We begin with an urgent search and rescue operation that is currently underway in the Atlantic Ocean. Oxygen is running out. Or maybe less than many.
Some of the time they die. They have very little time left. Nobody had ever made a carbon fiber pressure home for that depth before.
It has a very unique design. So it certainly when you when you see it, it's a fairly striking craft. Everyone's got different opinions on how subs should be designed, how dives should be conducted.
Question here is that in do we expose civilians to this type of risk? There was a lot of concern about this outfit and this spill, but there are. Our apprehension is it wears its.
Fame and fortune involved too. My name is Wilk Khonen I'm the CEO of HydroSpace Group in California, and I'm also the executive director of the World Submarine Organization and the Submarine committee at the Marine Technology Society. We've been building submarines here in California since 1995.
So we're coming on almost 30 years. My name is Stefan Williams. I'm a professor of marine robotics at the University of Sydney.
I've been working in marine robotics for about 25 years. There are today in the neighborhood of just short of 200 submersibles that are active. The industry is around 60 years old.
The first submersibles were built in 1960 to 65, and maybe the best estimate from our database at the moment is that the world has built around 500 submersibles in the last 50 years. It is an international community. Every country has people that are have the same endeavor to to go and explore.
There are currently nine submersibles in the world that will go to the depth of the Titanic, which is 4000m or deeper. We can distinguish between scientific expeditions where there's a, you know, a purpose to go and discover, you know, new environments to, to map parts of the ocean, to understand, life in the oceans and the, more tourist focused, market, which is it's going to be said it's sort of a nascent thing that people are starting to have interested. And we can also distinguish between the vehicles that you put people in and remotely operated or autonomous vehicles that that are, operated without people onboard.
I think we're seeing an increasing interest in sort of people going into these in extreme environments. We're seeing the same thing, and sort of the the advent of space tourism. People are interested in this.
So, yeah, it's sort of a changing environment. I. An American man is braving new depths in sub aquatic tourism, heading to the bottom of the ocean to explore one of the most famous shipwrecks in history.
Chief executive of OceanGate Stockton, Rush has designed a custom submarine to take paying clients to the Titanic on research missions. 20 dives are planned in the coming weeks, with scientists and Titanic experts on board. They'll use special sonar and laser equipment to create a high res 3D image of the wreckage.
The infamous unsinkable Titanic. 110 years after a North Atlantic iceberg sank, there's evidence the ocean is steadily gnawing away at her wreck. A deep sea exploration company claims this is the first 8-K video of the ship taken from its submersible on a recent journey down 3.
7km to her resting place. The unmistakable bow, a giant anchor chain, a dislodged boiler fragment from April 1912 from hubris that let the luxury liner leave Southampton for New York with barely enough lifeboats for half the 2200 on board. More than 1500 drowned or froze to death among survivors either had lived long enough to learn.
73 years later, the wreck had been found. It is my father's grave, and I would rather it was left untouched. Now the OceanGate expedition team that gathered the new images says they include strong signs of the liners decay, like the recent collapse of Dick railing.
They say annual expeditions will track the rate at which the Atlantic is again overwhelming the Titanic. Hi, my name is Stockton Rush. I'm the CEO and founder of Ocean Gate.
Let's take a look at Titan. Ocean gate came in and around 2008. From 2008 to 2023.
There's a long history here for Ocean Gate. How they kind of adapted. We have our control screen here, our sonar screen here.
Well, they came in with some good ideas and brilliant ideas and and as it went, they were starting to take a left turn and it's like, well, you know, maybe you don't want to really want to do that too. We'd recommend you do this and, and and it was a, it was definitely a slippery slope gradually going in until you're finding out, wow. They they, they really are taking a left turn.
And in the end they just were openly public about the fact that we're just ignoring all the rules. And we're going to show you. I got these from, Camper World.
We run the whole thing with this game controller, you know? Come on. It's seems like this submersible has some elements of MacGyver.
