Commercial space travel shares plenty of similarities with deep-sea tourism: wealthy customers, tight spaces, far-flung destinations and waivers that clearly warn people they¡¯re risking death by embarking on unregulated vehicles.
As the world dissects what went wrong with the doomed OceanGate submersible vessel, the craft¡¯s lack of safeguards is raising alarms. The founder of the deep-sea tour group once called safety a ¡°pure waste¡± and industry peers flagged the potentially ¡°catastrophic¡± results of his ¡°experimental¡± approach to ocean exploration.
Submersibles like the Titan are subject to little safety oversight, even less so when they¡¯re in international waters. A similar regulatory regime ¡ª or lack of one ¡ª governs commercial human spaceflight. And while the private space industry hasn¡¯t seen a disaster on the scale of the OceanGate fiasco, the risks are there.
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