Titanium’s running about $3 a pound right now. It’s something.
Not long before the doomed trip, Rush flew into Las Vegas to try to convince Jay Bloom and his kid to go after they’d decided against it for fear of it being unsafe. (According to the elder Bloom, it was his son Sean who said “fuck no.”) The Pakistani guy and his son, sadly, ended up taking their places. Rush flew in to Vegas to meet them FLYING AN EXPERIMENTAL PLANE HE HAD BUILT HIMSELF, thereby convincing the Blooms even more that they were very much in a different place from Rush in terms of risk aversion.
According to Bloom, Rush had offered to slash the per person price from $250,000 to $150,000. These are not the actions of a man representing a business with lots of dough in the bank and a backlog of clients. I don’t think there’s much left for the families to sue for.
A lot of submersibles have gone down to the Titanic, and well as some other famous wrecks; they’ve explored wrecks almost twice as deep. They’ve even explored Bismarck, which is quite a bit deeper than Titanic. So it’s not like this sort of thing is a tremendous impossibility. A submersible can be designed and constructed that will, with a pretty high degree of safety and reliably, take you down to look at the bottom of the sea. The difference is that Stockton Rush, apparently, tried to do it cheap.