Jerry rig this. I mean, you're putting construction pipes as ballast. I don't know if I'd use that description of it.
but there's certain things that you want to be, buttoned down. So the pressure vessel is not MacGyver at all, because that's where we work with Boeing and NASA and University of Washington. Everything else can fail your thrusters can go, your lights can go.
You're still going to be safe. The scientific community has had a long focus on designing these sorts of vehicles and supporting these sorts of deep sea operations, and the really fundamental discoveries that we've made in deep ocean science have come from being able to put equipment and tools into deep water environments. And there's challenges associated with that, not least which is the pressure that these sort of vehicles are exposed to when they're at depth.
The material strength is, of course, very important. And that is why a lot of material technology worldwide, has been pushed to see what are the best materials to go down. The strongest material that we know of is still steel.
Steel is a very special material. People think it's very common, but steel is the strongest material we have out there. Titanium is only two thirds of strength of steel, but it doesn't corrode and it's a bit lighter and it's a lot more expensive.
So it is about strength. Aerospace has gone to a lot of nonmetallic. Certainly all the Boeing's and Airbus fuselages are all made out of nonmetallic carbon fiber structures.
They're much lighter. An airplane. The weight makes a really, really big difference.
In submarines, the weight is less of an issue. One of the big concerns is the possibility of the carbon fiber de laminated. So although you might have a pressure vessel rated for a particular pressure under repeat cycling, there was concerns.
And it seems that this year I think the investigations are still underway, but it seems that you might have saltwater penetrating into the carbon fiber, crystallizing and affecting the integrity of the carbon fiber itself. Research on carbon fiber for submersible goes back 40 years, and just about everyone has given up on that one. One strand of carbon fiber can pull your car.
But if you took that same strand of carbon fiber and you try and push a coffee cup with it, it wouldn't help. Carbon fiber is great for pulling, but you can't push with a rope very easily, and that's what you get in submersible. All the pressure from the ocean pushes.
It pushes on a carbon fiber, carbon fiber. It just doesn't like to be pushed. It likes to be pulled.
It's an unusual choice for a deep sea pressure vessel. Ocean gate was involved in some legal proceedings around fair use and the testing of of the carbon fiber material. There was some pretty serious concern raised, both within the organization and from external parties.
about the design of the platform, the design of the pressure vessel in particular, and some of the materials they were using. If you want to go forward, you press forward. If you want to go back, you go back, turn left, turn right, go down, go up.
I know Stockton really well. There was a money thing and for sure there was certainly fame and fortune involved to to do something no one else did. I believe Stockton needed to prove something.
But everyone in life has something to prove. It's just how you go about it. This will be, one of the great moments of submersibles.
To some extent, he needed because his his father was a big adventure as well. I mean, big adventure. And they had the money and the means to to explore the world.
So even as a child, he was exposed to adventures that people have on their bucket list. You know, by the time he was 15, he'd done them all. And I think there was a certain sense where you had to be even a bigger explorer than his dad.
It's a general epidemic out there for young people. The very dangerous things that float around, like fake it until you make it. The whole idea of, technology disrupter.
But technology disruptors find if you're making an app or a computer game, it's different if you're making submersibles or other serious equipment or cranes for building high rises, you don't want to mess with the rules of making cranes for high rises, for obvious reasons. So the same thing for a submarine. He was fairly direct of saying, okay, I'm going to ignore the entire vote of the entire planet Earth and say that I'm right.
When you act with impunity, I don't care if it's in submarines or in politics. It is not a good thing. You can get away with it for a while, but in a long range it does not hold.
You still had 1415 years under his belt in submarine experience. So, yeah, after 15 years, he did not have the excuse that he didn't know. You didn't know?
Then you're really not smart enough to be in the business in the first place. And if you were smart enough to know that and it was deliberate, then that's like, pick the worse of the two. They're openly ignoring the the proper advice that has held us state for all of them.
