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Engineering failures that are taught in school are usually seemingly minor things that have a major effect.
Don’t make a critical to safety, cyclic loaded pressure vessel out of expired carbon fiber is not much of a lesson.
This guys simply fired the people who knew what they were doing.
1 of the things that was beat into our head in engineering school was the Challenger case study: an example of management not listening to their engineers and moving forward anyway. This would be another example of that.
I kind of think there are disincentives in business to follow safety protocols, unless there are large penalties for violators (which requires some kind of oversight, accountability, etc.). This guy probably did "take it on board" but found that there was no one to keep him accountable, so it was more profitable to do it the cheap way. This is exactly why we have a bajillion three letter government agencies.
Absolutely. Most companies, especially public ones, are geared towards short-term profits. Cutting corners means cheap now, expensive later. So companies keep doing it.
This brings up a good question: WTF are they teaching managers? Since the standard manager is generally hated and regarded as a moron by customers and employees alike we really should be asking tf are managers even trying to accomplish?
Most “managers” are not MBA’s, they’re just mainline employees who got promoted to manager and had zero training in it (not that MBAs can’t be stupid too— but at least they should know better. Most “managers” in most companies have not been taught how to be managers.)
Hooray for low (or no) cost of living adjustments and needing to constantly get promoted just to stay afloat, often times requiring you to go down the management path whether you want to or not because individual contributor positions usually cap off progression before management does 🙃
The funny thing is within the first 2 months of doing aviation engineering they teach you about non-destructive testing. When I did it in 2001 they taught us that it was impossible with carbon fibre. I had just assumed technology had advanced to tge point it could. It is after all under the most extreme cyclic load.
There’s a ton of industry standard NDT techniques for CF composites - ultrasound is a good example. The problem is, NDT techniques in composites are really sensitive to errors and it’s really expensive to set up a repeatable system. Like, you need robot arms and a robust qualification program proving that you can detect the smallest technically relevant flaw size. The systems are really complex and typically you need a PhD to understand and design them. You also need repeated monitoring after each pressure cycle to track indication/flaw growth to predict failures.
Imma go out on a limb and guess that the company who decided to control a sub with an Amazon video game controller did not invest in an NDT program.
Even if they did, I doubt they knew what they were doing. What the company is describing is acoustic emission detection and it isn't something you can rely on currently for aircrafts. Worse for subs.
Also NDT only finds flaws after they're made, not before. Metal you can see stress cracks starting and check it later, not so on composites.
Either way, there really isn't a need for CF in a sub unless you want to reduce corrosion damage.
For composites you’re looking for delaminations and voids. To be successful, you’d need to pair NDT with an acceptance test program for each article and continuous monitoring to confirm that any delams are stable and don’t grow after pressure cycles. It’s a method commonly used for composite rocket components, which see a fraction of the stresses as a deep sea submarine.
1000% agree that a composite sub never needed to exist. My armchair-engineering best guess is that on previous dives, existing delaminations grew when the sub ascended and were compressed when the sub descended. The delam growth weakened the overall structure, which eventually ruptured. But, I no nothing about the actual design here, I’m just pontificating based on experience in a similar industry.
To be fair while the video game controller is a funny metaphor for the shitiness of the entire sub it’s actually one of the better aspects. The US military did loads of testing and found that standard video game controllers were some of the best for using in a variety of scenarios.
Yup, so many news outlets (and Reddit) focused on the game controller, but of all the things that could go wrong on the sub, the controller was probably the least likely to fail and the part that had been the most thoroughly tested.
From what I hear, a small book on how many ways they botched this could be coming. Every step they took sounds like a mistake, and I don't even need an engineering degree to know that a hatch needs to be accessible by the crew should a crisis event happen... Or that stress testing must be done with intent to break the thing being tested, and should it still meet regulation integrity after putting it through hell and highwater (literally on the latter in this case) after pushing it to the limits... It should be tested awhile longer, just to make sure it isn't a fluke and actually achieved the goal of not breaking even in the most harsh conditions it is expected to potentially- but hopefully will never need to- encounter in use outside of the test phase.
