A company planning an expedition to the Titanic next year says it's 'too soon' after the Titan sub disaster to send people back down

• The firm with the sole salvage rights to the Titanic is moving forward with a planned 2024 expedition.
• But in the aftermath of the Titan sub disaster, the company is looking at sending ROVs instead of a manned sub.

The private Georgia-based company with the exclusive salvage rights to the Titanic is moving ahead with plans for a 2024 expedition down to the famed shipwreck.

But it may be "too soon" to send people back down to the ocean's depths, the company's president said.

In the aftermath of the Titan submersible disaster that killed all five people on board, including French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet — who served as the company's director of underwater research — RMS Titanic Inc. is leaning towards sending an unmanned deep-sea vehicle for its expedition.

"I feel like a manned submersible expedition is too soon," Jessica Sanders, the president of RMS Titanic Inc., told Insider in an interview this week, adding, "We're still grieving."

Nargeolet, British billionaire Hamish Harding, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, his teen son, Suleman, and OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush — whose company operated the doomed dive — were killed on June 18 when the sub they were in imploded on a voyage to the Titanic.

Sanders says her company is still in shock months later that Nargeolet is gone.

"We're still kind of in this stunned mode of somewhere between mourning and grief, and how do you replace somebody who's irreplaceable?" Sanders said.

The planned 2024 expedition 'absolutely must go forward'

Nargeolet was known as "Mr. Titanic" for having visited the wreck site of the iconic ocean liner more than 35 times, and was set to pilot a sub for RMS Titanic Inc.'s planned 2024 expedition, Sanders said.

As a result of the deadly Titan tragedy, the company is looking at using remotely operated vehicles (ROV's) for the mission instead, but Sanders said the firm has determined at least one thing for certain — "the expedition absolutely must go forward."

It's what Nargeolet would have wanted, the RMS Titanic Inc. president said.

"We all understood PH was going to dive to this wreck site until the day he died and he did," Sanders said. "It was what he wanted to do, and he was not going to stop. And so we're not going to stop."

RMS Titanic Inc.'s mission, Sanders said, is to "preserve the legacy" of the passenger liner that hit an iceberg and sank 12,500 feet down to the depths of the North Atlantic Ocean in 1912, killing more than 1,500 people.

"I think that now we fold in his legacy into that mission," Sanders said of Nargeolet.

"One of the things that he spent his life doing and he died doing was visiting this wreck site and bringing the story of Titanic to the public," said Sanders, explaining that Nargeolet "believed everybody should have the right to see the wreck site."

She added, "We think that we honor him more by continuing the work that he started and that he believed in, and really what he died doing."

Though Sanders isn't as "confident" that ROVs can bring the same results as an expert like Nargeolet piloting a manned sub can because "deep sea recovery is an art," she says, "I think we need to try."

Plans for the 2024 expedition filed days before Titan sub disaster

Just days before OceanGate's Titan sub imploded, RMS Titanic Inc. had filed its tentative plans for its 2024 expedition in the US District Court in Norfolk, Virginia, which oversees the organization's access to the wreck site.

In the filing, the firm said that likely in May 2024, it plans to take images of the entire Titanic wreck site as well as work to recover artifacts from the debris field.

The company also noted it "may recover free-standing objects inside the wreck, including for example objects from inside the Marconi room, but only if such objects are not affixed to the wreck itself."

Over the years, RMS Titanic Inc. has salvaged more than 5,000 artifacts from the wreck site, the majority of which were recovered by Nargeolet himself, according to Sanders.

The planned 2024 expedition would be the company's first since 2010; however, the US government is fighting it, arguing in a recent court filing that the company needs to get authorization from the Secretary of Commerce first.

Sanders said she's confident the company is within its rights for the expedition.

Meanwhile, the US Coast Guard is leading an investigation to determine what caused the Titan sub to implode and Sanders said if there's ways for RMS Titanic Inc. to help on its planned 2024 expedition with "some additional supplemental imaging" or other requests, "we want to be in a position to do that."

Titanic is 'deteriorating' and time is of the essence, Sanders says

RMS Titanic Inc. has not yet submitted its finalized plans with the court for its proposed 2024 expedition, but Sanders said time is of the essence to get back down to the shipwreck site.

"It is deteriorating," Sanders said of the 111-year-old wreck. "And every year that passes, we're losing opportunity for access. So there is a sense of urgency."

Sanders explained that Titanic's decks "are starting to collapse" and that there was documented deterioration in the roof above the Marconi room — the ship's radio area where the Marconi wireless telegraph machine is held.

"Obviously, once that collapses, it's gone," Sanders said. "It's gone forever. You've lost it to the sea twice now."