JAKARTA (BeritaTrans.com) – Search teams from the United States and Canada are racing against time to find a submarine containing 5 tourists, who disappeared while diving into the wreckage of the Titanic in the Atlantic Ocean.
This Titanic tour is operated by a company called OceanGate Expeditions. To see the wreck of the Titanic, tourists can pay from 250,000 USD or around 3.7 billion rupees for a total trip of 8 days. Because it is very expensive, the participants are certainly wealthy people.
As quoted by the Daily Mail’s detikINET, one of the passengers on the missing ship is believed to have been a British billionaire, Hamish Harding. Also joined by OceanGate CEO himself, Stockon Rush, who is also the inventor of the submarine.
The ship named Titan lost contact about 1 hour and 45 minutes after diving. So far, there has been no signal from the ship. OceanGate Expeditions began opening Titanic tour services in 2021.
The purpose of this Titanic expedition was to witness the iconic ocean liner which sank in 1912 after hitting an iceberg, killing around 700 of the 2,200 passengers and crew on board. The wreckage of the ship was discovered in 1985 and is slowly deteriorating due to metal-eating bacteria.
Titan weighs about 23,000 pounds on earth. Titan is made of carbon fiber and titanium and is designed to reach depths of over 3,900 meters. The Titanic wreck itself lies at a depth of 3,800 meters.
The vessel is equipped with state-of-the-art technology, including a real-time Hull Condition Monitoring (RTM) system that analyzes the stresses in the vessel and its structural integrity. Oxygen can last up to 96 hours. So there are about 3 days left to save the passengers.
CBS reporter David Pogue, who rode Titan, said the makers claim Titan is very tough. “It’s a one-of-a-kind submarine with five inches of carbon fiber. I have to admit I had my doubts. For example, you steer this boat with a joystick,” he said. .
“The inventor of this submarine, Stockton Rush, convinced me that anything is possible to improvise, but the parts you need, (like) the container holding the people and the oxygen, were designed with NASA and the University of Washington and are very robust,” he added.
The rescue operation continues overnight in the mid-Atlantic but so far there has been no sign of the vessel. Government agencies, navies from both countries, and deep-sea commercial companies all participated in the rescue operation.
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