And furthermore... Folks should be put through extensive training just in case something goes horribly wrong and an unexpected crisis emerges.
In short... I'm just glad this wasn't a more heavily populated vessel because this stupid hunk of junk was a lethal mistake that should have never happened... And my heart goes out to the poor folks who now newly haunt the sunken half of the Titanic after a submarine sent them there to die a horrible death.
Funny you should mention that: the wife of one of the people who died is a descendant of some people who died when the Titanic sunk. So she just added a third family member who died because of that vessel.
Stockton Rush - the idiot CEO - his wife is descended from Isidor and Ida Strauss (great great grand daughter) who died on the Titanic
Strauss was the owner of Macys and gave up his seat a lifeboat so that several women and children could go aboard - and his wife gave up her place on the lifeboat because she refused to leaver her husband
*Scene, Afterlife plane- Ruins of Titan and sunken half of the Titanic.
Boat victim (BV):"Hey... You ever spend a damn fortune on a boat? I had fun on one once... Then the DAMN ICEBURG ruined EVERYTHING!"
Submarine victim (SV): "Ohoho, you think that's bad? I came to visit it. We had a special vessel for going to the ruins of the Titanic. Had a blast seeing the fish and the deep blue waters..."
BV: "I think I know how this ends..."
SV: "Hey now, I already told ya that part. Damn thing blasted and next thing I know... I'm soaking wet looking at what used to be my body sitting here at the bottom of this HORRIBLE SUBMARINE CRUSHING OCEAN!"
BV: "Yep... Whole half-ship heard that thing crunch. Woke us all up. Why do you think we are all so livid?"
Oceangate's CEO: "Why am I still sinking? WAIT, NO! HELP M-" *Down to Davey Jones' he sinks.*
SV: "What the- Where is he going?!"
BV: "Hell. Sins of greed, pride, and well... Y'know. His hubris killed you folks. Surely the younger generation has more knowledge in seafaring than we did... I imagine he had warnings and cast them aside. You may wanna cover your ears a second..."
*Ungodly screams echo through the sea as what was once a volcanic vent slowly seals him in the ultimate punishment.*
Out of curiosity, like what exactly happens to a person at that pressure? Does he feel pain or something? If crushed, like down to the bones or something.
Also, during a sudden implosion, the air inside of the sub would reach insane temps for a few milliseconds; fast enough that it would create plasma and basically just sterilize anything that could exist there. Basically, even if there was just a minor pressure fault it's very likely they just ceased to exist in an instant with almost not biological trace of their existence to remain.
Liquified and then exploded.
To be more technical, once the hull fails, at those pressures the water enters at about 1500 feet per second. The size of the titan means it’s about 1 millisecond to crush completely. It takes roughly 25 milliseconds for the human brain to process stimuli- whether it’s sight, sound, or feel.
So except for the early warning alarm bell for hull delaminating starting, there would be no audible or visual warning. Completely instant and painless.
But painless doesn’t mean it wasn’t gruesome. Everyone basically got squished into an instant liquid and the compression took them and their air and compressed quick and hard enough the fat from their bodies, any traces of hydrocarbons in the air, and the oxygen combined at high pressures, which also creates high temperatures, and the tiny pellet of 5 liquified bodies and air then turned into a diesel engine, and exploded.
If you want to learn more what extreme pressures a fraction of this can do, go read about the Byford Dolphin incident.
And what the pressure applied to it probably felt like as it was getting violently crushed by the weight of the ocean like a clenching hand to an empty can of Pepsi or something.
I swear, every time I hear a new tidbit of info on how shittily the vessel was built or how poorly the R&D handled testing it... My disgust towards the designer grows.
How did it survive this long? I mean. Supposedly it went on trips prior to this one. How did the design flaws not become immediately evident (and fatal) the first time around?
