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OceanGate Inc. is a privately held company operating out of Everett, Washington that provides subsea manned submersible solutions for industry, research and exploration.
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History
In 2009, Stockton Rush and Guillermo Söhnlein, businessmen with close ties to the aerospace and technology industries, founded OceanGate Inc., an ocean exploration venture focused on providing manned submersible solutions which enable researchers to access the oceans' vast resources. Taking an early lead in an emerging market, Stockton and Guillermo recognized that private industry funding and utilization of modern materials could have a significant impact on our ability to explore earth's deep oceans, while also significantly lowering the cost of entry for subsea initiatives.
During the first two-and-a-half years of operations, OceanGate evaluated undersea technologies and acquired the submersible Antipodes, two robotic vehicles, various support vessels, and multiple pieces of support equipment. From the beginning OceanGate has worked with partners, such as Teledyne BlueView Technologies and Global Diving & Salvage Inc., in order to deploy innovative and often proprietary technology to recover historical artifacts, map and document shipwrecks, as well as observe and record marine life and underwater habitats.
In June 2013, the OceanGate team committed its flagship submersible Antipodes to a series of dives to showcase the company's ability to operate quickly and efficiently through successive cycles of mobilization and deployment. In less than 30 days, OceanGate completed expeditions in three separate bodies of water across the contiguous United States. This series of dives was performed by a single team with one submersible vehicle diving first in the Pacific, then the Gulf of Mexico, and finishing in the Atlantic. Each location had very specific dive objectives that included: equipment testing, oil platform surveys, and invasive species and habit monitoring.
Cyclops Class Submersibles
Through a collaboration with the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory, OceanGate developed the submersible Cyclops 1, a revolutionary 5-person submersible that is capable of reaching depths up to a maximum of 500 meters (1,640 feet). Launched in March 2015, the Cyclops 1 submersible is the first Cyclops Class submersible developed by OceanGate with Cyclops 2 projected to debut in 2016.