It’s Brutal to Get to the Ocean’s Depths. This Minisub Will Take You There

This story originally published on Sept. 7, 2017. As of June 20, 2023 a search is still underway for OceanGate’s submersible diving vessel with five people aboard that went missing in the North Atlantic on June 18.

For years upon years, Stockton Rush dreamed of leaving this earthly plane. “I wanted to be an astronaut,” says the man with the satin pilot’s jacket and the lustrous silvery mane, speaking at New York City’s Explorers Club, one of the few places where a guest might really encounter someone who’s exited our planet’s atmosphere. Rush learned to fly as a teenager specifically for that purpose, but he became disillusioned with the narrow scope of manned space exploration. He wanted to go far and find new worlds. “I eventually realized I wasn’t going to get to Jupiter or Mars,” he says. Which was OK, because Rush found a new and even more mysterious universe to explore. “I realized that all the cool stuff I thought was out there is actually underwater,” he says, then begins clicking through slides of creatures from the extreme deep. These are the fish of nightmares and sci-fi films: They have huge eyes or no eyes, spiny protuberances, enormous teeth, exoskeletons. “Here’s the creature from Alien,” he says, showing a slide from the film, and then, click—something in our oceans that looks a heckuva lot like the creature from Alien. Click. “Here’s the goblin shark.” Click. “And the barrel-eyed fish, one of my favorites. It was brought up in nets over the years, but until someone saw it underwater, we didn’t know that its eyes rotate up inside its gelatinous skull.”