WSU students had an early role on Titan project, years before implosion

Among the revelations in recent reporting on the missteps before the Titan submersible disaster was the news that the project’s leader had employed college interns in the design of the vessel.

Those who follow the news in the Northwest may already have known that.

Students at Washington State University’s Everett campus worked both before and after graduation on designing an earlier version of the submersible’s electrical system in advance of a series of planned dives in 2018.

Two students began working for OceanGate, the company that built the vessel, while still enrolled in engineering courses and then after graduation, at which point they helped recruit other students to do senior “capstone projects” there, according to WSU.

Their involvement was touted in a 2018 article in the WSU Insider, a university-wide publication, and covered by several regional news outlets.

“The whole electrical system – that was our design, we implemented it and it works,” said Mark Walsh, a 2017 WSU-Everett graduate in electrical engineering, at the time, as reported by the WSU Insider. “We are on the precipice of making history and all of our systems are going down to the Titanic. It is an awesome feeling!”

The 2018 dives were eventually scrapped due to ongoing problems with the vessel’s launch-and-recovery system.

The WSU graduates left the company in 2019, the university said this week. The reasons for their departure are not clear, but they left as concerns were mounting inside and outside the company about the Titan’s safety.

In June of this year, a Titan test dive with five people on board, including company co-founder and CEO Stockton Rush, suffered a catastrophic implosion after losing contact with its surface team. The Titan vanished less than two hours after beginning its descent, setting off a four-day search-and-rescue mission that was the subject of intense global media coverage; it ended when the Coast Guard announced it had found debris from the sub.

An investigation is ongoing, but experts have noted that the intensity of the implosion may have left little to investigate – and a detailed explanation of what happened may never be found.

For years before the incident, concerns were raised about the vessel’s ability to withstand high pressure at the 12,500-foot depths where the Titanic wreckage lies. The Titan used a carbon-fiber hull that was touted as revolutionary and able to withstand pressure that would crush a steel-hulled submarine.

Rush was criticized for recklessly ignoring safety concerns even as he was peddling the idea of six-figure tickets for future trips to the Titanic site. A New Yorker article, published last week, examined the steps leading up to the failure and the many red flags raised inside and outside the company by engineers and experts.

The involvement of WSU-Everett students was one of several ways that Washington colleges participated in OceanGate projects, though all of that involvement ended years before the recent disaster. The University of Washington worked with OceanGate on an earlier submersible, though it parted ways with the company for unspecified reasons before fulfilling most of a multimillion-dollar contract.

OceanGate also used interns from Everett Community College, according to news reports.

The involvement of the WSU students came at a critical time in the development of the Titan: The project’s chief pilot at the time, a prominent expert with three decades piloting submersibles, had just delivered a scathing analysis of the Titan’s safety flaws, including concerns about the ability of the hull and its components to withstand the pressure. He was fired the day after delivering the report.

Not long after, more than three dozen industry experts signed a letter to OceanGate expressing “unanimous concern” that Titan was not safe, The New Yorker reported.

‘You’re hired’

According to the Insider story, the students’ involvement began with a visit by the university’s engineering club to the OceanGate facilities in Everett in 2017. During the tour, the firm’s director of engineering, Tony Nissen, discussed some of the challenges the project was facing, and Walsh and a fellow student, Nick Nelson, offered potential solutions.

“Tony said, ‘OK, you’re hired,’ ” Walsh said, according to the WSU Insider piece.

Walsh and Nelson worked as interns and then full-time employees after graduation. Walsh became the engineering lead for the company, according to the Insider piece, overseeing a team of five, including Nelson and two other WSU-Everett interns, working on monitors, keyboards, tablets, Wi-Fi and sonar.

“If electrons flow through it, I’m in charge of it,” he said.

The involvement of college interns in the OceanGate project was a passing detail in The New Yorker article, which stitched together a vision of Rush as reckless and overconfident in the face of safety concerns, including a reliance on people with little expertise for their positions.

For years, he had been marketing a vision of submersible dives to the Titanic site as something the public would be able to purchase, dating back to trials with an earlier submersible in the San Juan Islands – one of which included the rapper Macklemore.

