An Ohio Billionaire Is Planning to Take (Another) Submarine to the Titanic Wreck
After the disaster of the OceanGate submersible last June, Ohio billionaire Larry Connor said he wants to prove the industry is safer.
"I want to show people worldwide that while the ocean is extremely powerful, it can be wonderful and enjoyable and really kind of life-changing if you go about it the right way," Connor told the Wall Street Journal. Last June, five people—OceanGate CO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet—died while on board a submersible that was set to travel to the Titanic depths.
He plans to make the journey to the Titanic wreck with Patrick Lahey, the co-founder and CEO of Triton Submarines. Days after the implosion, Connor called up Lahey. Lahey recalls, "He called me up and said, 'You know, what we need to do is build a sub that can dive to [Titanic-level depths] repeatedly and safely and demonstrate to the world that you guys can do that, and that Titan was a contraption.'"
Connor did not tell the WSJ when he and Lahey plan to make their journey.
“Even though the golden age of exploration came to an end nearly a century ago, people still want to see things with their own eyes and in the process test themselves,” author Reid Mitenbuler, who wrote a biography of arctic explorer Peter Freuchen, told Town & Country. “There is, as [polar explorer] Robert Peary described it, an animal urge in some to just get out there.”
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