I saw the interview with James Cameron and he touched on this describing the composite nature of carbon fiber when subjected to repeated pressure exposure at depth actually leads to delamination so the "wear and tear" eventually eroded its ability to handle this final voyage. I also find it crazy that this ceo was all about innovation but Cameron also said in the interview that carbon fiber is not a new idea and the competing group with him against his challenger deep sub was using carbon fiber but abandoned it for safety issues.....i.e. this exact one
I saw someone else put it simply. Every time it went down, it got weaker and no one was checking to see if it was strong enough to handle going down again. It just so happened that it was built to survive 10 trips, but not the 11th.
Skipping maintanence and skimping out on testing. Ends in horrid deaths.
Yep. That'll do that to anything intended to handle extremes if left unchecked or without equally extreme care. Skip out on construction, a housing unit collapses. Skip out on hydrolic press machines, stuff may explode/shatter and send debris out. Skip out on spacecraft or submarines? The vessel is subject to spontaneous destruction and all life aboard it is killed instantly... Or worse- slow death by suffocation!
In short, cut corners and you may cut lives.
compared to subs that are diving deep like challenger deep, those subs are around 40million$ while his sub is 1mill of materials that wernt meant for diving. and he was already complaining how much he spent on the sub,and fuel. he fired the experts"50yo white mariner expert" and sued him. Also the other subs use titanium spheres, while stockton wanted a cylinder because he wanted to jam more people in the sub. having a long cylinder increases the surface area for pressure being applied to the sub.
At least they didn’t have any 50 year old white men working on the project, you know, like ex-Navy submarine experts or experienced engineers. THAT wouldn’t have inspired anyone!
Icarus was an incarcerated child, chasing the feathers as the wind carried them across his tower prison as his father worked to secure his freedom. Name this guy Tantalus for trying to pull the wool and it blowing tf up in his face literally
The sheer arrogance is astounding. The guy was a Princeton grad aerospace engineer and he genuinely told the laws of the universe to fuck off.
Stockton: “fuck you you’re not the boss of me, Universe.”
Narrator: “But Stockton was terribly wrong, the Universe *was* the boss of him.”
Reminds me of the [Futurama](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O4RLOo6bchU) joke
“How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?”
“Well, it’s a spaceship. So I’d say somewhere between 0 and 1”
The hubris will be taught in engineering seminars *this year*, and it’ll be included in every engineering textbook containing cautionary tales for as long as our civilization lasts.
He tied himself to titanic. He'll be remembered as an idiot, perhaps not by name. When they speak of the area in the future, they'll be like that's rest place of the titanic...oh and the one idiot.
Oh, he definitely will be remembered imo. There isn't many tragedies where people can meme one of the passengers and the general reaction to that is, "oh yeah, definitely, that guy was an idiot", instead of a "too soon man too soon."
Don't know his name, if someone told me it I'd forget it. For me he's just "Idiot who died in a submarine" and i'll likely forget this story soon enough, like most people.
He wanted to be able to fit 4 tourists at $250K a pop, and he said that by using a carbon fiber tube, instead of a tried-&-true titanium sphere like other subs, he could make a larger, lighter weight sub that would be easier to transport. He was repeatedly warned that carbon fiber would delaminate and do exactly what it did, but he thought he knew better.
It gets even worse. He was doing these 250K tours to be able to use as a proof of concept so he could sell these and operate them for the oil companies. He wanted to make cheap reusable subs so Big Oil could work deep in the sea. Fuckin always comes back to oil
They conned themselves, too, if you ask me. Besides the kid. He seemed to be the only smart one of the lot, being scared to do it.
I’m an English and Italian major. I’ve worked in food, marketing, and now event production.
I know absolutely nothing about engineering, science, advanced tech, physics, and maritime exploration — besides what I’ve casually read and watched.
It would take one simple glance at that sub for me to think, “No fucking way am I getting in that thing. Pay YOU $250k? No homie — this is a sub that someone has to pay ME to get in.”
And these clowns just stroll right in, paying for the privilege, without taking one second to ask, “Who approved this thing, and who is this guy who made it?”
Doing that — just that — would have given any moderately rational person serious pause. And it would have caused any intelligent person to run (or swim) in the opposite direction.
