The world needs people like 'visionary' OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush: former Titan passenger-turned-investor

• OceanGate's Stockton Rush was a "visionary," a former Titan passenger and OceanGate investor said.
• Aaron Newman called the late CEO a "hero" innovator. 
• "We need people like that experimenting, trying things," he told Insider. 

OceanGate's CEO and pilot of the ill-fated Titan submersible Stockton Rush was a "visionary" innovator and the world needs people like him, said a former passenger of the now-imploded vessel who also invested in the sea exploration company. 

"We need people like Stockton. He is a hero," Aaron Newman told Insider of the OceanGate founder who was killed last month along with four others when his company's sub imploded while on an expedition to the Titanic wreckage site in the depths of the North Atlantic Ocean. 

Newman, a retired software entrepreneur and explorer who said he became an investor in OceanGate after his successful August 2021 dive to the Titanic in the tourist sub, said Rush was "pushing the limits and trying different things, and he paid the ultimate price."

"He was a startup guy trying a brand new way that could have or maybe still is a revolutionary new way to do it, or maybe it's totally the wrong way, but he was trying something, and that is to be respected and admired," Newman said of Rush.

Newman added, "We need people like that experimenting, trying things, going beyond what others have tried."

After the Titan went missing last month and was determined to have imploded, resulting in the deaths of all on board, reports emerged that industry experts had flagged warnings and safety concerns about the Titan and its carbon fiber and titanium hull. 

The sub, which was designed to be steered using a video game controller, also never underwent a certification process, despite calls from experts to do so. 

Rush, the mastermind behind the Titan, even acknowledged in an interview two years ago that he had "broken some rules" by partially making the sub out of carbon fiber.

And he once brushed off safety warnings about the vessel as "baseless cries."

Rush "tried something different, and a lot of people didn't like it," said Newman, who added it would be "disingenuous" to say that the CEO didn't care about safety. 

It was Rush's 'passion' to make the ocean floor more accessible

"Safety was important to him," and it was Rush's "passion" to "create more accessibility to the bottom of the ocean," Newman explained. 

Newman said that when he first met Rush back in 2021, Rush "just talked about the ocean and how we know more about the surface of the moon than the bottom of the ocean."

"There's so much down there, and that was his vision — to go be on the cutting edge of exploring this," said Newman. 

Just a week before Rush went on the doomed exhibition that would end his life, Newman said Rush was encouraging him to join him on a trip to Portugal's Azores islands "where they were going to dive on hydrothermal vents."

"While there was a bit of the exploration and the adventure with it, there was also a lot of scientific research going into this," said Newman. "And they had discovered so much around the Titanic, as well. So there was real meaning behind what was happening here."

Newman called Rush a "real inspiration" to him and said he hopes the "silver lining" of the Titan tragedy will be that "other people will start understanding that we don't put a lot into ocean exploration — and we need to."