A lifelong adventure seeker, Mr. Rush said he took on the risk of deepwater travel because the “ocean is the universe. That’s where life is.”
Stockton Rush, the chief executive and founder of OceanGate and the pilot of the Titan submersible, was declared dead on Thursday after his vessel was found in pieces at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, near the rusting wreck of the RMS Titanic. He was 61.
Mr. Rush oversaw finances and engineering for OceanGate, a privately owned tourism and research company based in Everett, Wash., which he founded in 2009. In 2012, he was a founder of the OceanGate Foundation, a nonprofit organization that encouraged technological development to further marine science, history and archaeology.
Mr. Rush first looked skyward for adventure. In 1981, when he was 19, he was believed to be the world’s youngest jet-transport-rated pilot.
If the sky was the limit, though, it was too confining for Mr. Rush.
“I wanted to be the first person on Mars,” he told Fast Company magazine in 2017.
By the time he was 44, he had abandoned his dream of becoming an astronaut. Interplanetary travel didn’t seem economically viable in the foreseeable future. But he saw potential in underwater travel, and he said he was willing to take on risk and bend the rules to achieve his goals.
“I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed,” he said in an interview with “CBS News Sunday Morning” last year. “Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything. At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk-reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.
