A haunting image of OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush peering out of the Titan submersible that would ultimately implode, instantly killing its maker, has resurfaced.

Rush appears grim as he gazes out of the Titan's lone porthole during a 2018 testing trip in the Bahamas.

The late pilot's face is surrounded by darkness inside the submersible, chillingly reminiscent of what the five-person crew may have experienced Sunday in the moments before the Titan's infrastructure failed.

Rush had tested the Titan in Bahamian waters for several months before launching the submersible as a Titanic-bound tourist attraction.

During one such trip a year after the unsettling image was taken, a submarine expert warned that repeated cracking sounds emanating from the Titan's hull could cause pose significant dangers.

Rush was one of the five people who were killed when the Titan imploded under the intense pressure of the deep Atlantic Ocean.

“Titanic” director James Cameron on Friday blamed the carbon fiber composite construction hull of the doomed OceanGate submersible for its tragic implosion this week.

The material likely led to the “critical failure” that claimed the lives of five passengers aboard the minivan-sized craft, Cameron told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos.

“You don’t use composites for vessels that are seeing external pressure,” he said. “They’re great for internal pressure vessels like scuba tanks, for example, but they’re terrible for external pressure.”

Cameron said the submersible’s designers relied on aviation engineering rather than submergence technology — an approach he believes led to the implosion during a tour of Titanic wreckage.

“We all said that it was, you know, a flawed idea and they didn’t go through certification,” he said.

“I think that was a critical failure.”

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A submersible expert who boarded the Titan himself four years before its Atlantic Ocean implosion once urged OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush to fully examine potential safety concerns before considering "taking dozens of other people to the Titanic."

Karl Stanley claimed to have heard a mysterious cracking noise that got louder over the two hours it took the Titan to plunge more than 12,000 feet during his April 2019 trip in the Bahamas.

The unusual and persistent sounds were enough for Stanley to implore Stockton to push back the Titan's tourism launch in order to fully investigate any fractures in the vessel.

“A useful thought exercise here would be to imagine the removal of the variables of the investors, the eager mission scientists, your team hungry for success, the press releases already announcing this summer’s dive schedule,” Stanley said in an email obtained by the New York Times.

“Imagine this project was self-funded and on your own schedule. Would you consider taking dozens of
other people to the Titanic before you truly knew the source of those sounds??”

Stanley wrote the noises “sounded like a flaw/defect in one area being acted on by the tremendous pressures and being crushed/damaged.”

Though the source was uncertain, he believed the sounds signaled that an area of the hull was "breaking down."

The Titan's hull, which has yet to be recovered by ROV recovery teams, is believed to have caused the catastrophic implosion that killed the five crew members during their trip to see the Titanic Sunday.

Rush did not reply directly to Stanley's email, but the expert claimed the CEO did heed his advice.

OceanGate supposedly replaced the hull and called off planned dives for that year.

The hunt for any debris left behind from the Titan submersible implosion remains underway, researchers announced.

The Odysseus 6K -- the same remotely operated vehicle that found original evidence that the five-person crew was lost -- launched from Horizon Arctic into the North Atlantic for a second time at 3:30 p.m. Friday, Pelagic Research Services announced.

The unmanned undersea probe has maintained a 24-meter-per-minute dive speed, meaning it took just over an hour to reach the site near the Titanic where a "debris field was discovered" Thursday.

"The mission is for continued mapping and documentation of the area and assisting in any direct recovery of debris," according to Pelagic.

Odysseus 6K -- which remains the only ROV that has been to the debris site -- has already recovered five major pieces of the OceanGate vessel, including its nosecone and the front bell of the vessel’s pressure hull.

The hull itself remains missing.

OceanGate, the deep-sea exploration company that operated the Titan submersible, received $447,000 in government loans throughout the pandemic under the Paycheck Protection Program, according to federal loan tracker ProPublica.

The PPP is a Small Business Administration-backed program that assisted companies from April 2020 through May 2021 by issuing checks so they could afford payroll costs, including benefits, for up to eight weeks.

Funds were also allowed to be spent on interest incurred from mortgages, rent and utilities.

The full amount of OceanGate’s loan was forgiven under the terms of the program, which was available to small US-based businesses with fewer than 500 employees and that met certain criteria, ProPublica’s records show.

OceanGate had a reported 22 employees at the time.

However, OceanGate’s LinkedIn page says it has 48 staffers who are on the social media site, though the company’s description says it could have up to 50.

One of those employees was the exploration company’s co-founder and CEO Stockton Rush, who was killed in what the Coast Guard called a “catastrophic implosion” during a journey to the Titanic shipwreck aboard OceanGate’s submersible, Titan.

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In her 1818 novel “Frankenstein,” Mary Shelley describes a young scientist who is horrified and driven to his death by a hideous creature he designed in his laboratory.

The book — and its unsettling questions about the potential consequences of ambition and innovation — is now a classic of the horror genre.

