The diver, who disappeared with five other people while plunging into the wreckage of the Titanic on Sunday, June 18, was built with the help of NASA. Washington-based OceanGate advised engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama during the development of a deep-sea submarine called Titan. According to OceanGate, the collaboration came about through an agreement with the space agency.

“NASA’s expertise in the development and automatic deployment of fiber composite hulls was invaluable in this project,” OceanGate founder and CEO Stockton Rush said in March 2022.

“Titan’s ability to build its aerospace-grade carbon fiber pressurized hull and manufacturing protocols resulted in the diver’s weight being much less than that of other deep-sea manned submarines,” he added. “This weight reduction allows us to carry a much larger payload that we use to carry five crew members: the pilot, researchers and mission specialists.”

NASA’s help isn’t the only space link to the missing diver. One of the people on board, for example, is businessman and researcher Hamish Harding, who flew into suborbital space in 2022 with Jeff Bezos’ rocket company Blue Origin. Another crew member having trouble on Titan is Shahzada Dawood, vice president of Pakistani conglomerate Dawood Hercules Corporation. Dawood is a trustee of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California.

The other three crew members are Rush, Dawood’s 19-year-old son Suleman, and researcher and former French Navy diver Paul-Henri Narjolet, the BBC reported.

Titan (named after Saturn’s largest moon) made a series of successful dives into the wreckage of the Titanic, famous for its sinking in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage in 1912.

Planetary scientist Alan Stern, who leads NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and the outer solar system, made one of these dives. Former NASA astronaut Scott Parazinski also went aboard the sunken Titanic and joined OceanGate’s board of directors last year. Additionally, OceanGate said last week that SpaceX will provide Internet service for this final Titanic dive of the Starlink mega-constellation.

The Titanic struck an iceberg and sank about 400 miles (640 kilometers) off the coast of Newfoundland, killing about 1,500 of the approximately 2,200 people on board. The wreck lies 2.4 miles (3.8 km) below the North Atlantic waves, making it difficult to reach. Indeed, the ship’s final resting place was discovered only in 1985.

According to the BBC’s report, communication with the diver Titan was lost about an hour and 45 minutes after leaving the mothership to descend into the depths. (Divers like Titan have to commute to and from the landing site, while submarines can make such trips on their own).

The diver is believed to have had enough oxygen to feed his crew members for about 96 hours when he disappeared. It’s unclear what went wrong and where Titan is now, but an intense search continues.