“Patrick has been thinking about and designing this for over a decade,” the Journal quoted Connor as saying. “But we didn’t have the materials and technology. You couldn’t have built this sub five years ago.”
Lahey is the chief executive of Triton Submarines, a maker of personal submersibles. Triton and the peer companies in its industry seek to distinguish their “classed” ocean-going vessels, which the Journal said are “certified as safe and up to code,” from unclassed vessels such as the OceanGate Titan, which imploded on a trip down to the Titanic last June.
A message seeking comment was left with a vice president of The Connor Group, the Miami Twp. company Connor founded in 1992 to buy apartment properties nationwide that firm leaders believe are poised for appreciation.
Connor is known for attention-grabbing ventures, and he has a history with Lahey. In 2021, he was a passenger on a vessel that made three deep dives in five days at the Mariana Trench in the Western Pacific Ocean, some 200 miles from Guam.
“The trip was phenomenal,” Connor told the Dayton Daily News at the time. “It’s a different world down there.”
And in 2022, Connor was a member of the crew in AxiomSpace’s first all-private commercial human space flight to the International Space Station. The team performed more than 25 experiments, over 100 hours of research, with 30 outreach events to students and other audiences worldwide.
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