Then the question is, what do you do? What can you do? Which comes back to the famous letter that got published by the New York Times.
It came within our meeting, our yearly meeting. It came up as an issue in 2018 already that said, well, well, what do we do? I mean, this is dangerous.
This is not good. We have to say something. Maybe we should sue the company like, how are you going to sue a company?
You can't sue. You're a competitor suing another one. You can't sue anybody.
It's like, well, what can we do so well, look, why don't we try and appeal to the better angels and say, let's write a letter on behalf of all the experts around the world to saying, look, it's not sibling rivalry issue here. This is really serious. That's what the letter was like.
Look, everybody around the world is really worried about what you're doing. Please correct your course. And it's like, well, I'm smarter than everybody else.
The last thing I said to him was Godspeed, and I wished him luck with his day. When we heard about it, and I heard that they called the Coast Guard, there'd been ten hour, 12 hours. It's like 10 or 12 hours.
Oh my God, what were they doing? Because typically when you lose communication with a submarine within 15 minutes, you start worrying. The Titan carries 96 hours worth of oxygen and a third of that is now gone.
They may have as little as 60 hours. The full briefing becomes impossible. Good afternoon.
Yes. Very delicate. Search and rescue mission is currently unfolding in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean right now, after a specialized submersible lost contact thousands of meters below the surface.
It was supposed to be the ultimate adventure. Diving to the ocean floor to see close up. The world's most famous shipwreck.
Only to strike trouble itself. Now it's a desperate and delicate rescue mission to save five lives. It is a challenge to conduct a search in that remote area.
The mini sub, called the Titan, vanished an hour and 45 minutes into its four kilometer plunge. Radio silence set off alarm bells on its support vessel, the Polar Prince. On the surface right now, the US and Canadian Coast Guards, as well as private ships are answering their distress call, and it's urgent.
The Titan carries 96 hours worth of oxygen and a third of that is now gone. They may have as little as 60 hours before breathing becomes impossible. Everything else can fail.
Your thrusters can go. Your lights can go. You're still going to be safe.
That's Stockton Rush, CEO of Ocean Guide Expeditions that runs the private Titanic Tours. He's one of the five on board, along with British billionaire and adventurer Hamish Harding, whose last online post was about conditions in the open ocean. A weather window has just opened up and we're going to attempt to dive.
This is the second year we've been out to the Titanic. The Titan is small, about the size of a van, and a seat on board will cost you $365,000. We have our control screen here, our sonar screen here, and we can put any image we want in the back.
When it deploys, it's untethered, allowing it to get as close as possible to the famous wreck. You see the anchor, the central anchor. This trip took off from new found in Canada on Friday.
It's a 600 kilometer voyage across the Atlantic to the Titanic's ocean grave, almost 4000m below the surface. The dive to reach it takes eight hours, and it's dangerous down there with strong currents and no GPS. It's like a a spaceship launch.
The way they treat each of these expeditions. Colin Tyler took a deep sea voyage aboard the Titan last year with his son, and while it's billed as a tourist trip, he knew the risks were real. You're in a very, very hostile environment.
My heart goes out to the people involved in all of this. It's it's a terrible, terrible situation, and I really hope, that they can be rescued. These are people that I've gotten to know and have a huge appreciation for.
Of course, you're taking through the risks, and there's lots of forms that you have to sign, when you when you go on this and his time takes away, so too does hope if the tiny submarine is still intact and everyone on board is still alive, it needs to be found quickly and brought back to the surface before adding to the Titanic tragedy. 111 years after it sank. It seemed impossible, but just a few hours ago, signs of life from a sonar which acts like a bionic killer underwater crews searching for the sub reportedly heard today banging sounds at 30 minute intervals, followed by another unidentified noise close to the Titanic wreck and confirmed by the US Coast Guard immediately.
