Five lovers of adventure, exploration and nature. Five passionate about the history of the Titanic. Two of them, the pilot, had already seen the sunken liner. For the other three, it was the first time; It is not known if they ever fulfilled their dream of seeing the wreck before the submersible imploded, claiming all five of their lives. Each ticket on the Titan cost $250,000.
Except for the young Suleman, only 19 years old, the other four had shown on different occasions that they were not afraid of the danger of experiencing adventures as extreme as the one that has cost them death. Rush was also an aviator. Nargeolet, mine deactivator. And Harding had descended for more than four hours into the Mariana Trench and in 2022 had traveled into space as a tourist astronaut on the private New Shepard rocket.
The aviator and navigator Stockton Rush, 61, was the founder and CEO of OceanGate, a US company that operated the crashed ship and was also the pilot of the Titan. “It’s an incredibly beautiful wreck,” Rush told Sky News earlier this year of the Titanic. According to the biography on the company’s website, “Rush became the world’s youngest jet transport pilot when he earned his DC-8 Type/Captain rating from the United Airlines Jet Training Institute in 1981 at the age of 19 years”. As a child, Rush dreamed of being an astronaut, and in 1984 he graduated with a degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton. “The future of humanity is underwater, not on Mars,” Rush declared in an interview with the Mexican YouTuber Alan Estrada, who last year accompanied him to visit the remains of the Titanic. 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, including one for having spent the most time on a single dive in the Mariana Trench, the deepest place in the seas. It was in March 2021 when he submerged for four hours and fifteen minutes with ocean explorer Victor Vescovo to the deepest point of the Trench. In addition, in 2022, he was one of the first tourists to travel to space in the New Shepard rocket of the Blue Origin company. Harding posted on social media that he was proud to head to 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 crewed mission to the Titanic during the 2023”. Positioning itself on the site of the wreck, the businessman reported that the submersible would try to dive when the weather improved. Additionally, in 2019, he participated in the One More Orbit flight mission, which set a record for the fastest circumnavigation of the earth by aircraft over both geographic poles.
Paul-Henry Nargeolet, 77, was a French explorer and director of underwater research at the company that owned the rights to the Titanic wreck. He was a former commander in the French Navy, where he spent two decades as a submariner and mine clearance 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 renowned experts on the shipwreck of the ocean liner, whose wreck he had descended thirty times. So much so, that he was nicknamed Monsieur Titanic. In a 2020 interview with radio station France Bleu, Nargeolet touched on the dangers of deep diving, saying, “I’m not afraid of dying, I think it will happen one day.”
British national and Pakistani millionaire Shahzada Dawood, 48, was vice president of one of Pakistan’s largest business conglomerates, Engro Corporation, with investments in fertilizers, vehicle manufacturing, energy and digital technologies. According to the SETI website, a California-based research institute of which he was a trustee, he lived in the UK, along with his wife and his two children, one of whom, Suleman, accompanied him on the submersible “Traveling and science are part of his DNA,” Ahsen Uddin Syed, a friend of Dawood’s, told The New York Times. In addition, he is a fan of science fiction and passionate about Star Trek and Star Wars. Shahzada Dawood’s Instagram profile reveals his passion for nature and travel, where he displays images of birds, flowers and landscapes. On his Facebook profile, he posted reflections on a trip to Iceland last year, quoting the character Bilbo Baggins from The Lord of the Rings. “Do adventures never have an end? I suppose 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 Rubik’s cube.
