OceanGate Advertising Titanic Sub Trips for Next Year

OceanGate, the company that owned the submersible that catastrophically imploded while descending towards the wreckage of the Titanic earlier this month, is still advertising expeditions to the famous sunken ship in 2024.

On its website, the company still lists two missions in late June to "see the Titanic with your own eyes" and "step outside of everyday life and discover something truly extraordinary."

Five people, including OceanGate's CEO Stockton Rush, have been presumed dead after travelling on board the Titan submersible, which lost communications with its surface ship on the morning of June 18, and whose debris was discovered by a search and rescue operation on June 22.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Coast Guard, which is part of a multinational investigation into the incident, said human remains had likely been recovered from the vessel's wreck, after parts of the deep-sea submersible were dredged up from the sea floor and brought to Newfoundland.

Alongside Rush, those presumed dead are billionaire Hamish Harding, former French Navy diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman.

Promising "the adventure of a lifetime to the bottom of the ocean," OceanGate's expedition listing notes Nargeolet as still among the "experts who may join you on [the] expedition." It also claims that the 2023 expedition is "currently underway."

"OceanGate continues to sell tickets for a trip to the wreck of the Titanic," Twitter user Erika Grey wrote on Friday. "Does anybody want?"

It appears that after a brief period when the website was unavailable, it is now back without any revisions having been made to it in light of the devastating recent events.

"It looks like nobody's bothered to update OceanGate's website," Twitter user Bryan Passsifiume noted on Wednesday, referencing the listing.

It remains unclear whether the 2024 trip will go ahead or which submersible it would use—given the company's other vessel, Cyclops 1, is not built to go down as far as the depth the Titanic lays in the Atlantic Ocean.

Newsweek reached out to OceanGate via email for comment on Friday.

Since the Titan's disappearance, historic concerns about the safety and construction of the submersible have reemerged, including a former employee suing the company over safety issues in 2018, and a warning from the Marine Technology Society about OceanGate not allowing independent testing of the craft.

Submersible experts have questioned the novel design of the underwater craft, while others reportedly warned Rush directly about their worries only to be brushed off.

The company said in 2019 that bringing in an outside entity was "anathema to rapid innovation." Its website states that the Titan was designed for depths of more than 13,000 feet and had a real-time hull health monitoring system that provided "unparalleled safety."

On Sunday, the U.S. Coast Guard announced that it had convened a Marine Board of Investigation (MBI) to probe the implosion, including what caused the five deaths and whether "an act of misconduct, incompetence, negligence, unskillfulness, or willful violation of law" contributed to it.

It added that the MBI would work in coordination with counterpart authorities in Canada, France and the United Kingdom.

OceanGate and the U.S. Coast Guard have said they will not be commenting publicly on the investigation while it is ongoing.