An Ohio real estate billionaire is planning an underwater trip to the site of the Titanic shipwreck, where a year ago an underwater ship imploded as it neared the seabed, killing all five passengers on board.
Shortly after the OceanGate disaster, Larry Connor, 74, a real estate investor and amateur adventurer, contacted Triton Submarines co-founder Patrick Lahey, begged him to build a submarine which, according to The Wall Street Journal, could safely and repeatedly reach the depths of the Titanic.
The two men want to explore the site, located off the coast of Newfoundland, 3,000 meters under the sea, and conduct scientific research in a two-person submarine that Triton is designing in the summer of 2026.
“Our journey is simply not a journey to the Titanic,” Connor said in an interview on Tuesday. “It's a fact-finding mission.”
“The other goal is to show people around the world that you can build a revolutionary, unique submarine and dive it safely and successfully to great depths,” he added.
The bespoke submarine, which Mr Connor plans to call 'The Explorer – Return to the Titanic', is still in the design phase and will be based on an existing submarine design that Mr Lahey has been working on for years. It is listed on the Triton website as the Abyssal Explorer, a vessel with an acrylic hull than can reach a depth of 4,000 feet, “the perfect submersible for repeated voyages to the deep ocean.”
“Once underground, the submersible's hydrodynamic shape – with folded wings – accelerates the descent to 4,000 feet,” the company said on its website. “The journey takes less than two hours, considerably faster than previously possible.” It will be the first acrylic-hulled submarine to reach such depths, Mr Connor said, expanding a deep-sea submarine's visibility from small window portals and cameras to a 320-degree view.
“To be honest, the technology didn't exist six or eight years ago,” Mr Connor said. “It was only thanks to the recent developments of the past five years that you were able to build this.”
An interview request with Mr. Lahey was referred to Mr. Connor's spokesman, who said only Mr. Connor would speak about the expedition.
Mr Connor said his interest in venturing to the Titanic in a new ship stems from his broader interest in advancing ocean exploration, in this case by innovating the best tool in the field: the submarine.
“The best way to explore the ocean, in my limited experience, is in a submarine,” he said.
The final cost of the submarine has yet to be determined, but Mr Connor said it would be in the millions.
Mr Connor has gone to great lengths to compare the submarine he plans to use on his dive to the Titanic with the submarine he used on the deadly journey to the sunken ship a year ago.
After the Titan disaster on June 18, 2023, the ship was criticized by recreational and professional underwater researchers cost-saving design choices.
The ship disappeared under the dark water of the North Atlantic Ocean, losing contact with its Canadian surface expedition ship, MV Polar Prince, about 400 miles south of St. John's, Newfoundland, an hour and 45 minutes en route.
were on board Stockton Rush61, the founder and CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, who piloted the ship; Hamish Harding58, a British businessman and explorer; Paul-Henri Nargeolet77, a French maritime expert; Shahzada Dawood, 48, a British Pakistani businessman; and his son, Suleman, 19.
Six days later, a multinational search ended with evidence of it a catastrophic implosion leaving no survivors.
Until the Titan disaster, no one had ever died while piloting or piloting a submarine, a safety record that stood for almost a century despite explorers making many thousands of dives.
Mr Connor claims the OceanGate episode has damaged the underwater industry and damaged public perception of efforts to innovate in space.
“I worry that people associate diving submarines, especially new or different submarines, with danger or tragedy,” Mr Connor said.
Mr Connor said he wanted to confirm the safety of well-made submarines, certified (what the industry calls classified) by respected organizations that conduct rigorous testing. Mr Connor said the submarine would be certified and would take two and a half to three years to build.
OceanGate's experimental Titan design was not certified, which Mr Rush promoted as evidence of the submarine's groundbreaking innovation, even as industry experts raised concerns about the vessel's safety.
By contrast, Mr Connor said he had a reputation for never taking “unacceptable risks”.
“If we can't do what we call 's and s' – safely and successfully – we're just not going to do it,” Mr Connor said. “We are not sensation seekers. We are not big risk takers.”
Mr. Connor too a record-breaking skydiverastronaut and deep-sea explorer, who joined Mr. Lahey in 2021 three deep dives in five days near the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, about 200 miles off the coast of Guam. Their ship, a Triton-built submarine known as DSV Limiting Factor, reached a sea depth of about 35,000 feet, greater than Mount Everest.
In April 2022, Mr. Connor joined two other paying customers and a retired NASA astronaut on a SpaceX flight to the International Space Station, the first such mission crewed only by private citizens and NASA's first attempt at space tourism.
During the eight-day mission, which cost Mr. Connor and the other two clients $55 million each, Mr. Connor and others conducted a series of research experiments in collaboration with the Mayo Clinic and other medical organizations.