I think they were the whole industry.
Small subs were never made to go that deep.
Even the US NAVY subs don’t go that deep.........................
Right after this incident I saw IIRC was a CEO from another submersible outfit stating “Rush and Oceansgate had given the whole industry a black eye” so I figured there were at leat a few more.
I guess they even lost a robotic submersible during the search operations. It couldn’t handle the depths.
Research subs can go that deep but they are fabulously expensive, painstakingly engineered, and carefully monitored and maintained. They are not designed for sightseeing tourists.
You can make subs that are designed well and go down that far. You don’t make them like this guy did.
There are small subs classified to “full ocean depth” (36k feet) with the pressure chambers tested to 150% in labs without a single loss for decades. They are incredibly expensive and only have two chairs in a very cramped cockpit full of *manual* switches/valves for redundant systems (not just a touchscreen and game controller).
The classified subs that go this deep are not suitable for tourists at all and this shmuck was trying to go around every safety consideration to make it so...
Anyone can build a submersible, it’s the re-surfaceable part that is hard.
The US Navy, Russia, and France have 2-person spherical submersibles which will go deeper than that. I think there are also privately owned ones, like the one James Cameron went to the Titanic 35 times on. The Russians were doing something similar, selling rides down to the Titanic, but they could only take one tourist at a time. Rush’s “innovation” was to make a larger cylindrical submersible which takes more tourists at a time.