Earlier this week, OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush -- who could perhaps be considered the Dr. Frankenstein of deep-sea tourism — died along with four others, aboard the Titan submersible he had personally manufactured, in the North Atlantic Ocean en route to view the wreck of the Titanic cruise liner.

Rush, 61, and the others -- including billionaire explorer Hamish Harding and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet -- are believed to have been killed in an instant when a malfunction in the materials of the sub caused it to suffer a “catastrophic implosion” and cave in under the enormous pressure of the deep sea.

In perishing aboard his own vessel, Rush has landed himself on an unenviable list of history’s real-life Frankensteins, inventors killed by their own creations. That list also includes:

• Titanic shipbuilder Thomas Andrews

• Franz Reichelet, who designed a working wearable parachute

• Blood tranfusion pioneer Alexander Bogdanov

• Rocket builder Mike Hughes

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Structural issues with the doomed Titan sub’s hull could be among the causes of the “catastrophic implosion” that destroyed the vessel and killed all five people on board in the depths of the Atlantic, an expert told The Post.

Investigators were hunting for clues on Friday as to how and why the OceanGate-owned submersible suddenly fell apart as it was descending toward the wreck of the Titanic this week.

While authorities say it is too early to tell the cause of the deep-sea disaster, one expert pointed to possible failures of the sub’s hull — its main body — as a likely explanation.

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OceanGate Expeditions listed a job posting for a submersible pilot on its website while a frantic search-and-rescue mission was underway for five missing tourists in the doomed Titan bound for the Titanic wreckage site.

Social media was abuzz on Friday after screenshots of the ad, which was posted before the Coast Guard announced on Thursday that all five people aboard the Titan had perished, were widely circulated.

OceanGate posted the ad in search of a “Submersible Pilot/Marine Technician” who would “help manage and operate our fleet of manned submersibles and support vessels.”

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A British Army officer and well-known explorer has defended the deep-sea tourists who were killed in the Titan submersible this week — but said even he would “draw the line” at the tiny sub.

“While the dangers of deep-sea exploration are obvious and well known, many are still drawn to push boundaries, a fascination I know only too well,” Levison Wood wrote in an op-ed published in the Times on Friday.

“But even I draw the line at packing myself into a tiny submarine to sink 4 km (2.5 miles) to the bottom of the Atlantic.”

Wood said explorer Hamish Harding and expert Titanic diver Pierre-Henri Nageolot especially “undoubtedly knew what they were doing and understood what could happen if it went wrong” on the Titan journey.

“The world needs pioneers and risk-takers,” he wrote.

“What a dull place it would be without them. And how slow progress would be were it left to those who are guided by fear.”

OceanGate Expeditions is the owner and operator behind the Titan submersible, which had five people on board when it experienced what the Coast Guard called a “catastrophic implosion” during its journey to the Titanic shipwreck.

Legal experts are divided as to whether OceanGate faces legal liability over the Titan disaster, given that the passengers all signed waivers that spelled out the risk to their safety.

One lawyer thinks the next of kin will have an uphill legal battle if they decide to sue OceanGate despite past allegations of negligence and the most recent tragedy.

“The chance of family members of the passengers having a successful lawsuit against the company is close to zero,” attorney Sherif Edmond El Dabe, a partner with El Dabe Ritter Trial Lawyers, told Insider.

“The passengers knowingly participated in an extremely hazardous activity and they knowingly assumed great risk,” he added.

Miguel Custodio, an attorney at the law firm Custodio and Dubey LLP, agreed, telling the outlet: “Everyone on board knew this wasn’t a vacation or a sightseeing trip, and the disclaimer appears to have made the risk of death very clear multiple times.”

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Hamish Harding, the billionaire explorer who perished on the Titan submersible this week, had no misconceptions about the potential dangers of deep-sea adventures, his obituary states.

In March 2021, Harding and American explorer Victor Vescovo traveled to the deepest point of the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench in a two-man submarine, according to the Telegraph.

“The submarine made it back home despite suffering a damaged thruster, but Harding acknowledged that had a more serious problem arisen, there was little chance of survival,” the write-up reports of the risky adventure.

“‘There is no other sub that is capable of going down there to rescue you ... If something goes wrong, you are not coming back,’” Harding allegedly said.

Harding’s family previously said they were comforted by the knowledge that the Dubai-based businessman died doing what he loved.

“He was a passionate explorer — whatever the terrain — who lived his life for his family, his business and for the next adventure,” they said of the 58-year-old, who also went to space last year aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.

The chances of recovering the bodies of the five passengers aboard the doomed OceanGate submersible bound for the Titanic wreckage are extremely bleak, experts have said.

The four tourists, including two billionaires, and the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions were all killed when the submersible suffered a “catastrophic implosion,” the US Coast Guard announced Thursday.

It is unclear when the powerful underwater implosion occurred during the Titan’s journey to the wreckage 12,500 feet below the ocean’s surface — but due to the nature of the disaster, recovery efforts are extremely difficult.

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