US billionaire plans to take new $2 million sub to Titanic wreckage site after 2023 implosion incident

A billionaire based in the US state of Ohio is planning to take a new $2 million deep sea submersible to the wreckage site of the Titanic, which is located almost 4 km below the surface of the sea in the North Atlantic Ocean. Real estate investor Larry Connor said a visit to the wreckage site “can be done without disaster” in the wake of the catastrophic implosion of the Titan deep-sea submersible in June last year.

The Titan was destroyed in a catastrophic implosion during its June 18, 2023 descent to the Titanic site, resulting in the deaths of all five people onboard — OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush, father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

“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,” The New York Post quoted Connor as saying to The Wall Street Journal.

Without mentioning a date, the Dayton-based real estate investor said he and Patrick Lahey, co-founder of Triton Submarines, will dive over 12,400 feet to reach the Titanic wreckage site in the two-person new submersible, dubbed the Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer.

The $20 million vessel was designed by Lahey.

“Patrick has been thinking about and designing this for over a decade. But we didn’t have the materials and technology. You couldn’t have built this sub five years ago,” he told The Wall Street Journal.

Connor said that a few days after the Titan submersible’s implosion, he called Lahey and urged him to build a “better” vessel.

Also speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Lahey said that Connor told him that “what we need to do is build a sub that can dive to repeatedly and safely and demonstrate to the world that you guys can do that, and that Titan was a contraption”.