(NEW YORK) — As the search-and-rescue efforts became a recovery mission Thursday, U.S. Coast Guard officials conceded they are facing a daunting investigation to determine what caused the Titan submersible to implode underwater near the wreckage of the Titanic, killing all five explorers aboard.

After searching for five days for the OceanGate Expedition vessel, Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger announced that a “catastrophic event” doomed the five men aboard the minisub.

Believed to have been killed in the undersea disaster were OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, paying passengers billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood, aviation tycoon Hamish Harding and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a renowned expert on the Titanic.

“We immediately notified the families,” Mauger said at a news conference. “On behalf of the United States Coast Guard and the entire united command, I offer my deepest condolences to the families. I can only imagine what this has been like for them and I hope that this discovery provides some solace during this difficult time.”

Officials said the 21-foot-long Titan was found in pieces by a remotely operated vehicle on a smooth section of ocean floor more than 2 miles beneath the surface and 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, which crashed into an iceberg on April 15, 1912, in the North Atlantic Ocean, four days into her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City, killing an estimated 1,490 to 1,635 people aboard.

“This was an incredibly complex case and we’re still working to develop details for the timeline involved with this casualty and the response,” Mauger said.

Five major pieces of the Titan, including its nose cone and pressure hull, were discovered by the ROV in a large debris field and a smaller debris field nearby, suggesting a major implosion had occurred, officials said.

Mauger said it remains unclear whether crews will be able to recover the bodies of the five people killed and how much of the vessel can be salvaged.

“This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor and the debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel,” Mauger said.

He said two ROVs, one from France and the other from Canada, will remain at the site off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, to continue mapping the debris fields.

“We’ll continue to work and continue to search the area down there, but I don’t have an answer for a prospect at this time,” Mauger said, referring to the recovery of the bodies.

Mauger said an investigation is underway to determine when the implosion happened on the Titan’s voyage to the Titanic.

The tourist expedition to the Titanic was launched at 8 a.m. on Sunday. The Titan’s companion surface ship lost contact with the explorers an hour and 45 minutes into the trip, Coast Guard officials said.

“We know that as we’ve been prosecuting this search over the course of the last 72 hours and beyond that we’ve had sonar buoys in the water nearly continuously and have not detected any catastrophic events where the sonar buoys have been in the water,” said Mauger, suggesting the implosion occurred at the outset of the voyage.

He said the Coast Guard and the British and French governments will keep investigating to answer “how, why and when this happened.”

“Those are questions that we will collect as much information as we can now while the governments are meeting and discussing what an investigation of this nature of casualty might look like,” Mauger said. “This is something that happened in a remote part of the ocean with people from different countries around the world and so it is a complex case to work through. But I’m confident that those questions will begin to get answers.”

He added, “Right now, our thoughts are with the families and making sure that they have an understanding as best as we can provide of what happened and begin to find some closure.”

A former employee of OceanGate alleged in a 2018 counterclaim lawsuit that he was fired for raising concerns about quality control and testing of potential flaws in the same experimental submersible that imploded.

David Lochridge, an engineer and submarine pilot, claimed in his counterclaim against OceanGate that he was hired in 2015 by the Everett, Washington, company to ensure the safety of all crew and clients during the submersible and surface operations of the vessel called Titan. Lochridge, according to the suit, raised concerns about the design and strength of the submersible’s hull, particularly that it was made of carbon fiber instead of a metallic composition.

But when he expressed concerns about the design and testing of the minisub’s hull, he said he was terminated by the company.

OceanGate had initially sued Lochridge alleging, among other things, breach of contract, fraud and misappropriation of trade secrets — all claims he denied. Both OceanGate’s lawsuit and Lochridge’s countersuit were settled out of court.

It remains unclear if any of the concerns that Lochridge raised were a factor in the Titan disaster.

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(NEW YORK) — The company behind the lost Titanic tourist submersible exaggerated the details of the industry partnerships behind the development and engineering of its Titan submersible.

The submersible likely suffered a “catastrophic implosion” based on debris located 1600 feet from the wreckage of the Titanic, according to the Coast Guard. The five passengers aboard the experimental deep-sea vessel “have sadly been lost,” according to the submersible company OceanGate Inc.

The deadly implosion of the Titan submersible, a vessel which OceanGate once said would mark the “beginning of a new era of exploration,” leaves open questions about how the upstart company was able to not only operate the vessel but also convince paying customers to travel aboard it.

In some public statements, the company suggested that its Titan submersible — the company’s only vessel able to reach Titanic depths — was designed and engineered with the assistance of entities such as Boeing, the University of Washington and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. In statements to ABC News, each entity described its role in Titan submersible, or lack thereof, as more limited than sometimes stated by OceanGate.