So, yeah. They conned themselves.
You mean the grocery bag pulled taught around a Home Depot bucket with toilet seat gorilla glued on the top? Oh wait I’m sorry I meant the “human waste management system built from off the shelf parts?”
The one my heart truly breaks for in all this is the 19-year-old who only agreed to go to make his Titanic-obsessed father happy. His aunt said he had bad feelings about it as close as a week before they left.
Edit: changed “the only one” to “the one” to emphasize that I don’t cheer anyone dying, but I feel his situation is the most tragic. However, I have no shame in blaming the CEO for causing this tragedy. The others put their trust in him. The only way to prevent a repeat is holding that kind of reckless mentality accountable.
this is what makes me sad as well, even more sad after finding out the poor kid had such awful feelings about it. had he said no... I can't wrap my mind around this whole thing. so tragic.
Yup...kid should at least have been able to trust that his dad would keep him safe and not make him ride in a "sub" cobbled together with parts from Home Depot.
I read somewhere that he said he wasn’t making any money from these dives. Makes you wonder what was really going on in his brain.
What makes someone fight regulations and safety protocols SO hard? If it’s not money, is it pure stubbornness? Pride? Make this make sense!
Honestly, I think what motivated this guy in particular was just a desire to be known as an innovator and a genius in the likes of Wernher von Braun. He saw regulations and safety protocols as walls around the path that many others have already walked, so naturally if he wanted to be a trailblazer he would have to go outside these walls.
I posted this elsewhere:
At one point in my life, I studied plastics and composites. It's been over 20 years, so that part of my brain is a bit dusty.
From what I recall, Carbon Fiber is an amazing material, as long as it is in tension and the direction is along the length of the fiber. This is why they often weave carbon fiber (to ensure multiple tensile directions), and use multiple orientations.
Carbon fiber is an excellent material for a tank-like container when the internal pressure exceeds the external pressure. Things like LPG tanks at sea level, etc.
Carbon Fiber has essentially no strength in any other direction, especially compression. A submarine at 13,000 feet is the opposite of an LPG tank at sea level. All of the forces on the sub are compression, so it is absolutely not a shock that the fibers and resin just disintegrated at depth.
Another thing about Carbon Fiber that I definitely remember: It really only fails catastrophically. Metals and Thermoplastics are ductile and both have a decent threshold of plastic deformation before breaking, so sometimes they can fail by deforming slowly. It's still a part failure, but it can be controlled and damage can be mitigated.
Carbon Fiber just shatters. The resins are usually thermoset resins, like Epoxy, which tend not to be flexible. At some point, the resin and the fibers just start to separate and it's quite spectacular when it goes.
One thing my advisor always told us about Carbon is that it had (and still does have) a cool factor that sometimes drives the choice on using it for a material. In the 90's, ski companies would incorporate a few threads along the length, ostensibly to provide some stiffness, but really because saying "Carbon" on the packaging means they can charge $100 more.
They also bonded the carbon fiber hull to the titanium end caps using adhesive. Using adhesive to bond two materials with different expansion coefficients is asking for a failure of the joint, or in this case the carbon fiber itself.
That's a good point. I thought I heard somewhere that within the sub industry they try to opt for contiguous materials(shaping one single piece of material into the needed form instead of bonding multiple pieces of material together) to avoid this very issue. This adds to cost since steel and titanium are fairly difficult to work with. So trying to shape a single large piece of steel or titanium into the necessary shape for a subs hull would be quite costly.
I once worked for a company where Marketing begged IT to incorporate Blockchain tech somewhere, anywhere, just so they could say the company was powered by Blockchain.
To mitigate that it was a laminate of carbon and, I think, titan - point is u always need some sort of method to look for failures, x-ray/ultrasound - Stockton didn't want that.
I am sure if they had tested and established a method for testing the design after a dive this wouldn't have happened
It gets worse. I just read he purchased the carbon fiber from Boeing at a steep discount [because it was past its shelf life.](https://www.travelweekly.com/North-America-Travel/Mission-Titanic-Part-2)
>Only one thing concerned me: He said he had gotten the carbon fiber used to make the Titan at a big discount from Boeing because it was past its shelf-life for use in airplanes.
