OceanGate Asked College Students To Come Up With More ‘Cost Efficient’ Battery for Sub

In the fall semester of 2018, OceanGate approached engineering students at Washington State University with a problem: The company needed to find a way to make a cheaper “deep sea” smart battery for its innovative new submersible vehicle.

“We, at OceanGate Engineering, postulate that, of the presently available systems, the extremely long lead time to market is not born of necessity and that the proportional high cost is not justified,” the company told the students. 

As part of a group project, students were tasked with developing a more “cost efficient” prototype that would be both “safe and”—just as critically—“affordable.” The OceanGate representatives, Mark Walsh and Tony Nissen, wrote in a memo that they suspected that “commercial off the shelf” parts and “lowcost circuits” could be used more than they were at that moment to build a cheaper, more readily available battery for its submersibles.

The engineering students ultimately produced a prototype for their OceanGate partners that they said was “approximately $50,000 cheaper.” In part, they did this by purchasing “parts from a local store because they were efficient and cost effective.” 

After the Titan went missing this month, WSU’s Everett campus put out a statement saying the company had been “an incredible partner to WSU Everett” and that the school “firmly beside them during this challenging period.” “We cannot express enough gratitude for their invaluable contributions to our academic community and the field of underwater exploration,” said WSU Everett chancellor Paul Pitre.

The statement has been subsequently revised to refer to OceanGate as an “incredible advocate of WSU Everett and higher education” and no longer makes mention of a “partnership.” A WSU spokesperson wrote in a statement that “student capstone projects do not constitute formal contracts or partnerships” and that after WSU graduates left OceanGate in 2019, “our communication with the company ended.”

Motherboard was not able to determine if a version of the battery was ultimately used in the Titan, but the assignment showed the pressures that the small OceanGate team was under to find creative ways to fulfill CEO Stockton Rush’s dreams. OceanGate declined to comment when reached by Motherboard.

For years leading up to the Titan catastrophe, Rush had portrayed himself and his company as revolutionary disruptors, controversially opting not to get  Titan certified as safe by a third-party organization (known in the industry as “classing”) and making use of a carbon fiber hull, an “experimental” approach which greatly concerned outside experts due to the material’s inherent unsuitability.

“I'd like to be remembered as an innovator,” Rush said in a 2021 interview with a Mexican YouTuber. “I think it was General MacArthur who said: ‘You're remembered for the rules you break.’ And you know, I've broken some rules to make this.”

“I think I broke them with logic and good engineering behind me. The carbon fiber and titanium, there's a rule you don't do that–well I did,” the CEO added. 

But in interviews promoting the company, Rush and his employees admitted that they were under intense pressure—suggesting, sometimes indirectly and sometimes more forthrightly—that moving fast and reducing costs was critical to the company’s success. 

In a March 2018 interview with a local news station, Nissen, then the company’s director of engineering, had said creating the Titan involved “a lot of pain. We did this extremely fast.” 

By then, the company’s director of marine operations, David Lochridge, had already begun to develop a report to plead for more testing and emphasize “the potential dangers to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths.” He was subsequently fired. 

The next year, in June 2019, Nissen spoke more openly with Nathan Blackwell, a student at WSU and freelance journalist, about the cost-related issues that the company had faced while building the Titan, the first sub the company had “built from scratch,” he said then. 

The company had approached the creation of the Titan with a startup’s mindframe and resources, relying extensively on interns and recent graduates in the development of its subs. Only four full-time engineers were involved in the creation, though more people helped during the process, Nissen said.

To keep “cost low” and “development around longer,” OceanGate had tried to get creative, including by pulling “parts off the shelf,” Nissen told Blackwell, who shared the unpublished interview with Motherboard. “If engineers just sat around and overspent … we couldn't afford any engineering projects,” Nissen said. 

During Titan’s development, the company’s engineering team had struggled to deal with the “accelerated” pace at which the company needed to work, according to Nissen, who said they “just don't get a whole lot of time.” Dealing with outside vendors was also a consistent headache. Sometimes, the products they delivered fell “short” of what was promised, which Nissen said “eats into your schedule.” 

“In some cases, they bit off a little bit more than they could chew,” he said. “It's like wrangling the kids at Disneyland sometimes.”

In the interview, Nissen said the company’s carbon fiber hull—the “first of its type in the world,” he said—had two advantages. First, it was “extremely light” in comparison to steel, which meant if something went wrong, they would not have to drop a “boatload of weight” or “power yourself up.” “So we designed inherent safety into the vehicle,” he added.

Secondly, it was also “a whole lot cheaper” to manufacture, which meant they were able to drive “down the cost on what it takes to manufacture a vehicle to be able to do this.”

The comments aligned with those of Rush, who had repeatedly suggested the decision to use a carbon fiber hull had been motivated at least in part by money.  Just last month, he had reportedly bragged to Travel Weekly's editor-in-chief that he had “gotten the carbon fiber used to make the Titan at a big discount from Boeing because it was past its shelf-life for use in airplanes,” but that “those dates were set far before they had to be.” (Boeing has since said it "has found no record of any sale of composite material to OceanGate or its CEO.")

Years earlier, in a 2017 interview with the trade publication CompositesWorld, Rush had said that the company had originally started to consider the possibility of a carbon fiber hull “primarily” because of its buoyancy, which “would enable OceanGate to forgo the use — and the significant expense — of syntactic foam on its exterior,” as the publication wrote. 

When the company contracted Spencer Composites to design the now-controversial composite hull, OceanGate gave the company six weeks to complete the project. 

“This is the pressure we have to meet, this is the factor of safety, this is the basic envelope. Go design and build it,’” Spencer Composites’ president said then. (OceanGate later rebuilt Titan to withstand more pressure.)

Nissen said that during the Titan’s development, many of the company’s ideas “ended up not working” and they worked iteratively, which he described as “old school, hardcore engineering.”

“We're not afraid to try new and different things, and we push the boundaries of preconceived notions on how you're supposed to go about engineering and development, and whether or not something will work,” Nissen said. 

“We really challenge the status quo, and we've done things differently,” he said at another point. “I mean, starting really at the hull itself. It's a carbon fiber structure, first of its type. Nobody else has done it and stuffed people in it, and we're doing it.”

A month after the interview, Nissen left the company, according to his LinkedIn page. He did not respond to a request for comment. 

Financing appeared to have remained an issue until at least January 2020, when the company secured $18 million in additional investment. In an interview about the financing, Rush said that a number of the company’s plans were “in limbo” until they received the infusion of cash. That seemed to have weighed on Rush. 

During a trip on  Titan in April 2019, submersible expert Karl Stanley had heard a cracking noise that concerned him. One day after, he reportedly wrote an email to Rush in which he suggested that the CEO consider what he would do if he could make a decision without worrying about the desire of outside parties like investors. 

“Imagine this project was self funded and on your own schedule. Would you consider taking dozens of other people to the Titanic before you truly knew the source of those sounds??” Stanley wrote. 

This post has been updated to include additional information from WSU and note that WSU Everett chancellor Paul Pitre’s statement has changed.