with the crew of the polar prince, our emergency procedures kicked in immediately. our emergency room next door is staffed 24/7 with a group of extremely capable people, and there s live communication with the vessel. how many crew are aboard out there? six. reporter: we ve got 17 crew on board the ship. that s it, thanks. thank you. got to go. he was with horizon maritime surfaces issue one of the co-owners of the polar prince, essentially the mother ship, so when the submersible went down toward the titanic, every 15 minutes, they were in that constant contact with the polar prince. letting them know that everything was going according to plan. then on sunday, when they didn t check in, that s when this massive operation was triggered. i want bring back in nbc news correspondent kristen dahlgren who is in boston, captain david
that. reporter: what has the crusade about the conditions out there? how difficult is it to operate? the north atlantic is always a challenging place, especially in the region we re in. the weather is not overly significant at this point but it always presents a challenge in the region. reporter: the prince lost contact with the submersible on sunday morning. be realistic, how optimistic are you that you will find the submersible and rescue the men on it? the equipment that s been mobilized for this is the finest in the world, the most capable in the world, we have to hold out hope. i think as you re aware, there s still life support available on the submersible, and we will continue to hold out hope until the very end. reporter: how much life support is there? reporter: shaun can you talk about the first time that you heard that you had communication after the dive began after an hour and 45 minutes after you
submarine from water deeper than the submarine s in, so it is the thing we need there to get the submarine up. we just need to find it. well, yeah. obviously step one, as you were saying earlier, but kristen, i think the consistent thing we have heard throughout the day, whether it was in these press conferences, the two that we just listened to, the experts that we ve had on throughout the day, here on msnbc, everybody agrees if they can do what captain marquet says, if they can locate it, there has never been an operation like this, perhaps more prepared to get the folks out of there, and potentially, in what many people would consider to be a miraculous rescue get them out alive, kristen. yeah, absolutely, chris, and keep in mind, these are the owners of the support vessel. what i heard in that press conference was them holding on to hope saying things like i have never seen an operation like this before. i have never seen equipment moved this quickly on site for a
that today, they said there were a lot of factors that play into it. they were reluctant to give a number. and they did say repeatedly, we need to have hope. this is a massive operation. it is still search and rescue, it is still ongoing. so there are five vessels now searching. three of them arrived today. they are expecting five more on site, including a french vessel that has a remote operated vehicle that they say has incredible state of the art technology on board that is expected to get there sometime late tonight or in the overnight hours so they re hopeful for that. they are trying to zoom in on where these noises are coming from. the canadian planes heard noises last night, and again today. here s what they said when they were asked about it in the coast guard briefing today. with respect to the noises specifically, we don t know what they were. is it possible a ship in the ocean or even some mammals out there could mimic that kind of
everything going as planned? was there any moment that they communicated that they were in any sort of distress of having any sort of issues? i m not aware of the details of that. reporter: there s been a lot of concerns raised already about the safety of this and what oceangate is doing. did you consider that when you partnered with oceangate? oceangate runs an extremely safe operation. our full focus right now is getting that submersible located and getting those people brought back safely. one more question. reporter: at what point did communications cease? when they were diving to the titanic at some point. do you have a time line ton on that. not off the top of my head no. reporter: how often you were in contact that s it, thank you. reporter: how often were you in contact with the crew and what kind of information are you getting. we re in constant contact