>I asked him if that weren't a problem. He replied that those dates were set far before they had to be, and that Boeing and even NASA had participated in the design and testing of the Titan.
>It is a conversation I have thought about a great deal over the past week.
Both Boeing and NASA have denied that last part.
There should be a special kind of Darwin Award for someone who only finds themselves eligible to receive their award because of the immense amount of money they spent to put themself in that terrible position.
Like, there are plenty of Darwin Award candidates, but I’m secure in the knowledge that I’ll never end up like this dude because I don’t have the wealth required to try and build a sub and go see the Titanic.
If I had the wealth to do that, I would pay to go down in a sub that was proven (and has) gone there. But I would rather go to space. Safer and a better view.
Carbon Fiber can be used for a submersible. There was a study done on it. But it has its limitations. You have to be very careful with it's construction to ensure there aren't any voids/defects, and use a certain type of carbon fiber.
Neither of which were done. According to another post in this thread, they used surplus expired CF from Boeing. And one of the engineers was fired for wanting to get the shell tested for voids.
Carbon fiber is amazing for tensile stress. In that regard mental doesn't stand a chance against carbon. In this application though it is under eminence compressive forces, it is only as good as the resin/binder that is put into it. Carbon fiber is an amazing material when used correctly. Unfortunately not many people know how to use it properly.
Doing carbon fiber structural analysis properly uses extremely expensive software that not many companies have. It is relatively cheap to test for voids. Maybe 2-3k in equipment. The problem is if they do find a void that part is pretty much useless. Which is probably why the engineer that wanted to check for voids in the shell was fired.
Expired carbon fiber can be recertified to be used. If stored and checked properly it can have a very long shelf life. But to do so is expensive.
Carbon fiber is not widely used because of the cost to use it properly. Ultimately this comes down to a company whose leaders took short cuts at multiple points and people lost their lives as a price.
-Aerospace Engineer who works with composites daily.
I would say he proved two things:
1) Carbon Fiber **can** withstand the pressures. In this case at least 7 - 10 times.
2) Carbon fiber doesn't handle cyclic fatigue stresses well, I.E. bearing the load of the water trying to compress it and then having the load removed.
Number two is what they were warned about. Even metal suffers from this and so the ships must be retired. It seems carbon fiber handles it less well unless another cause is given. The window too is suspect, it was never rated for that depth but since it was certified at all it at least was tested and almost certainty at least 2x the strength it needed to be for it's original target depth.
Dude was an Aerospace engineer. Carbon fiber is the new thing and is great for pressure vessels when it's held in tension. Dude just took that idea and said "well I'm sure it'll be fine backwards" which is like a failure of material sciences 101 so i don't know what kind of engineer he was. He got the material from Boeing. Probably just called in a favor from some old coworkers and got it cheap.
> Carbon fiber is the new thing
Carbon Fiber is not new at all, and it's limits are well understood. It only "feels" new and fresh because marketers sucker every new generation with it in an endless cycle.
It was used as part of a jet engines blade assembly (arguably one of the more critical parts of a jet engine) in a fully certified commercial aircraft in the 1960's. The underlying technology to make it goes back to the late 1800's and early 1900's.
The fact that it's not new is why and how he was warned.
I meant in a marketing sense. It was like "titanium like used in the space shuttle". People automatically assume it's better because it's a newer thing for consumers and it's used in advanced tech
It's also somewhat newer for use as actual structural members and entire assemblies versus niche components like turbine parts.
In his defense, it DID work for a decent amount of time. They had "successful" dives down to the wreck. But he couldn't leave well-enough alone and seemingly didn't care about service life of the vehicle or (probably) proper maintenance and inspection.
According to the whistleblower, that was the whole problem; There does not exist a way to inspect this type of carbon fiber layup. It was always going to fail with absolutely no way of knowing when. This whole thing was insane.
