Everett company diving deep to the Titanic

An Everett company is boldly going to where few have gone before. It will visit the Titanic where it rests at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. And the expedition will do it using impressive technology.

“Take some of that new expertise in materials and put it into the submersible world where they had been making things out of steel and titanium, but not carbon fiber,” said Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate. “This will be the largest carbon fiber submersible ever made, and the only one operating.”

Related: Reflecting on the Seattle-based ship lost in the Bering Sea

That machine is Cyclops. It weighs 19,000 pounds and spans 22-feet-by-9.2-feet-by-8.3-feet with a carbon fiber hull. It boasts the largest viewing port of any deep-diving submersible. Its max speed is 3 knots — forward or up-and-down.

“One of the things they say is that speed is the enemy of observation,” Rush said.

It will give research crews plenty of time to observe the famous sunken ship through a series of trips in 2018. Cyclops can carry five people on a standard 8-hour trip. For the 2018 trips, it will carry three specialists, a researcher and a pilot. Reservations have already filled up. The teams will spend a week at sea and get a minimum of three dives during that time – possibly more depending on the weather.

OceanGate’s Titanic mission

The Titanic sunk on April 15, 1912. Today it rests 12,500 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, 380 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.

The purpose of the 2018 trips will be to provide researchers access to the sunken ship. OceanGate’s goals will be to document the wreckage with high-definition photography and video; document the flora and fauna throughout the ship; capture data missing from the scientific record; and create a detailed 3D model of the shipwreck and debris field.

“Most of the time, the images you see from the deep ocean are from robots,” Rush said. “Most people don’t appreciate that there aren’t people taking those pictures, those are robots on a long line. We will be the only privately-owned sub to be able to go to that depth, in operation.”

“The tourist dives done in the past were on Russian subs and they weren’t on a research dive. They were a tourist operation,” he added.

Unlike the Russian subs, OceanGate will have more time. It took previous subs about 2.5 hours to descend to the depth of the Titanic. And then another 2.5 hours to go back up to the surface.

“With Cyclops, we will have that below an hour and a half,” Rush said.

OceanGate was founded seven years ago. It is headquartered in Everett, where it worked to develop and use the newest technology to explore underwater. For example, the carbon fiber that Rush mentioned is far lighter than materials traditionally used to make submarines, yet it maintains great strength.

Since its founding, the company has run expeditions in the Gulf of Mexico, explored the wreck of the SS Andrea Doria off the coast of Nantucket, and has explored Alcatraz Island. OceanGate will often take passengers ranging from explorers, filmmakers, or oil and gas executives on underwater trips.

Follow @https://twitter.com/DyerOxley