Ever since he could remember, Stockton Rush wanted to be an astronaut. After having an epiphany late in life that maybe that wasn't going to happen, he realized that what he really wanted was to be an explorer.
"I wanted to be Captain Kirk," he said.
Rush is the CEO of OceanGate which owns and operates submersibles. Unlike a submarine, a submersible requires a support ship located on the surface of the water.
In 2021, OceanGate is offering people the opportunity to join the five-person crews for a four-week expedition to visit the wreckage site of the Titanic, which sank in the Atlantic ocean in 1912.
"It's an eight-day trip, leaving from St. Jonh's, Newfoundland, which is 380 nautical miles from the Titanic. We're planning to go with our Titan submersible and we will go out for a series of 8-day missions to explore, document and photograph the Titanic."
Over the years, the Titanic had begun to decay from bacteria eating away at the steel. However, there are also over 300 different life forms who have made the ship their home.
For being the most known wreck on the planet, a surprisingly low number of people have actually gotten the chance to see it in person. Rush claims that fewer people have seen the Titanic than will summit Mt. Everest in a single day!
"One of the reasons we focus on the Titanic, it is such a draw, there's so much emotion around it that I don't have to explain how exciting it's going to be because people have an idea that it's going to be this amazing, exciting experience."
Out of the five seats available on the sub, three of them are for sale to paying clients. The clients will be trained on sonar operations as well as get the chance to actually fly the sub which operates using a video game controller.
Rush describes the ocean as being in another world and awe-inspiring, "you're in a completely different alien world and you get sort of used to it after a few hours. And then you come to the surface and it's just amazing. It's like 'welcome back to Earth.' It's almost as if somebody has beamed you to another planet and beamed you back. That never goes away, every time I get out of the sub it's like 'wow, I have just been somewhere that no one on this planet has ever, in the history of mankind, seen."
If you would like to join the expedition, there are a few seats left. Each ticket will cost you $125,000.
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