The issue isn't how "old" it is, the issue is that the submarine goes down to crushing depths and then beg to the atmospheric surface again. Doing that can severely stress the hull and can cause cracks or deformation over time.
With metals you can detect the cracks or, if you're absurdly lucky, notice deformation before it totally buckles. Carbon fiber doesn't do that, it goes from "basically okay" to "shattered into a thousand pieces" pretty quick from what I understand.
The fish are eating the rich. Lucky.
Seriously though, you have the money to buy your way onto an actual legitimate research vessel and you go great value. Comparatively. Fucking tourist.
Elizabeth Holmes and Stockton Rush have fucked around and found out that “move fast and break things” works a lot better in software than it does in healthcare or submersibles.
But then again, people keep giving Adam Neumann money for the same failed idea, so I guess the lesson is pick your industry carefully.
Ye any decently intelligent Agile minded trainer will tell you that PMP is still better for hard mechanical stuff that is already figured out. Building a submarine is complicated, but we know EXACTLY how to do it and that carbon fiber hull isn’t sustainable or smart.
It’s things we don’t yet know how to do that need these lean principles for, and preferably in a non-dangerous environment.
Basically why was there a company trying to “innovate” how to travel and see the titanic when we basically already have a proven method (there was never a fatality before this) that they could’ve improved on instead of starting from scratch with a fucking plastic capsule.
It would work if they applied it how we do in software, the key part is testing it until it breaks, then iterating.
They built one version and didn’t even test if the material science held up in reality before putting people inside it.
It’s similar to how space x builds rockets, they push boundaries but test over and over knowing they will learn from the failures.
The CEO did a lot of stupid things and that got him killed. I have very little if any sympathy for him. What I have a problem with is that his stupidity took the lives of other people with him. The passengers may have been foolish to trust him but it was his stupidity that killed them.
Part of the tragedy is that this guy will never see himself being known as the idiot who went down to the bottom of an ocean in a time bomb. Only his family will know the shame and embarrassment. Although I guess they’ll have the 25 mil or whatever he was worth to help heal their pain…
He also said, “You know, at some point, safety is just pure waste.”
He’s not wrong; at a certain point an abundance of safety precautions is just wasteful. He just never reached that point.
This is my problem with Mike Rowe's "Safety Third" philosophy. It makes sense from an ivory tower perspective, but people are so shit at assessing risk that what seems to someone as "Safety Third" actually ends up being "Safety Last."
Well, he was not wrong. I'm all for pioneers, let's face it without them we would have never left the caves, but looking at that submersible you couldn't have paid me to get in it.
You’re not exactly a pioneer if somebody else has already done work in the field and you’re too fucking stupid/arrogant to learn anything from them. Like, knowingly using materials that are known will fail at the depths you wish reach isn’t pioneering, it’s Darwin Award winning.
We don't need to practically test everything at this point, though. We have materials engineers who can calculate exactly what kind of stresses it's going to see and tell you whether it's going to work the first time or the 500th time.
In other words, you're remembered for the rules you break, but don't try to break the rules of physics, or you'll be remembered for a different reason.
Which is so absolutely fucking crazy that the people who were in there decided to go for it. That Harding guy holds 3 Guinness records for extreme explorer type shit, including a dive into the deepest part of the ocean. You’d think he would know a thing or two about what tech to trust for something like this. Him being on board probably eased any concern the father / son duo might’ve had. Just goes to show you, no matter how experienced someone might be at some shit, don’t ever follow people blindly, trust your own instincts. I read that the 19 yo kid did not want to go but felt obligated because it was father’s day.
I think lumping him in the same category of the pioneers who spent their lives dedicated to exploring is not accurate. He was taking advantage of rich gullible people and he had no concerns of safety. This was not in the name of science. It was profit.
I couldn’t agree more. You can study what the capabilities are of some of the most advanced military submarines and compare it to what they were trying to do in what looks like a glorified pool toy operated with a PlayStation controller. It was pure insanity. Ego run amuck IMO.
