Stockton Rush wanted to be the first person on Mars. At some point, he realized space wasn't the final frontier — it was the ocean.
The Seattle resident has recalled similar versions of the story to myriad news outlets over the years, recounting his journey from a pilot flying around the world to founder and CEO of a company that takes people to some of the deepest depths of the ocean. He was interviewed often, showing reporters the ins and outs of his company OceanGate's deep-sea vessels and talking about his ambitious endeavors to take researchers and private citizens to the Titanic wreckage, about 12,500 feet below the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean.
Rush, 61, was on one such eight-day expedition this weekend with four other people when the submersible, called Titan, went missing about an hour and 45 minutes after its initial descent to the Titanic site. The U.S. Coast Guard said Tuesday that its search continued, with the people onboard having about 40 hours remaining of breathable air.
The search site is 900 miles east of Cape Cod and 400 miles south of St. John's, Newfoundland. It's a complex search effort that "requires multiple agencies, subject matter expertise and specialized equipment," Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick said in a Tuesday morning news conference in Boston. "Logistically speaking, it's hard to bring assets there. It takes time, it takes coordination."
OceanGate confirmed to The Seattle Times that Rush is on board the vessel. The other four people are reportedly British businessman Hamish Harding; Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, members of one of the most prominent business families in Pakistan; and Frenchman Paul Henry Nargeolet, a prominent Titanic expert.
Rush's ambition started young — at 19 he was the youngest jet transport-rated pilot in the world, according to his company bio — and continued over decades as a flight test engineer and board member and chair of manufacturing and technology companies. OceanGate, his privately owned company headquartered in Everett, was recently valued at $60 million, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence records.
Rush grew up in a family of wealthy industrialists and benefactors, and is a descendant of two Founding Fathers: Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton. His maternal grandparents are Ralph K. Davies, chair of the American President Lines, and Louise M. Davies, who paid $5 million for a San Francisco concert hall that is named for her, according to a 1986 New York Times wedding announcement when he married his wife, Wendy Weil Rush.
He attended Princeton University and graduated with a degree in aerospace engineering in 1984 and obtained an MBA from the University of California in 1989. He was a flight test engineer on the F-15 program with the McDonnell Douglas Corporation in the 1980s, and over two decades was chair of Remote Control Technologies, director of Entomo, Inc., and director for BlueView Technologies.
He founded OceanGate in 2009, beginning with a five-person submarine purchased from a private owner. The submarine Antipodes was introduced the next year and made 130 dives within two years. Along with two submarines, he began making his own vessel, a submersible — different from a submarine because it needs a mothership — made from carbon fiber. He called it Cyclops, which served as a prototype and platform for Titan.
The OceanGate vessels have gone on dozens of dives throughout the Puget Sound region and around the world. On one such expedition in 2014, rapper Macklemore went aboard Antipodes into Elliott Bay to find sixgill sharks, in a dive that was documented by the Discovery Channel's "Daily Planet" for Shark Week, according to OceanGate's website.
In 2018, OceanGate worked with the SeaDoc Society for a Salish Sea expedition, doing seven dives in Cyclops 1 off San Juan Island over five days. SeaDoc science director Joe Gaydos said Tuesday he was impressed with their attention to safety and professionalism, and amazed by the complexity of the vessel. Everything was double-checked and there were safety briefings before and after the dives.
One day, Gaydos was asked if he wanted to be part of a dive and he jumped at the opportunity. He had never gone deeper than 120 feet as a scuba diver, and the vessel was able to get to the bottom of the big, glacially-carved floor.
"To see what it looks like with your own eyes, I can't explain it," he said Tuesday. "It was like as a kid, looking at a microscope. This is what it looks like down there, this is how it is laid out. It was mind-boggling."
Titan has the capability of going eight times deeper than Cyclops, and in 2021 and 2022 OceanGate completed expeditions to the Titanic site. The goal is to take researchers and "mission specialists" on board, charging up to $250,000 for a seat. One reason for the focus on Titanic, Rush said in a 2019 Smithsonian Magazine story, was because everyone seems to know about it.
"If you ask people to name something underwater, it's going to be sharks, whales, Titanic," he said in the story.
The company has been the subject of at least one lawsuit related to Titan, filed in 2018 by an employee who said he had safety concerns about the vessel. The case was settled out of court, according to court documents. That same year, a marine technology group wrote to Rush that members were concerned about Titan and negative outcomes, from minor to catastrophic, which "would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry." The letter, sent by the Manned Underwater Vehicles committee of the Marine Technology Society, was obtained by The New York Times.
There is no typical client, Rush told CBS News last November. Some are Titanic enthusiasts, whom he called "Titaniacs," and some had mortgaged their homes to afford the fee, while others didn't think twice about the price.
Rush told CBS News he hadn't made any money from the operation, noting that the company had gone through $1 million in gas alone during one expedition.
Gaydos said Tuesday he felt heartbroken and almost sick to his stomach when he heard the news about the missing Titan. He has a visual of himself in Cyclops 1, with Rush, and going over safety procedures, and he wonders what happened.
"You have this distressed feeling, but also this feeling of hope," he said. "They have checks and balances. I'm hoping something is going to go right. I'm still holding on to that hope."