The first thing is it gets your hopes go skyrocketing up, but also it makes you think that, wow, you know, time is really now against us. And that's the bad news. Even if the mini sub is found and everyone on board is alive, how do they get them back to the surface?
This is a very complex search, and the Unified Team is working around the clock to bring all available assets and expertise to bear. As quickly as possible, but time may have already beaten them. This sub has as little as 24 hours of oxygen left, and to sail salvage equipment to the site will take two days.
I would assume they're stuck on the bottom in the mud or somehow entangled in Titanic. Incredibly, at almost four kilometers under the surface, it's too deep for even a US Navy submarine to mount a rescue mission. They never venture that far down, and with good reason.
Submersibles implode. They crush down on themselves like a like a toothpaste tube, which has many asking how these homemade mini subs allowed to go so deep, especially when they're not certified in America or anywhere else and tested by a cheap video game controller. Perhaps there was a breach and water came in.
I'm not very optimistic for their return. Excitement or panic among those onboard could also kill them. It's cramped and uncomfortable, and fear and adrenaline will only quicken their breathing.
British billionaire Hamish Harding is a veteran adventurer with a cool head, so two stopped in rush. The chief executive of Ocean Gate that owns the sub the most experienced is former Navy officer Paul Henry Nagl, and the only two rookies on board, a father and son, Qaisara and Suleiman Dawood. As it stands right now, it would be a miracle if they are recovered alive.
This photo of Harding was taken just before the sub entered the water on Sunday, staring at the ocean that now surrounds him. The last thing I said to him was Godspeed, and I wished him luck with his dive in. What's turned out to be a terrifying premonition before he actually left this dock here in Canada on Friday, Hamish Harding told a podcast that he knew that this mission wasn't without risk.
So what I worry about most are things that will stop me from being able to get to the surface. Right now, underwater drones are trying to confirm the source of that banging and to hopefully spot the missing sub. Until then, every breath is precious and every minute the tech spy is the enemy every second.
And like I said, it keeps looking dimmer. But everybody keeps holding out hope. Think most explorers assess the risks before deciding to go on an expedition.
We're going where humans have rarely gone. So, you know, we're pushing the limits of things. And so, you know, it's it's not a it's not a Disney World ride.
More rescue ships leaving this small Canadian fishing town. And what feels like a futile mission of hope now is. But hope is all they have.
This is a search and rescue mission, 100%. We are smack dab in the middle of search and rescue, and, and, we'll continue to put every available asset that we have in an effort to, to find the Titan in the crewmembers. Even that banging noise they heard yesterday that offered so much optimism has turned out to be a cruel tease with respect to the noises specifically, we don't know what they are.
And to be frank with you, there's growing and get to against Ocean Gate, the company that owns the sub and runs these dangerous adventures. The tiny vessels are not certified anywhere, and experts started raising serious safety concerns about them back in 2018. In the end, it is an experimental vehicle.
A lot of risk is being taken. It's a big gamble and we thought that the risk was was was too high. One former employee even sued because he was so worried, but the case was settled out of court.
Adventurer Chris Brown was supposed to be on this very voyage with his friend Hamish Harding. The chose to stay behind. Harding is among the missing.
I think most explorers assess the risks before deciding to go on an expedition. Aaron Newman did and was selling pressed. He's now an investor in Ocean Gate and a believer.
He loves pushing the envelope even four kilometers underwater. We're going where humans have rarely gone. So, you know, we're pushing the limits of things.
And so, you know, it's it's not it's not a Disney World ride. Even here in Saint John's, a Canadian port city that knows all too well the brutal nature of the North Atlantic Ocean. This story has taken over.
The city is now accommodating a desperate and frantic search and rescue mission, but many residents here say they're realistic about how this one ends. Every second. And like I said, it keeps looking dimmer.
But everybody keeps holding out hope. I think anybody who's associated with the sea will feel sadness over all of this. That's going on.
