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 — or lack of one — 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.