‘Close enough’: OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush’s reckless behavior before Titan implosion revealed in new documentary

It’s the popping that sends shivers down your spine in repeatedly and unforgivably ignored, until finally the submersible imploded on 18 June 2023, killing all five engers on board.

When news first broke that the tourist expedition to view the wreck of the days the submersible was missing, the tragedy transformed into a spectacle, with endless memes, conspiracy theories, and glib commentary overshadowing the real human cost.

For documentary filmmaker Mark Monroe, the viral nature of the coverage was as unsettling as the tragedy itself. “I was, just as a casual observer of news, kind of horrified at the whole idea,” he tells me. “I don’t subscribe to any aspect of social media. I think it’s a bad thing. So it became this kind of focal point for some of my anger over social media, in the way that the story became so swept up in everyone’s reaction to it.”

Monroe, the writer behind Oscar winners The Cove (2009) and Icarus (2018), and nicknamed Hollywood’s “documentary whisperer”, ed the Netflix project when he heard the producers had secured a key figure: David Lochridge. Lochridge is an ex-Royal Navy diver and became OceanGate’s chief pilot and director of marine operations until he was sacked in 2018. “He’s the reason I’m here,” says Monroe. “He was front and centre in of the building of this company.”

Over the course of the documentary, Lochridge paints a picture of OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who went down with his ship on Titan's final voyage. “He wanted fame, first and foremost, to fuel his ego,” says Lochridge. One of the most alarming moments in the film comes when we learn how Rush informed Lochridge, moments before a dive to the Andrea Doria shipwreck off the Massachusetts coast, that he would be piloting the trip on another of OceanGate’s submersibles himself. During the chaotic and near-deadly trip, Rush ventured far too close to the wreck, and the craft became surrounded by debris. He eventually and reluctantly ceded the controls to Lochridge, who steered them to safety; however, their relationship was irreparably damaged.

“The dynamic changed,” Lochridge says in the film, before describing how he was dropped from communications with other OceanGate executives. The final nail in the coffin came when Lochridge was allowed to carry out his own inspection of Titan, which was supposed to be ready for its maiden voyage. He uncovered a host of safety issues and was promptly called into a meeting where Rush informed him that his services were no longer required.

“To me, he was a very unique individual, a person of privilege, a person with a long history within his own family of movers and shakers, of people who had a dynamic impact on the culture,” Monroe tells me of Rush. The CEO was born into a wealthy family in San Francisco and studied engineering at the prestigious Princeton University in New Jersey. As shown in the documentary, his lineage could be traced back to two signatories of the Declaration of Independence, Richard Stockton and Benjamin Rush. “When you’re of that upbringing where it feels like you need to do something in life, and then you say you're going to take an experimental submersible using material never before used to the Titanic, and year after year, you have yet to accomplish that… They talk about the pressure of the ocean as you go down, the atmospheres. I think there's an intense pressure when you're a person like that who says you're going to do something.”

Titan was distinctive because it was made of carbon fibre, which is lighter and more cost-effective than traditional alloyed steel used for submarines. If Rush could prove the material would work, why not build a whole fleet of Titans, ferrying high-net-worth tourists paying $250,000 a pop to the bottom of the ocean, like the Jeff Bezos of the sea? The problem was: he couldn’t. The OceanGate Disaster shows how Rush repeatedly flouted regulations, either bending them to his will or ignoring them outright. Relatively early on in the process, he decided that Titan did not need to be “classed”, meaning certified to industry standards by an independent body. Classification experts, the CEO insisted, did not understand his technology.

On Titan’s first deep ocean test, Rush was supposed to take the submersible down to a depth of 4,200 metres – 400 metres below the depth of the Titanic wreck. Extraordinary footage from inside the vessel shows Rush growing concerned at the intensifying popping sounds as he reaches 3,939 metres. “Close enough,” he mutters to himself before abandoning the test and returning to the surface, where he triumphantly declares the mission a success. “I could’ve easily gone to four [thousand metres], but for what?” he tells his crew. For Monroe, showing moments like this were vital to illustrating “the consequences of the decision-making over a period of about a decade”, he says. “That was where I thought the drama of the film is: the step-by-step decisions that were made that add up to this situation.”

Of all those decisions, the fatal tipping point appears to have been on Titan’s 80th dive, when a “loud bang” was heard on board the vessel. To avoid costly shipping, the submersible was kept in sub-zero temperatures in Newfoundland, rather than being sent back to OceanGate headquarters in Washington to check for cracks in the hull. “I told Stockton, ‘Don’t do that,’” says Tony Nissen, OceanGate’s former director of engineering, in the documentary. “Once we build this, it cannot go freezing. If water gets in there and you sit it out in freezing conditions and that water expands, it breaks [carbon] fibres.”

Of course, what happened on Titan’s next dive needs little explanation. Indeed, just 10 minutes at the end of the film are dedicated to the final moments of the submersible’s existence. Instead, the focus shifts to those who lost their lives and the families who were left behind. British aviation billionaire Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman, and renowned Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet. “There's a cold inevitability about the story. We all know where it's going. We all know the ending,” Monroe its. “But that ending affects the people who are still here, and that's why we're telling the story; those are the people that I wanted to talk to.”

Monroe’s film is less about deep-sea exploration and more of a critique of those who believe the rules don’t apply to them. He compares Rush to a tech CEO, invoking Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook motto (abandoned in 2014), “Move fast and break things.” “There is an ambition in our culture led by a lot of Silicon Valley types that you can do things differently,” says the director. “You can change the way the world works. The rules don't apply to you. But as I like to say, there are rules of physics, there are rules of engineering, there are rules of nature, and those do apply to us. And so I don't know how safe it is to move fast and break things when other people’s lives are at stake.”

The Facebook founder’s infamous slogan is eerily similar to Rush’s braggadocious comments during Lochridge’s exit meeting: “We’re doing weird s*** here and I am definitely out of the mould. There’s no question. I’m doing things that are completely non-standard.” As The OceanGate Disaster shows, standards exist for a reason.

‘Titan: The OceanGate Disaster’ is out now on Netflix