One Year After the Titan's Implosion, James Cameron Speaks the Hard Truth: "We All Knew"

June 18 marks the one-year anniversary of the Titan implosion, a tragedy that claimed five lives, including that of "Maverick" Stockton Rush, deep-sea explorer Paul-Henry Nargeolet, and three paying customers. Described as anything from preventable to "unfathomable," the Titan implosion remains, to this day, an unsolved riddle.

Billed by operator OceanGate Expedition as the most groundbreaking luxury toy that would herald in a new era of deep-sea tourism for adventurous billionaires and bonafide experts, Titan imploded on its first dive to the Titanic of the year 2023. The sub lost contact with the mothership, to which it was tethered one hour and 45 minutes into the dive, but confirmation of the implosion only came days later, as OceanGate's practices came under the microscope.

One year on, victims' families and industry peers are still in the dark for answers. The questions left unanswered aren't as much about what happened on that fatal dive of the Titan but rather regarding the years OceanGate Expeditions was allowed to operate and eventually carry passengers on a vessel that was experimental, non-certified, and unclassified.

As James Cameron, one of the world's leading Titanic experts and, yes, the director of the Oscar-winning film of the same name, puts it quite bluntly in his recent interview with 60 Minutes Australia, "These guys broke the rules, it's that simple. They should have never been allowed to carry passengers."

But Titan did carry passengers – and not just that one time since it'd been doing manned dives since 2021. It did so even though it was a highly experimental vessel that hadn't been submitted for certification and, as later investigations would show, even proper testing before construction.

"You're remembered for the rules you break"

That seemed to have been the mantra of Stockton Rush, the OceanGate CEO and mastermind behind the Titan sub.

Rush was building a submersible that should have lasted some 10,000 dives to the Titanic, which sits at 3,800 meters/12,500 feet on the ocean floor. He imagined a business model where Titan would be doing at least six dives a year, with 3-4 paying customers each. The going rate at the time of the implosion was $250,000 per passenger – or "mission specialist," as OceanGate called them to use a legal loophole.

Rush was also building a sub on a very tight budget, with Titan blowing several deadlines and suffering years of delays before that first successful 2021 manned dive. Cutting costs is an everyday reality for many, but it should never be the guiding principle in an industry where it results in experimenting foolishly.

As Cameron says in this new interview, you don't break the rules before you've already learned them by heart. And you certainly don't go experimental on a vessel that carries you to the bottom of the ocean.

Yet this is exactly what Rush did, even taking pride in it. He used carbon fiber for the hull of the Titan because it was cheaper to make and lighter to carry (which also resulted in cheaper transport costs), repurposed the expensive titanium rings and caps from a hull that had already cracked during tests, skipped in-house testing and ignored warnings, and even tests that had shown him he'd fail.

Whereas industry peers spent years developing and even more years certifying their subs to withstand the pressure at Titanic-level depths, Rush proudly labeled his Titan an experimental watercraft and crowned himself a pioneer just after a handful of successful dives. He did that knowing only too well that Titan would be experiencing issues after repeated dives, so the problem wasn't as much about making it to the Titanic – it was to keep going back there, and up again.

"You're remembered for the rules you break," he once said in a televised interview. "And, you know, I've broken some rules to make this… carbon fiber, titanium, you know there's a rule you don't do that. Well, I did!"

James Cameron delivers the hard truths

James Cameron was one of the only experts to go public in the hours after Titan "disappeared," saying that he believed there was no chance for survival at that depth, and least of all in a sub like Titan. Because of the high pressure, it had probably been crushed like a can of soda, he said.

"We all knew they were dead," he reiterates in this new interview. The only thing that still surprises him to this day is the fact that the U.S. Coast Guard allowed the public – and victims' families – to harbor hope, even though they'd received the same report from the U.S. Navy that he got. At the same time Titan lost communication, there was "confirmed implosion" triangulated to the Titanic wreck.

Cameron doesn't go as far as to accuse the Coast Guard of lying but he does say they've "got egg on their face" for not disclosing all the information. In response, Cpt. Frederick of the U.S. Guard says it's standard procedure to consider a mission a rescue one when evidence otherwise is not definitive, which is what happened here.

With five active investigations into the tragedy as of this writing, one thing seems to be crystal-clear, at least to Cameron. "They should have never been allowed to carry passengers," not onboard a non-certified, unclassified sub.

But he's adamant the world shouldn't let "one guy who screwed up" define the entire industry. Cameron, for one, is determined to keep that from happening, and he'll be doing so by going back to the Titanic, this time with a "tourist" and a sub that's the opposite of what Titan was.

Cameron isn't just a film director, a Titanic expert, and the record-holder for the most dives to the wreck. His credits include designing the Deepsea Challenger, a manned sub with which he completed his lifelong dream of reaching the deepest point on Earth, the Mariana Trench. He's also a shareholder in Triton Submarines, which is now building the Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer, which will carry two people to the Titanic – to prove that the industry of deep-sea tourism is a "safe" one.