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Man who canceled OceanGate Titan trip shares lifesaving decision [1]

['Séamus Bellamy']

Date: 2025-08-11

Jim Kitchen's seen a lot of our planet. He was the first fella to travel to every one of the 193 nations recognized by the United Nations, been propelled into low orbit, and sunk down to the Mariana Trench in 2022.

And he damn near died two years ago, on the OceanGate Titan submarine. According to an interview with The Times, Kitchen was set to go on the OceanGate Titan's final, deadly dive in 2023. The sub's crew and passengers were set to see the Titanic! Up close! But as Kitchen sat through the trip's safety brief at a hotel in Newfoundland, Canada, his arse puckered up: he sensed that something was off.

Sitting in a hotel room in St John's, a city on the Newfoundland coast, with five other passengers and a team of about 20 leading the dive, Kitchen raised his hand to ask a series of questions. "Would the ship transporting the sub be able to withstand the Atlantic's 25ft-high waves?" "What does the weather look like?" "How long could they expect to be waiting at sea before making the dive?" His concerns, he said, were waved away by a senior mission co-ordinator. "Everyone's looking at me sideways, thinking, 'Hey, can you just give it a rest?'" said Kitchen, a 60-year-old American entrepreneur and business professor at the University of North Carolina.

Kitchen asked one final question—how many times had the submersible made the trip down to see the Titanic? The answer was not once. That was it for him. He made the smart decision not to set foot on the expedition's ship. Unfortunately, Kitchen did not share his reservations about the submersible with any of the other passengers attending the briefing.

Earlier this week, the United States Coast Guard released the findings of their investigation into the implosion of the Titan.

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/08/11/man-who-canceled-oceangate-titan-trip-shares-lifesaving-decision.html

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