“I’d like to be remembered as an innovator. I think it was General (Douglas) MacArthur who said, ‘You’re remembered for the rules you break,’” Rush said in an interview in 2021 with Mexican media personality Alan Estrada. “And I’ve broken some rules to make this. I think I’ve broken them with logic and good engineering behind me.”

Many others disagreed. The chief pilot who left the project in 2018 described the Titan as unsafe in many ways. A crucial misstep, according to critics, was the refusal to have the vessel “classed” by a marine-certification agency, which would ensure the submersible’s safety to a certain ocean depth.

In communications with another engineer, the former chief pilot described it as a “lemon,” according to The New Yorker, and wrote in a message, “That sub is Not safe to dive.”

An earlier model

Walsh and Nelson have not spoken to the press about their experiences, and efforts to reach them for comment were unsuccessful this week.

Both left the company in 2019, around the time that safety concerns were prompting others to leave the project, according to WSU-Everett spokeswoman Corrie Wilder.

While the WSU Insider story emphasized the connections between OceanGate and the school – Walsh described it as a “close relationship” – Wilder said there was no formal connection between the school and the company.

As is the case with many other internships and senior capstone projects, which are opportunities for students to have “expertly supervised practical experience,” the relationship was between the students and the company, Wilder said.

She emphasized that the connection ended several years before the recent test run, and that there was no suggestion the work done by former WSU-Everett students played any role in the recent implosion.

OceanGate burnished its reputation by promoting its associations with aerospace experts at the University of Washington, as well as NASA and Boeing. All three have issued denials emphasizing they did not work on the Titan’s design.

Boeing released a statement saying that it “was not a partner on the Titan and did not design or build it,” and NASA has similarly denied a link to the Titan, issuing a statement that said the agency did not “conduct testing or manufacturing via its workforce or facilities.”

UW researchers were involved in OceanGate efforts between 2013 and 2020 on the design of an earlier submersible, the Cyclops I. (Boeing also helped OceanGate on this model, according to a UW news release from 2013.)

The Cyclops I was involved in a series of dives in the Puget Sound that attracted a lot of publicity and produced some published scientific research, the Seattle Times reported. Those dives were much shallower excursions than the Titanic project.

OceanGate signed a $5 million contract with the UW physics lab for work on the submersible, but according to a statement from the university, “only $650,000 worth of work was completed before the two organizations parted ways.”

The UW also said, “That collaboration resulted in a steel-hulled vessel, named the Cyclops 1, that can travel to 500 meters depth, which is far shallower than the depths that OceanGate’s Titan submersible traveled to. The Laboratory was not involved in the design, engineering or testing of the Titan submersible used in the RMS Titanic expedition.”

‘A learning experience’

Wilder said that it’s unfortunate that some of the press reports have focused on Walsh and Nelson – who were young men at the time of their involvement with OceanGate – and seemed to link them to the disaster.

The sense of excitement that the students expressed at the time is understandable, she said, given the prominence of the Titanic and OceanGate’s ambitions. The sinking of the supposedly unsinkable Titanic in 1912 remains among the most famous and dramatic maritime disasters in history; more than 1,500 people died when the ship sank after striking an iceberg.

The ship now sits, in two pieces, on the bottom of the ocean, about 12,500 feet deep and 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.

Rush envisioned a project in which clients – paying a steep rate – would dive in the Titan for as long as eight hours: 90 minutes to go up and down, with the rest of the time left to explore the wreckage. Even in 2018, some of the key features of the Titan were in place, including its much-reported use of off-the-shelf video game controllers to direct the vessel.

The Lewiston Morning Tribune published a story on the involvement of the WSU students in 2018. That piece noted that OceanGate had just 25 employees, which meant that Walsh and Nelson were involved in “essentially every aspect of the electrical work.”

“I’m basically a jack-of-all-trades,” Nelson told the Tribune. “I’m doing computer programming, computer engineering, working on hardware, building test equipment, doing basic power routing and design review. It’s been a great learning experience.”