Tragically, if all the calculations are right, time has already beaten them or is just about to. NBC correspondent Jay Gray is covering the story from Boston. Jay, no more airlift, but the operation is in fact expanding.
Yeah, Jimmy. And look, the Coast Guard Command Center, which is running this operation here in Boston, says that that air has likely expired. That's an estimate, but it's being made by scientists and others who understand the situation and work through this constellation.
They are expanding the area of the search. It's now, 10,000mi², and it dies down to depths of to two and a half miles. And they're bringing in more assets.
The number of ships on the surface has doubled from 5 to 10. And they have more on the way under the water. They've had two drones.
Now they've added more remotely controlled vehicles, including a deep diving robot that France has allowed them to use as a part of this search and rescue team leaders say they're in constant communication with the family members of the missing men, and they've made them a promise. They say that the oxygen estimate will define their efforts here, that they'll continue this work. And and they still say it is very much a search and rescue.
They haven't switched to recovery and say they're they're not even thinking in that mode right now. They say they'll be out there for as long as necessary to finish this mission. But but they do, acknowledge that this oxygen issue is one of the key factors that they are are using as they push forward here, Jim, it's a rough go for so many who have watched this so closely and can't even imagine how those families are dealing with this.
The latest news that the oxygen inside that capsule is probably expired at this point. The rescue ships are slowly returning to port here, and the planes have been called back where now that their mission was over before it even began. The debris is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber.
The sub called Titan imploded with such force. The five men on board were crushed in the blink of an eye. They wouldn't know what happened.
You've gone in a nanosecond. It's one Empire State building made of lead, sitting on top of you. At that level, disaster struck less than two hours into the eight hour descent last Sunday.
The titanium hulled, probably stressed from previous dives, simply gave up the wreckage, sinking to the ocean floor 200m in front of the Titanic. It was spotted this morning by an unmanned mini sub, beaming the horrific images back to the surface. The size of the debris field is, consistent with that implosion in the water.
This social media post shows the sub in the background just seconds before the dive began. A reluctant 19 year old Suleiman Dawood was on board. He had to be talked into going by his dad, a Titanic fanatic.
This was not okay and he just he was not very comfortable about doing it. And this is a final way from experienced adventurer Paul on Re Nog lay before he boarded authorities now deciding if their bodies will ever be retrieved. Tragic and it's horrific and it's unnecessary.
Film director James Cameron has traveled to the Titanic wreck himself, and has been critical in the past of Ocean Gate, the company that owns the sub and runs these dangerous tours. There was a lot of concern about this outfit and this, some Ocean Gate employees who'd escorted the Titan on its final disastrous voyage and now making their slow trip back here to this Canadian port, where their company will face the harsh spotlight of investigators. Ocean gate CEO Stockton Rush was also on board.
Relatives of his wife, Wendy, were among the 1500 who died on the Titanic more than a century ago. Now, her husband lies near them and probably forever just absolutely devastating them. I'm still, you know, heartbroken.
I, I think I'm still a little bit in shock. I just can't believe that, you know, this is happening. The best way to preserve the memories and the legacies of these five explorers is to conduct an investigation to find out what went wrong, take lessons learned, and then move forward.
I run a database of what we have out there. We have probably had, in the order of 40 to 50,000 dives a year, happening for the last 40 years easily. And since 1975, we've not had a single fatality.
Zero. If you want to look at statistics, how many people kind of fatalities you have in helicopter crashes worldwide, here, or wave runners or small boats, they tend to be in the thousands each year. Right.
So we've managed to have zero for over 50 years. Sadly, this single event has had more fatalities and all of them inside the industry combined. We've had five fatalities in 60 years now.
We've just doubled it in a single incident. There are claims being made about the consultation that they'd undertaken with places like Boeing and NASA, which have been called into question. You can't lie on your website.
You know, doing one dive to 4000m is not a test program. You know, at the time, there was a lot of speculation about whether they'd just lost contact or there was some other issue. There's lots, lots of possibilities of things that might have gone wrong, but.
