Stockton Rush (cropped)

Richard Stockton Rush III (March 31, 1962 – June 18, 2023) was an American businessman who was the co-founder and chief executive officer of OceanGate, a deep-sea exploration company.

After graduation from Princeton University, Rush worked for McDonnell Douglas as a flight test engineer on their F-15 program. He later was a board member for BlueView Technologies and the Museum of Flight. In 2009, he created the company OceanGate with Guillermo Söhnlein, who departed the company in 2013.

On June 18, 2023, Rush died along with four others when OceanGate's submersible ''Titan'' imploded during an attempt to visit the wreck of the ''Titanic''.

Early life

Richard Stockton Rush III was born into a wealthy family in San Francisco, California, on March 31, 1962, the youngest of five children born to Richard Stockton Rush Jr. and Ellen (née Davies). His mother was a native of San Francisco, while his father was born in Philadelphia. His maternal grandfather was businessman Ralph K. Davies. His maternal grandmother, Louise Davies, was a philanthropist and the namesake of San Francisco's Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall. Through his father, he was a descendant of two signers of the Declaration of Independence, Richard Stockton and physician Benjamin Rush.

His childhood home in San Francisco was unintentionally damaged during a synchronised bombing of Yugoslav embassies in 1967. The explosion went off at midnight in a walkway between the consulate and his home, blowing holes in the walls of both the consulate and the room in which his 6-year-old sister Catherine was sleeping.

As a child, Rush wanted to become an astronaut and the first person on Mars, and had an interest in aviation and aquatics. He began scuba diving at age 12, and became a commercial pilot at 18 years old. He was later told his visual acuity would disqualify him from becoming a military aviator. In 1980, he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire.

Rush received a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree with a major in aerospace engineering from Princeton University in 1984 and a Master of Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989.

Career

After graduating from Princeton, Rush worked briefly for McDonnell Douglas as a flight-test engineer for the F-15 program before getting his MBA. Later on, Rush worked as a venture capitalist for the San Francisco company Peregrine Partners. He relocated to the Pacific Northwest in 1989 to manage the company ''Remote Control Technology'' based in Kirkland, Washington. He claimed to have built an experimental airplane later that year that he flew throughout his life.

Rush was a hobbyist scuba diver and spent time diving in the waters of Puget Sound. In 2006, after his first excursion in a submarine in British Columbia, Rush became interested in ocean exploration at lower depths. Rush began considering purchasing a submersible but discovered there were fewer than 100 privately-owned submarines worldwide and was unable to purchase one. Instead, a company in London offered to sell parts for a miniature submersible that could be assembled using blueprints reportedly created by a retired U.S. Navy submarine commander. The vessel Rush constructed was long and capable of diving to a depth of . After the construction of his miniature submersible he continued to try to purchase a submersible, including attempting to buy Steve Fossett's submersible vehicle after Fossett's 2007 death, but was unsuccessful.

Around 2007, Rush began to explore the idea of founding his own submarine company. He believed that there could be significant market for underwater ocean tourism and that it would provide an alternative to the significant time and technical gear required for scuba diving. Rush founded OceanGate with business partner Guillermo Söhnlein in 2009. According to Rush, the goal of the company was to use commercial tourism to fund the development of new deep-diving submersibles that would enable further commercial ventures including resource mining and disaster mitigation. Söhnlein left OceanGate in 2013.

While performing market research for OceanGate, Rush determined that the private market for underwater exploration had floundered due to a public reputation for danger and increased regulatory requirements for the operation of tourist submarines and submersibles. He believed these reasons were "understandable but illogical", and that the perception of danger much exceeded the actual risk. In particular, he was critical of the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993, a United States law which regulated the construction of ocean tourism vessels and prohibited dives below , which Rush described as a law which "needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation".

In 2016, exploring the sunken Andrea Doria on the ''Cyclops I'', David Lochridge reported how Rush "smashed straight down" into the wreckage of the sunken ocean liner, an episode recounted during a Coast Guard hearing in 2024.

In 2018, Rush piloted an expedition with researchers and scientists in the San Juan Islands to observe the red sea urchin and the habitat of the sand lance. In 2021, after several delays, Rush finally started his deep submergence business. Prior to the June 2023 dive, Rush was sued for $210,000 by a couple in Florida concerning a planned 2018 dive to the ''Titanic'' that they claim was repeatedly canceled and postponed. The couple claimed that they were unable to get a refund due to Rush's actions. After Rush's death, the couple dropped the lawsuit out of respect for the lives lost on the ''Titan''.

In a 2022 podcast with CBS reporter David Pogue, Rush discussed his views on the balance between risk and safety:

You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed, 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.

''Titan'' expedition and death

Rush was in the ''Titan'', a submersible owned and designed by OceanGate, to view the wreck of the ''Titanic'' when the vessel lost contact with the surface ship on June 18, 2023. Search-and-rescue missions involved water and air support from the United States, Canada, and France.

On June 22, after the discovery of a debris field approximately from the bow of the ''Titanic'', OceanGate said it believed Rush and the four others aboard had died. A United States Coast Guard press conference later confirmed that the debris found was consistent with a catastrophic loss of the pressure hull, an implosion, resulting in the instantaneous deaths of all aboard.

Personal life

Rush married pilot and teacher Wendy Weil in 1986, and they had two children. Rush and Weil both attended Princeton University, where they met. Weil is the great-great-granddaughter of Isidor and Ida Blun Straus, both of whom died in the sinking of the ''Titanic''. She was the Director of Communications at OceanGate.

Rush became a commercial pilot at age 18 and claimed to have become the youngest jet transport-rated pilot in the world at age 19 in 1981. In 1989, he built a Glasair III experimental aircraft, which he continued to own and fly throughout his life. Rush was also a lifelong scuba diving enthusiast, having begun diving at age 12.

See also

*List of inventors killed by their own invention

References

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Rush, Stockton
1962 births
2023 deaths
21st-century American businesspeople
21st-century American engineers
Businesspeople from San Francisco
Businesspeople from Washington (state)
Captains who went down with the ship
Civilian submariners
Deaths in the Titan submersible implosion
Formerly missing American people
Engineers from California
Inventors killed by their own invention
Phillips Exeter Academy alumni
Princeton University alumni
Stockton family (New Jersey)
University of California, Berkeley alumni
American people of English descent