A private submarine taking wealthy tourists to view the wreck of the Titanic has gone missing, capturing public attention amid hopes that a rescue can be affected as the vessel’s location remains unknown and its air supply is dwindling.
The missing sub underscores the risks of frontier travel and the business model of taking a small group of paying customers on an extreme voyage—whether that be undersea or in space, where companies like
Virgin Galactic
(ticker: SPCE) go.
The U.S. Coast Guard announced Monday that it was searching for five people after the Canadian research vessel Polar Prince lost contact with its sub during a dive some 900 miles east of Cape Cod on Sunday morning.
The coast guard said it was working with partners in the navy, Canadian armed forces, and private industry to try to locate and rescue the missing sub.
Among the passengers on the missing vessel—called Titan—are British aviation billionaire Hamish Harding and Shahzada Dawood, a businessman from one of Pakistan’s richest families, who would have paid $250,000 each, the BBC reported. The coast guard said it was a “challenge” to locate a vessel in such a remote area, with the sub having 96 hours of “life support” for its five crew, according to its owner, OceanGate.
OceanGate offers an expedition to view the Titanic alongside other commercial undersea operations, including deep sea materials testing, pipeline and underwater cable surveys, and research and data collection. All told, it makes its business model not unlike that of commercial space companies. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, for instance, is pushing into high-altitude tourism alongside activities like rocket engine provision and launch services. The same goes for Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
These companies court the same customers. Harding, of the Titan, also flew to space on Blue Origin’s fifth human-crewed flight, the BBC reported. And the current situation with the missing sub underscores the risks involved in taking part in frontier travel. These are ventures with inherent dangers, and it may only take one high-profile incident to significantly dent public interest in taking part in these extreme activities.
It should be something for investors in the space sector, a higher-growth and more investible area than undersea ventures, to consider as the world holds on to hope for the Titan’s recovery.
Write to Jack Denton at [email protected]
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