The Titan submersible vessel, which has gone missing with five people on board, was partially constructed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Search and rescue teams are racing to locate Titan after contact with the vessel was lost on Sunday about an hour and 45 minutes into its dive, which was meant to explore the wreck of the Titanic. The vessel was developed as part of an agreement between OceanGate, Titan’s operator, and NASA, according to a press release by the company that announced the partnership in 2020.
Related article: Everything We Know About the Missing Titanic Tourist Sub
The partnership was forged under the Space Act of 1958, which allows NASA to help stimulate commercial manufacturing that could in turn benefit the space agency in future missions. Under the agreement, Titan was partially constructed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.
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“NASA is committed to cutting-edge composites research and development that will not only further our deep space exploration goals, but will also improve materials and manufacturing for American industry,” John Vickers, principal technologist for advanced manufacturing technology at NASA, said in the 2020 press release. “This Space Act Agreement with OceanGate is a great example of how NASA partners with companies to bring space technology back down to Earth.”
The manufacturing of the carbon fiber and titanium submersible, in turn, helped NASA engineers gather more data on the development of vehicles that can survive under high pressure. Titan was created using aerospace grade carbon fiber, reducing its weight to about a fraction of what other deep diving crewed submersibles weigh, according to OceanGate.
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The 22 foot-long (6.7 meters) craft weighs 23,000 pounds (10,432 kilograms) and is capable of going as deep as 19,800 feet (6,000 meters) below water. RMS Titanic, which famously sunk during its maiden voyage in April 1912, lies roughly 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) below the Atlantic surface.
Titan, or at least some part of the overall system, relies on Elon Musk’s Starlink for communication, the company revealed in a tweet last week. As to the exact way in which Starlink is used, however, that remains unclear. It’s also not clear what caused the submersible’s communication system to fail. We reached out to OceanGate for more information about how it uses Starlink, but the company responded by providing a generic statement with no reference to Starlink.
The five-person crew on board Titan includes billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, who previously traveled to the edge of space on board Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket in June 2022. The debris field belonging to Titan was discovered by an ROV on June 22, confirming that all five crew members were killed in a catastrophic implosion. Five major pieces of the water craft came to rest some 1,600 feet from the wreck of the Titanic.
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