The plans come almost a year after the fatal Titan implosion (Picture: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
A billionaire businessman has revealed plans to take a $20,000,000 submarine to the Titanic shipwreck in a bid to prove it is safe.
Larry Connor, an American billionaire, has vowed to take a new submarine to the Titanic – months after the OceanGate submersible tragedy that killed five people.
He wants to prove that the expedition can be done safely despite the Titan disaster in June last year.
Connor will go on the risky adventure with Triton Submarine co-founder Patrick Lahey to show that ocean exploration can be done safely.
Larry Connor is a real estate investor and a private astronaut certified by NASA (Picture: Chris Gunn/Axiom Space)
The pair will travel more than 12,400 feet (3,779 meters) to the Titanic shipwreck in the North Atlantic.
Connor told the Wall Street Journal: ‘I want to show people worldwide that while the ocean is extremely powerful, it can be wonderful and enjoyable and really kind of life-changing if you go about it the right way.’
Now Lahey has designed a $20,000,000 vessel called Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer for the risky voyage.
The real estate investor said Lahey has thought about designing Triton for more than a decade, but building it was not possible until now due to a lack of ‘materials and technology.’
Larry Connor and Patrick Lahey previously completed three dives in just five days to the deepest depths of the ocean in the Mariana Trench using the Triton 36000/2 vessel (Picture: Triton Submarines)
Triton Submarines 660/9 AVA allows guests to play poker surrounded by sharks or enjoy underwater dining (Picture: Triton Submarines)
‘You couldn’t have built this sub five years ago,’ he said according to the New York Post.
The fresh expedition plans come almost a year after the Titan submersible imploded while underwater on June 18 on its way to the Titanic which lies at about 12,500 feet off the coast of Canada.
All five passengers, including the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions Stockton Rush, were killed.
The exact cause of the incident remains a mystery, but the submarine operated by OceanGate suffered a ‘catastrophic implosion’ shortly after losing contact with its support vessel.
OceanGate CEO and co-founder Stockton Rush pictured in June 2016 (Picture: Bill Sikes/AP)
The previous expedition to the Titanic shipwreck (pictured) ended in tragedy last year (Picture: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution/AFP)
Connor called Lahey some days after the tragedy and urged him to build a better one.
‘[He said], you know, what we need to do is build a sub that can dive to [Titanic-level depths] repeatedly and safely and demonstrate to the world that you guys can do that, and that Titan was a contraption,’ he told the Wall Street Journal.
Critics, including Lahey, accused OceanGate of questionable safety standards after the incident, with some calling Rush’s approach ‘quite predatory,’ the New York Post reports.
Former OceanGate employee David Lochridge had previously said that Rush would get himself and others killed on the submersible.
The doomed Titan submersible operated by OceanGate Expeditions (Picture: AP)
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The engineer said in an email: ‘I don’t want to be seen as a Tattle tale but I’m so worried he kills himself and others in the quest to boost his ego.
‘I would consider myself pretty ballsy when it comes to doing things that are dangerous, but that sub is an accident waiting to happen.’
He said nothing could have made him ‘to dive the thing.’
Others killed on board Titan were British billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman and French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
Debris was later found in the ocean, including presumed human remains, the US Coast Guard said a week after the implosion.
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