RMS Titanic Inc. said it has no plans to visit the shipwreck in 2025, but isn't ruling out future missions.
The company with exclusive salvage rights to the Titanic has no imminent plans for further dives, indefinitely pausing a dispute with the U.S. government, a report said Monday. The company has said it is still considering the possibility of future expeditions to the deteriorating ocean liner.
U.S. authorities withdrew a motion to intervene in a federal court in Virginia on January 10, the Associated Press reported. Artnet News has reached out to RMS Titanic Inc., the company, for more information but did not receive a response by press time.
The dispute between RMST, as it is known, and federal authorities stems from 2020 plans for a dive to document the status of the wreckage and recover more artifacts from the sunken ship -- the second such clash between the company and the U.S. government in five years.
RMST, which was granted the exclusive salvage rights by the federal government in 1994, has embarked on eight excursions to the Titanic, recovering more than 5,000 artifacts that it has also exhibited. The shipwreck was first located in 1985.
But in 2020, the company drew up plans to visit the so-called "Marconi room" of the ship, named for a wireless telegraph machine that was used to radio out the ship's distress calls in Morse code as it began to sink. The plans were initially approved by a federal judge but contested by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Federal authorities alleged that the RMST's plans to recover the machine violated a 2017 law passed that prohibits entering the ship and a treaty with the U.K. But because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the case didn't make it to court. RMST then tried to revisit its plans for the dive after the pandemic, in June 2023. Government authorities promptly objected.
The dispute raised the possibility of an interesting legal stand-off that would question the government's authority over such maritime matters. But the squabble was mostly squashed after the Oceangate Titan submersible implosion in 2023, which killed the company's director of underwater research and several other passengers.
RMST then revised its plans for the dive to take external images of the shipwreck, and the dive went forward in September 2024. But the dispute over the government's regulatory authority over the company was left unanswered.
The company told the court in December that it wouldn't visit the wreck in 2025, the Associated Press reported. It also said it had not decided on plans for future expeditions.
"Should future circumstances warrant, the United States will file a new motion to intervene based on the facts then existing," the government reportedly wrote in its latest filing.