The boss of OceanGate said he believed the missing Titanic submarine was "nice and cosy" and "obscenely safe" in an unearthed interview.
Stockton Rush, a former investment banker with an aerospace degree, revealed in 2019 he was inspired to create submarine wreckage tours after realising he could capitalise on the experience by offering an airtight vessel with a viewpoint.
Mr Rush is one of the five men trapped on OceanGate's Titan submersible, which has been missing since Sunday after venturing to the wreck of the Titanic.
After venturing to the Red Sea, the Cayman Islands and Tahiti, he went cold-water diving in Seattle but was put-off by the thick, full-body dry suits, and thought there was a better way of visiting the sea.
He later tried to buy a submarine but was unsuccessful. However, when a London company offered him parts for a mini-submarine he and his business partner came together in 2009 to form OceanGate.
The pair led several underwater expeditions to view shipwrecks such as the Andera Doria, an Italian boat that sank off the coast of Nantucket in 1956.
And the SS Governor Cobb, which was an American vessel that sank in 1921 off the coast of Washington.
Mr Rush believed there was a demand there as the sea was "safe from radiation, nuclear war and hurricanes".
He told Smithsonian Magazine: "I want to change the way humanity regards the deep ocean. The ocean is a very protected environment. It’s safe from ozone radiation, nuclear war, hurricanes. The temperatures and currents are very stable.”
The CEO admitted at the time submarines were not a popular choice of transport for tourist vehicles, but he claimed they were perfectly safe.
“Being in a sub, and being nice and cosy, and having a hot chocolate with you, beats the heck out of freezing and going through a two-hour decompression hanging in deep water," Mr Rush said.
“There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown — because they have all these regulations."
Mr Rush said in the interview there were fewer than a hundred privately owned submarines in the world with almost all of them government-owned.
He commissioned a study which claimed there was a huge appetite for "participatory" adventure to travel to the deep ocean and visit shipwrecks.
He added: “Every time I go deeper, the experience gets cooler and cooler. At the very bottom of the ocean, there must be a bunch of octopuses playing chess, wondering why it’s taken us so long to get there.”
The missing explorer, along with Pakistani British-based businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Sulaiman Dawood, are on the submersible, which disappeared on Sunday.
British billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding is also in the vessel, along with legendary French submersible pilot Paul-Henry Nargeolet.
On Tuesday, US officials estimated the five people onboard had around 40 hours of breathable air remaining.
