Five lovers of adventure, exploration and nature. Five passionate about the history of the Titanic. Two of them, the pilot and owner of the company that owns the submarine, Stockton Rush, and the former French military submariner Paul-Henry Nargeolet, had already seen the sunken liner. For the other three, businessmen Hamish Harding and Shahzada Dawood, and also for Suleman, the latter’s son, it was the first time. It is not known if they got to fulfill their dream of seeing the wreckage before the submarine exploded and claimed all five lives. Each tourist passage on the Titan cost $250,000.
Except for young Suleman, who was only 19 years old, the other four had shown several times that they were not afraid of the danger involved in experiencing such extreme adventures as the one that cost them their deaths. Rush was also an aviator. Nargeolet, mine defuser. And Harding had descended for more than four hours in the Mariana Trench and in 2022 had traveled to space as a tourist astronaut on the private New Shepard rocket.
The aviator and navigator Stockton Rush, 61 years old, was the founder and executive director of OceanGate, the United States company that operated the damaged ship and was also the pilot of the Titan. “It’s an incredibly beautiful wreck,” Rush told Sky News earlier this year about the Titanic. According to the biography on the company’s website, “Rush became the youngest jet transport pilot in the world when he earned his DC-8 Class/Captain rating at the United Airlines Jet Training Institute in 1981 with 19 years old”. As a child, Rush dreamed of being an astronaut and graduated from Princeton in 1984 with a degree in aerospace engineering. “The future of humanity is underwater, not on Mars”, declared Rush in an interview with Mexican YouTuber Alan Estrada, who accompanied him to visit the remains of the Titanic last year. In addition to the Titan, OceanGate operates two other submersibles, intended for exploration or tourism activities, scientific research and film production.
British businessman Hamish Harding lived in Dubai and was 58 years old. He was a seasoned adventurer who held three Guinness World Records, one of them for having spent the most time in a single dive in the Mariana Trench, the deepest place in the oceans. He went there in March 2021 when, for four hours and fifteen minutes, he dived with the ocean explorer Victor Vescovo to the deepest point of the pit. In addition, in 2022, he was one of the first tourists to travel into space on the Blue Origin company’s New Shepard rocket. Harding posted on social media that he was proud to lead the Titanic as a “mission specialist”, adding: “Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission on the Titanic during 2023”. When positioned over the wreck site, the entrepreneur reported that the submersible would attempt the dive when the weather improved. In addition, in 2019 he participated in the flight mission, which set a record for the fastest circumnavigation of the earth by aircraft over the two geographic poles.
77-year-old Paul-Henry Nargeolet was a French explorer and director of underwater research in the company that owns the rights to the Titanic wreck. He was a former commander of the French Navy, in which he spent two decades as a submariner and mine deactivation specialist. After retiring from the Navy, he led the first expedition to recover objects from the Titanic in 1987 and was one of the most recognized experts on the wreck of the liner, on whose remains he had descended thirty times. So much so, that he was called Monsieur Titanic. In a 2020 interview with broadcaster France Bleu, Nargeolet referred to the dangers of deep diving and said: “I’m not afraid of dying, I think it will happen one day.”
British-Pakistani millionaire Shahzada Dawood, 48, was vice-chairman of one of Pakistan’s largest business conglomerates, Engro Corporation, with investments in fertilizers, vehicle manufacturing, energy and digital technologies. According to the website of SETI, a California-based research institute of which he was a trustee, he lived in the UK with his wife and two children, one of whom, Suleman, accompanied him on the submersible. “Travel and science are part of his DNA,” Ahsen Uddin Syed, a friend of Dawood, told The New York Times. He was also a sci-fi buff and passionate about Star Trek and Star Wars. Shahzada Dawood’s Instagram profile reveals her passion for nature and travel, showing images of birds, flowers and landscapes, ranging from the Greenland ice sheet to the Shetland Islands (Scotland). On his Facebook profile last year he published reflections on a trip citing the character Bilbo Baggins from The Lord of the Rings. “Do adventures never have an end? I guess not. Someone else always has to continue the story.”
Like his father, 19-year-old Suleman Dawood was also passionate about science fiction. The young man was fond of volleyball and loved to solve the Rubik’s cube.
Five lovers of adventure, exploration and nature. Five passionate about the history of the Titanic. Two of them, the pilot and owner of the company that owns the submarine, Stockton Rush, and the former French military submariner Paul-Henry Nargeolet, had already seen the sunken liner. For the other three, businessmen Hamish Harding and Shahzada Dawood, and also for Suleman, the latter’s son, it was the first time. It is not known if they got to fulfill their dream of seeing the wreckage before the submarine exploded and claimed all five lives. Each tourist passage on the Titan cost $250,000. Except for young Suleman, who was only 19 years old, the other four had shown several times that they were not afraid of the danger involved in experiencing such extreme adventures as the one that cost them their deaths. Rush was also an aviator. Nargeolet, mine defuser. And Harding had descended for more than four hours in the Mariana Trench and in 2022 had traveled into space as a tourist astronaut on the private New Shepard rocket.