When asked about these exaggerations about the role of partnerships in the development of the Titan submersible, an OceanGate representative declined to comment on the matter.

“The state-of-the-art vessel, designed and engineered by OceanGate Inc. in collaboration [with] experts from NASA, Boeing and the University of Washington, made its subsea debut in 2018,” OceanGate Expeditions — the Bahamas-based company that operates U.S.-based OceanGate Inc. submersibles — said about the Titan submersible on its now inaccessible website.

OceanGate’s founder and CEO Stockton Rush — who was aboard the missing vessel — made similar statements about his company’s partnerships during an interview with CBS News correspondent David Pogue in 2022, who asked about the construction of the Titan submersible, which Rush said used some minor parts purchased from consumer retailers like Camping World.

“The pressure vessel is not MacGyvered at all because that’s where we worked with Boeing and NASA, [and] University of Washington,” Rush said. “Everything else can fail. Your thrusters can go, your lights can go. You’re still going to be safe.”

Kevin Williams, the executive director of the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory, told ABC News the school and laboratory were also not involved in the “design, engineering or testing” of the Titan submersible.

Victor Balta, a UW spokesperson, added that OceanGate and UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory initially signed a $5 million collaborative research agreement, but the two entities “parted ways” after only $650,000 of work was completed. That research only resulted in the development of another OceanGate submersible, the shallow-diving Cyclops I submersible, according to Balta.

The steel-hulled Cyclops I is only rated to reach 500 meters, compared to the Titan, which is constructed from carbon fiber and titanium to reach depths of 4,000 meters, the company said.

“The University’s and Laboratory’s engineering partnership with OceanGate ended with the completion of the shallow water vessel CYCLOPS, which served as a test platform for OceanGate since 2015,” Williams said. “Because APL-UW expertise involved only shallow water implementation, the Laboratory was not involved in the design, engineering or testing of the TITAN submersible used in the RMS TITANIC expedition.”

Balta added that OceanGate contracted with the school to use testing tanks on a contractual basis for nine tests between 2016 and 2022.

“No UW researchers were involved in any of those tests and UW personnel did not provide any verification or validation of any OceanGate equipment as a result of those tests,” Balta said in a statement.

When asked about the details of those relationships with OceanGate, a Boeing representative told ABC News that the aerospace company was not involved in designing or building the deep-sea submersible.

“Boeing was not a partner on the Titan and did not design or build it,” a Boeing spokesperson told ABC News in a statement.

In a 2021 press release, OceanGate thanked “industry partner” Boeing for their “design and engineering support” related to the Titan submersible.

OceanGate also made repeated statements in press releases about its involvement with NASA, including thanking the entity for design and engineering support.

“NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, will serve as the facility where the development and manufacturing of a new aerospace-grade hull is completed,” the company wrote in a 2020 press release. It also said NASA would be involved in the testing of the “new carbon fiber pressure vessels.”

A 2022 press release walked back the description of NASA’s involvement, saying a team of NASA engineers only consulted throughout the development and engineering of the project.

In a statement to ABC News, NASA confirmed it consulted on materials and manufacturing for the Titan submersible pursuant to an agreement with OceanGate.

“NASA did not conduct testing and manufacturing via its workforce or facilities, which was done elsewhere by OceanGate,” the statement said.

The strength of OceanGate’s purported industry partnerships was used to build credibility with industry groups such as the Marine Technology Society as well as the public who would buy tickets to OceanGate’s expeditions.

“[OceanGate] has invested six years of design and testing of this pressure vessel design in partnership with technology organizations such as the Applied Physics Lab at the University of Washington and the Boeing Company,” the Marine Technology Society noted in its 2017-18 global industry overview of manned underwater vehicles. “OceanGate reports this has given the company full confidence in their novel approach…”

Members of a MTS committee specializing in submersibles later voiced concern that OceanGate was avoiding industry-wide safety standards, according to a 2018 letter. The letter itself, which was never approved to be sent to OceanGate, was leaked to Rush, according to the committee’s chair William Kohnen.

“Your representation is, at minimum, misleading to the public and breaches an industry-wide professional code of conduct we all endeavor to uphold,” the letter said about OceanGate’s marketing materials about the safety of Titan’s design.

“The company had indicated that their state of innovation was beyond, beyond what was allowable within the regulatory standards we have today and that they would proceed without certification,” Kohnen told ABC News, adding that the company heeded some of the comments made in the 2018 letter.

ABC News’ Sam Sweeney, Amanda Maile, Victor Ordonez, and Gina Sunseri contributed to this report.

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