But in the end, based on the recovered, debris, the acoustic data that was collected by the Navy, you know, it's pretty clear that there was there was this catastrophic failure at that depth. There is a much bigger concern on consensus of what did not happen, which is really important starting from the first that it was towed out that far because they towed it behind the ship. I mean, it was on a very small platform going through the North Atlantic 400 nautical miles.
That's a lot of stress of waves, slap and waves and all that that you have. So it is of tremendous concern to think that the submersible, when they were starting the dive, was definitely not in the same condition as when they left port distress. Whatever moved, whatever twisted, whatever happened at 400 nautical miles is a long way to be banged around.
So that already set them up for for a serious negative risk that they were taking at platform ready to dive to typically any operation like that usually has a emergency response plan. So before you leave the port, you already either have a second submarine on board in case of emergency, or you have a robot on board that can reach at the same depth. They call them remotely operated vehicles, ROVs, or you have someone on contract to say, look, that's where I'm going to be.
If something happens, I'm calling you and just come on over. So it is a matter of planning for the emergency. And they didn't do that either.
So by the time they took the dive, they were just taking incredible chances and ignoring the most basic overview that everybody in the industry follows. When we heard about it and I heard that they called the Coast Guard, they had been 10 or 12 hours. It's like 10 or 12 hours.
Oh my God, what were they doing? Because typically when you lose communication with a submarine within 15 minutes, you start worrying. At half hour you kind of go into emergency mode.
After about an hour, you have to assume something has happened. The emergency response behavior was completely off. And the most important data that we need from the report is to find out what the communication log was.
Did they call for technical support? Did they call their lawyers? Did they call I mean, who did they call?
Like saying, oops, something bad happened. How do we get ourselves out of this? Everyone's got different opinions on how subs should be designed, how dives should be conducted, how expeditions should be conducted.
that being said, developing innovations and new any new technology, including submersibles, means that sometimes you have to go outside of the bounds of the regulatory scheme. One of the big innovations you'll see on the model outside, you take the top off, there's a carbon fiber hull with titanium, hemispheres on the end. We've done a great deal of testing on that.
And that will replace this, the steel pressure vessel. They failed to do a proper test regime, which is defined. I mean, we have test procedures.
They did not do those because it takes too long, cost too much money, which is what I put in the letter to stock them. You can't lie on your website and, you know, doing one dive to 4000m is not a test program, a proper test program on any pressure vessel that is new that we don't know how it behaves is you've got to do three tests. The first one is you've got to blow up five units.
You've got to crush them. And you go to find out that the crush pressure actually matches your calculation. If it's all over the place means the calculations are no good.
The second one is you've got to put it under constant pressure for three months at six times the pressure. Because plastic you've seen it. It's center.
It creeps. It just keeps moving. So it's like well it might be good for the first hour, but after four hours, all of a sudden it deforms and it collapses.
So you've got to put it for three months under very under six times the design pressure. And after that you're going to cycle it at full pressure for a thousand times. Well, that takes better part of two years to do that.
So in that perspective, doing two dives on one unit so far off of what a proper test program should be, I understand they had some issues with previous vehicles, both in terms of the carbon fiber, but also some of the electricals and things like that. I think there seems to be a general consensus that using carbon fiber for a pressure vessel to be used at this depth was questionable at best, and, you know, whether they've done enough due diligence in terms of the testing and the design to really be sure that there wouldn't be a failure like this. I think there was some genuine questions being asked before the tragedy, and certainly since then, there's been a lot of concerns that were raised both by staff within the company, but also by external parties they were consulting with.
There were claims being made about the consultation that they'd undertaken with places like Boeing and NASA, which have been called into question. It's an issue at the level of the United Nations. Does your country care if your country cares?
Someone was watched the gate. Don't let them out. Exploring the Arctic with speedo and sandals.
