021.

Download our free CBC News app to sign up for push alerts for CBC Newfoundland and Labrador. Click here to visit our landing page.