Stockton Rush “didn’t want anyone telling him what he couldn’t do,” according to Brian Weed, a cameraman who had worked with him.
The CEO of the underwater expedition company OceanGate, Rush, 61, was among the five people who died some 13,000 feet down in the Atlantic Ocean this week when their submersible, Titan, imploded during a trip to view the wreckage of the Titanic.
“He struck me as a cowboy,” Weed, who worked with Rush on a proposed documentary, told The Post. “He was not afraid to do his thing. He talked about nobody ever having done what he was doing. As far as he was concerned, he cracked the code.
“He was scrappy, intuitive, creative and committed to this,” Weed said of Rush’s dream to be extreme — and his willingness to break rules to make it come true.
“I think it was General MacArthur who said ‘You’re remembered for the rules you break’,” Rush said in one interview. “You know I’ve broken some rules to make this [the Titan] … It’s picking the rules you break that are the ones that will add value to others and add value to society.”
It was a renegade mindset that is now being seen as potentially reckless — but often charmed people.
“I did not trust his sub, but I liked him,” Weed said.
Weed went on a dive in Rush’s submersible while working on a possible show about him for Discover channel.
But the dive failed — “We were sitting in the water and lost propulsion,” Weed said — and Titan had to be brought up prematurely. Weed was spooked.
“I extricated myself from the dive,” he added. “I didn’t trust it.
“Stockton thought the things that went wrong were minor and they would be easy fixes. I worried that the problem we experienced would require extensive testing. Stockton thought there would be nothing to worry about,” Weed said. “He was sure that we would still do the show … and we didn’t, due to safety reasons. He was all-in on his submersible and 100% believed in it.”
David Lochridge, OceanGate’s former director of marine operations, has claimed that he had raised concerns about a “lack of non-destructive testing performed on the hull of the Titan” — but that when he brought them to Rush, he was wrongfully terminated, according to a lawsuit.
In a 2022 interview with CBS, Rush claimed “we worked with Boeing and NASA and the University of Washington” on the Titan. But all three have denied this, according to CNN.
“[Rush] told me, ‘When you’re trying something outside the box, people inside the box think you’re nuts,’” journalist David Pogue — who spent nine days with Rush for “CBS Sunday Morning” — told The Post. “Certification would have meant a safety agency telling him what he could and could not do in submersible design. He viewed that as the enemy of innovation.
“The most alarming thing is that there were all kinds of off the shelf cheap components,” Pogue remembered from his time on the sub. “He got the lights in the sub from camperworld.com. He told me that and chuckled.”
In 2017 a colleague described Rush to Businessweek as a “full-speed-ahead, damn-the-torpedoes kind of guy.”
He also mentioned the danger of that: “In the submersible industry, extreme depth is all about precision and control. Nothing can be left to chance.”
But Rush seemed willing to do just that.
In 2018, the Marine Technology Society (MTS) warned OceanGate that TItan’s experimental design and failure to follow industry-accepted safety protocols could lead to “catastrophic” results.
Even people who lived high-risk lives were uncomfortable with Rush’s seeming disdain for safety; as the CEO told “CBS Sunday Morning,” “If you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed.”
“I would have never gotten into that unit,” Butch Hendricks, who teaches extreme undersea diving, told The Post. “He couldn’t explain enough safety procedures to make me do it. He would just tell people that they had a fine maintenance program. He had his own ideas about how to make things work.”
As for the plastic video-game controller used to pilot the ship, Hendricks described it as “Mickey Mouse.”
Rush’s daredevil, devil-may-care attitude went back to his childhood when he announced to his family that he wanted to be an astronaut. Family members reportedly assumed he would grow out of it. He didn’t.
The scion to an oil and gas fortune in San Francisco, teenaged Rush was lucky enough to be introduced by his father to Pete Conrad, commander of Apollo 12. It was Conrad who suggested that Rush get his pilot’s license — which he did at age 18, making him then one of the youngest commercial pilots in the world.
Rush landed a gig that had him flying chartered planes in and out of Saudi Arabia. He described it to Smithsonian magazine as “the coolest summer job.”
But professionally built planes were not enough for renegade Rush. He built his own plane, from a kit, while studying aerospace engineering at Princeton.
“He’s very much in the Right Stuff mode,” Pogue said. “He built a fiberglass airplane and got exactly the same pushback from engineers and other interested parties that he got with the Titan. The plane proved to be successful and I think it emboldened him.”
While at the university, the Princetonian reported, Rush was charged with drunk driving in 1983 after allegedly driving his Volkswagen into a shuttle train called the Dinky.
After school, he worked as a flight-test engineer on F-15 fighter jets for McDonnell Douglas. After imperfect eyesight dashed his dreams of becoming an astronaut, Rush considered buying a ticket for a future Virgin Galactic suborbital flight.
But standing in the Mojave Desert during a 2014 test flight, watching Branson showboat on the wing of the grounded spacecraft, Rush was turned off by the idea of sanitized space-tourism.
“I wanted to be Captain Kirk on the Enterprise,” he told Smithsonian. “I wanted to explore.”
Changing his trajectory, Rush began piecing together his first submarine; built from spare parts, it was designed to go only 30 feet underwater. But Rush was quick to take it to 100 feet.
And he projected a confidence that convinced people to trust him, Weed said.
“He was willing to go down with it,” Weed said. “That goes a long way in convincing somebody to do it.”
It definitely worked on Mike Reiss, a writer and producer on “The Simpsons” who took multiple dives on Titan and was somewhat impressed by Rush’s reckless edge.
“He was the most meticulous guy, but there was definitely the daredevil in him.” Reiss told The Post. “He’s the most amazing man I ever met in my life. He was movie-star handsome, spoke beautifully and was always in command. He loved checklists.”
As for who was responsible for the carbon fiber composite hull that “Titanic” director James Cameron has called the vessel’s likely “critical failure,” Reiss believes that it was Rush himself.
“The carbon fiber was something he did,” said Reiss. “He was very proud of it. We [passengers] saw footage of the carbon fiber being wrapped around the sub.”
As for the death of Rush and his five passengers, Reiss said, “It was a disaster, but he got 10 groups to the Titanic and I think he’d believe that it was worth it. It’s a tragedy and Stockton was my friend but I am not heartbroken. This is not an unexpected way for him to die. I bet he expected to go this way.”
