They did dozens of successful trips to the Titanic, but for some reason people only wanna talk about the time they accidentally cooked and pancaked the CEO
an old irishman shuffles into a bar at sundown with his eyes low and his head down
the bartender says "ay, billy! whats the matter. you seem troubled"
billy responds with "you see this bar we're standing in. I built it with me own hands! but they don't call me the bar builder, no!
and the bridge everyone uses to cross the river to get to the market, i built that that with me own hands too! but do the call me the bridge builder? no, they do not.
and the wall that protects our city, i built that with me own hands too! and they don't call me the wall builder neither.
I know you're being facetious, but I just wanted to point out that out of however many dives, only something like four of those missions were successful 😬
The Titanic fanously sank on its maiden voyage, so that's a little different. The Titan submersible was successful for hundreds of dives before the implosion, which I'm sure gave the team a false sense of security and ultimately led them to ignore all the red flags.
Titan was the only sub they actually designed and built by themselves.
Antipodes was purchased. Cyclops was purchased and refitted - meaning someone else actually designed and built the pressure hull. They did retrofit it so it could be steered with a wireless gaming controller, though!
Just send an intern to buy a VW bus from a junkyard and have them stop at home Depot on the way back for some duct tape, then fire the whistleblowers and have more interns add 3 layers of tape--you know what, to be on the safe side, let's make it 4--and send out another intern to buy some fans for propulsion.
Hook those babies up to the alternator and we'll be ready to--why the FUCK are these windows covered in duct tape!? Clients don't pay a quarter of a million dollars to visit the Titanic but not be able to see any of it! Don't any of you ever use your fucking heads? Glass is bullet proof, I saw a YouTube video about it once, just put tape on the edges to make sure it's sealed and it will be fine.
I am surprised they didn't do so sooner. I would've sold everything I could right away after they're confirmed dead. There's no coming back from this, even if they had another sub.
Yeah I can’t even imagine trying to market another trip. You could never escape the negative reputation of this, why wait so long to announce that it’s over?
It might feel like forever in internet time, but it's only been two and a half weeks since the thing imploded and two weeks since the rescue operation was called off after finding debris from the Titan. Two weeks is lightning fast for a company to formally shut down in response to something like this, especially when you consider that the company's employees have been grieving the death of their CEO/friend during all of this.
Unfortunately they aren't empty anymore. They are filled with water, if you can consider something filled when it's in pieces on the bottom of the ocean.
Either they are suspending operations until they are out of the press spotlight, until they find a new CEO to take over, or until everyone in the company starts a new company doing the same thing under a different company name.
Do I feel bad for those who worked there? Maybe, most of them chose to work at that company and continued to let the CEO continue on, but everyone has to make money somehow.
There are only a couple of companies worldwide that build submersibles.
There are a few that build deep sea submersibles, and a few that build tourist submersibles, but this was the only company in the world to try and build tourist deep sea submersibles - and the only one they ever built imploded.
It took them 13 years to get to this point, with every other company warning them that their approach didn't work and was dangerous. Their sub imploding only confirmed everybody's suspicions.
Nobody is simply going to pick up where they left off using their approach.