I wouldn’t be surprised. But, I suspect there’s also a factor of just implausibility. Apparently, the main vessel they use is “experimental”, so it may just literally be impossible to have a recovery vessel without being a literal government.

My money’s on this being the result of someone ignoring the “hey, these are not good conditions” warnings.

One of the other posts in the feed makes it sound like they only do it a handful of times a year, and that cost is covering a multi-day excursion since they have to wait for conditions to be right. Still, no excuse to not have contingencies, but I think their take gets eaten into a fair bit more than the raw math would suggest.

So, in the live feed the BBC has going, there’s a post suggesting that a group of explorers were apparently on board based on one of them’s Facebook feed, so it’s safe to say they probably had the full passenger set on there.

BBC’s also got a live feed going for this.

Apparently, the sub’s supposed to have a suite of systems to more or less warn the pilot if things are looking dicey, so hopefully this is a communications problem and not something worse.