This is not your grandfather's submersible; inside, the sub has about as much room as a minivan. It has one button. "That's it," said Rush. "It should be like an elevator, you know? It shouldn't take a lot of skill."
The Titan is the only five-person sub in the world that can reach Titanic's depth, 2.4 miles below the sea. It's also the only one with a toilet (sort of).
And yet, I couldn't help noticing how many pieces of this sub seemed improvised, with off-the-shelf components. Piloting the craft is run with a video game controller.
Pogue said, "It seems like this submersible has some elements of MacGyver jerry-riggedness. I mean, you're putting construction pipes as ballast."
Our dive in the OceanGate submersible had made it down only 37 feet when floats came off the platform. And that wasn't supposed to happen. The mission was scrubbed.
There's no GPS underwater, so the surface ship is supposed to guide the sub to the shipwreck by sending text messages. Rush recalled, "I said, 'Do you know where we are?' '100 meters to the bow, then 470 to the bow. If you are lost, so are we!'"
But on this dive, communications somehow broke down. The sub never found the wreck.
"We were lost," said Shrenik Baldota. "We were lost for two-and-a-half hours."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/titanic-visiting-the-most-famous-shipwreck-in-the-world/