They should have certified the submersible, which should have been required for the type of work they did, which is taking passengers. This was just certified it, and there's any one of half a dozen agencies around the world that do that, and they had to pick one and just follow follow through with it. It probably would have added $1 million added a year, but over their investment of 20 or 30 or $40 million they had in the company over 15 years, it doesn't wash out because like, it's there is no logical reason not to do it.
That's why we have rules. We have regulations. We know how to build submarines.
We know how to make them safe. The regulations are international. Every country has a set of regulations for the design, controlling the design, testing of submersibles.
And, it's not a mystery. Everybody knows how to do it all the way to the deep depths, including the depth of the Titanic. The only recourse you have is back to the initial thing is who is watching the gate, and that becomes a governance issue.
Does your country care? If your country cares? Someone must watch the gate.
Don't let them out. Don't let them out. Exploring the Arctic with speedo and sandals.
That's a very simple form of what governance is about. And we have it for ships. We have it for planes, we have it for cars, for trucks, for we have it and we have it for submersible.
Also, more or less generally, it relates to whoever is in charge of the port. When you see something weird, you should be asking question. Maybe you shouldn't let them go out the door.
The only thing we have is to rely on the last domino standing, and the last domino is the Coast Guard or the Port Authority. What we are doing right now as an association within the industry, where we're pushing is to say, look, maybe there's still too much ambiguity in what the rules are, and to make that much simpler and clear that it is the same thing around the world, because the submarines on yachts and stuff, they travel from country to country. So you can't just fake it and say, yeah, while in Italy everything's fine.
Let me go. It's like, no, show me your little card right? As an industry, we can say, look, I think these are basic standards that are simple enough for every country to recognize the same.
And they give some, some conformity, some uniformity to take out the ambiguity. So it's an issue at the level of the United Nations because it involves all the governments and everybody kind of sitting at the table. And that's what we're doing now at our yearly conference, is not just bringing in the industry people, but to lobby for the Coast Guard authorities and the marine authorities to join and sit at the table and say, look, we don't have the answer, but we need to sit at the table together.
And it's not just for Canada, Coast Guard or the American Coast Guard to figure it out. It's a uniform that we sit and come up with something that works, that is unambiguous and simple enough that everybody can agree to it, which is hard to do. We do have a standard at the United Nations under the International Maritime Organization.
So we do have something for operation of tourist submersibles at the United Nations level. Under IMO, there are rules. But, you know, United Nations doesn't have a lot of enforcement.
So our idea is to if we can get all the countries to adopt certain standards, then it becomes a de facto international standard that the United Nations can then endorse. The next step here, where we need to go and where we need to push, is to push the government authorities that let these submersible go to say, look, here are some basic guidelines and you need to check. And if people do something crazy, don't go and take a cup of coffee and let them out the door.
Somebody within the Marine Authority had the chance to say, okay guys, nice try, but no, people would certainly be second guessing their desire to to be going in investigating these deep sea environments. I'm sure it still appeals to to some people, but I think they'd be asking some pretty serious questions about the the vehicles that they're going to be operating in. I mean, there's risks with any of this kind of operation.
And, you know, some people are willing to take those risks and others, you know, particularly in light of what's happened, may be second guessing those, those opportunities. There's a big issue with the waivers. They do not work.
And it is a very serious, modern issue beyond the submarine world is that as you have a tremendous, complicated the technology involved in something, the common citizen or a normal citizen is not able to date, and even less in ten years from now to make a decision of risk based on informed consent. So for someone to say, oh yeah, I'm my own man, I'm signing this thing, it's like. You can't you you don't know what you don't know.
You cannot do it. So how do you stop that? You cannot stop it.
Other than a government policy, that's called governance. Whether you're a king or a prince or a government or a democracy that says, okay, you know, for all this stuff, we need a couple experts to look at that and find out what it means and allow it so that the citizen doesn't have to say who. I wonder if they thought about everything in that submarine.
It doesn't make sense.
