Missing Titanic submersible live updates: Texts show OceanGate CEO dismissed concerns
Five people, including the company CEO, were aboard the sub when it imploded.
All passengers are believed to be lost after a desperate dayslong search for a submersible carrying five people that vanished while on a tour of the Titanic wreckage off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.
The 21-foot deep-sea vessel, operated by OceanGate Expeditions, lost contact about an hour and 45 minutes after submerging on Sunday morning with a 96-hour oxygen supply. That amount of breathable air was forecast to run out on Thursday morning, according to the United States Coast Guard, which was coordinating the multinational search and rescue efforts.
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What to know about the missing sub
A submersible on a tour of the Titanic wreckage was reported overdue by its operator OceanGate Expeditions on Sunday, prompting the United States Coast Guard to launch a search and rescue effort for the 22-foot, 23,000-pound vessel.
Designed with life support to sustain five crew members for 96 hours, the submersible would need to be rescued in three days to save its five passengers, according to the Coast Guard.
Stockton Rush founded Washington-based OceanGate in 2009 to make deep-sea exploration more accessible to scientists and tourists. Fourteen years, more than 200 dives and three submersible designs later, the company now finds itself in a desperate search to recover the submersible carrying five people aboard that’s gone missing off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.
OceanGate confirmed Monday it had lost contact with a submersible, saying in a statement: "We are exploring and mobilizing all options to bring the crew back safely. Our entire focus is on the crewmembers in the submersible and their families. We are working toward the safe return of the crewmembers."
Here's what we know about the submersible.
-ABC News' Peter Charalambous and Sam Sweeney
Why Titanic continues to captivate
The submersible that catastrophically imploded while on a voyage to see the Titanic wreckage has highlighted a high-risk, experimental and exclusive tourism opportunity to see what is largely considered to be the most famous shipwreck of all time.
The doomed ocean liner has intrigued the public from the moment it tragically crashed into an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean and sank on April 15, 1912 -- as well as throughout the century-plus since.
Visits to the underwater site have been conducted in recent decades to retrieve artifacts, study the Titanic's gradual decay and simply lay eyes on the storied shipwreck, which has inspired a wealth of novels, plays, TV shows and films.
"The Titanic has basically been in popular culture since the night it sank," Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, told ABC News.
Read more about the Titanic's long intrigue here.