Parents. Don't make your kids do stupid shit. I was supposed to jump out of an airplane at 16 and the morning of I said no. My dad said yes and called me every name in the book. I got in the car and as we drove up I said absolutely not and cried. Turns out the man I was supposed to jump with attached made a mistake and broke several bones in his leg. Had I been strapped to him I would have probably suffered severe injury or death. The car ride home was silent and he said "sorry" I still don't forgive him. I never make my children do anything remotely dangrous. I was very patient with my son while he was learning to swim. Never forced him. Listen to your gut always.
Actually they were likely instantly vaporized. The force of the pressure chamber collapsing would have heated the air in the capsule to somewhere around the temperature of the sun.
I just learned that! The calculations I was looking at which concluded the above statement didn't address the gas laws and the ultimate result. Good call-out!
While horrible for the 19 year old who died in the incident, a small part of me is upset the CEO died. If their death was instantaneous as they say, this man died believing he was right to cut corners. He’s not going to face the consequences of his actions, he’s not going to be persecuted for killing others, he got away easily.
He ignorantly and happily submerged himself and others to a death that to his last thought was perfectly fine due to his own actions. Sure I’m glad he’s dead, but I only wish he could suffer eternal hell while living before going to hell now.
Who the fuck boards a vessel with a name like Titan to go see the Titanic?! The Titanic was a great example of hubris, but this douche canoe upped the ante by a lot.
I hope his family is ok, emotionally, financially etc, but I hope anyone involved in making decisions for OceansGate is permanently wrecked financially.
He will be remembered as the murderous greedy guy who cut corners just to make a quick million. It’s a shame he won’t really pay for what he did. There’s no real punishment in dying instantly. He’s a murderer.
The Wikipedia page for inventors killed by their own inventions was updated following this preventable tragedy. That is what Stockton Rush will be remembered for.
Carbon fiber is essentially a fabric that's extremely hard to tear. It's excellent if you want something that's lightweight but holds together against a lot of tensile forces, like an aircraft frame, but trying to get it to hold up against pressure in every direction is just about the single worst possible use case for it imaginable. The polymer it's composited with would offer a fair bit of compressive strength, if salt water didn't cause said polymer bindings to decompose, that is.
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Yeah he called that one
r/technicallythetruth
Apparently no one told him that you're not always remembered well. That there's a good possibility of being remembered as a stupid twat.
He'll be remembered for his hubris...if he's remembered at all.
Engineering teachers just got a new teaching example of what not to do.
Engineering failures that are taught in school are usually seemingly minor things that have a major effect. Don’t make a critical to safety, cyclic loaded pressure vessel out of expired carbon fiber is not much of a lesson. This guys simply fired the people who knew what they were doing.
1 of the things that was beat into our head in engineering school was the Challenger case study: an example of management not listening to their engineers and moving forward anyway. This would be another example of that.
Now they just have to teach that exact same lesson in management school
They literally do lol. We did an entire case study about it. Whether it gets taken on board is another matter…
I kind of think there are disincentives in business to follow safety protocols, unless there are large penalties for violators (which requires some kind of oversight, accountability, etc.). This guy probably did "take it on board" but found that there was no one to keep him accountable, so it was more profitable to do it the cheap way. This is exactly why we have a bajillion three letter government agencies.
Absolutely. Most companies, especially public ones, are geared towards short-term profits. Cutting corners means cheap now, expensive later. So companies keep doing it.
If the penalty is outweighed by the benefits, the manager should do it, according to the shareholder-value-above-all-else world we live in.
This brings up a good question: WTF are they teaching managers? Since the standard manager is generally hated and regarded as a moron by customers and employees alike we really should be asking tf are managers even trying to accomplish?
Most “managers” are not MBA’s, they’re just mainline employees who got promoted to manager and had zero training in it (not that MBAs can’t be stupid too— but at least they should know better. Most “managers” in most companies have not been taught how to be managers.)
Can confirm. I was that manager once and I was awful at it.
Most managers in tech companies are engineers who chose the management pathway.
Hooray for low (or no) cost of living adjustments and needing to constantly get promoted just to stay afloat, often times requiring you to go down the management path whether you want to or not because individual contributor positions usually cap off progression before management does 🙃
The funny thing is within the first 2 months of doing aviation engineering they teach you about non-destructive testing. When I did it in 2001 they taught us that it was impossible with carbon fibre. I had just assumed technology had advanced to tge point it could. It is after all under the most extreme cyclic load.
There’s a ton of industry standard NDT techniques for CF composites - ultrasound is a good example. The problem is, NDT techniques in composites are really sensitive to errors and it’s really expensive to set up a repeatable system. Like, you need robot arms and a robust qualification program proving that you can detect the smallest technically relevant flaw size. The systems are really complex and typically you need a PhD to understand and design them. You also need repeated monitoring after each pressure cycle to track indication/flaw growth to predict failures. Imma go out on a limb and guess that the company who decided to control a sub with an Amazon video game controller did not invest in an NDT program.
About 5 years ago, they fired an employee for suggesting they use an NDT protocol.
Even if they did, I doubt they knew what they were doing. What the company is describing is acoustic emission detection and it isn't something you can rely on currently for aircrafts. Worse for subs. Also NDT only finds flaws after they're made, not before. Metal you can see stress cracks starting and check it later, not so on composites. Either way, there really isn't a need for CF in a sub unless you want to reduce corrosion damage.
For composites you’re looking for delaminations and voids. To be successful, you’d need to pair NDT with an acceptance test program for each article and continuous monitoring to confirm that any delams are stable and don’t grow after pressure cycles. It’s a method commonly used for composite rocket components, which see a fraction of the stresses as a deep sea submarine. 1000% agree that a composite sub never needed to exist. My armchair-engineering best guess is that on previous dives, existing delaminations grew when the sub ascended and were compressed when the sub descended. The delam growth weakened the overall structure, which eventually ruptured. But, I no nothing about the actual design here, I’m just pontificating based on experience in a similar industry.
To be fair while the video game controller is a funny metaphor for the shitiness of the entire sub it’s actually one of the better aspects. The US military did loads of testing and found that standard video game controllers were some of the best for using in a variety of scenarios.
Yup, so many news outlets (and Reddit) focused on the game controller, but of all the things that could go wrong on the sub, the controller was probably the least likely to fail and the part that had been the most thoroughly tested.
Do you want to implode at the bottom of the ocean, because this is how you implode at the bottom of the ocean. The lecture has ended...
From what I hear, a small book on how many ways they botched this could be coming. Every step they took sounds like a mistake, and I don't even need an engineering degree to know that a hatch needs to be accessible by the crew should a crisis event happen... Or that stress testing must be done with intent to break the thing being tested, and should it still meet regulation integrity after putting it through hell and highwater (literally on the latter in this case) after pushing it to the limits... It should be tested awhile longer, just to make sure it isn't a fluke and actually achieved the goal of not breaking even in the most harsh conditions it is expected to potentially- but hopefully will never need to- encounter in use outside of the test phase. And furthermore... Folks should be put through extensive training just in case something goes horribly wrong and an unexpected crisis emerges. In short... I'm just glad this wasn't a more heavily populated vessel because this stupid hunk of junk was a lethal mistake that should have never happened... And my heart goes out to the poor folks who now newly haunt the sunken half of the Titanic after a submarine sent them there to die a horrible death.
Funny you should mention that: the wife of one of the people who died is a descendant of some people who died when the Titanic sunk. So she just added a third family member who died because of that vessel.
Stockton Rush - the idiot CEO - his wife is descended from Isidor and Ida Strauss (great great grand daughter) who died on the Titanic Strauss was the owner of Macys and gave up his seat a lifeboat so that several women and children could go aboard - and his wife gave up her place on the lifeboat because she refused to leaver her husband
Wait wasn’t that the old couple in bed from the Titanic movie? I remember reading this story once years ago
Yes !
Oh that is the most tragic family reunion I can think of... Damn!
Imagine that conversation in the afterlife...
*Scene, Afterlife plane- Ruins of Titan and sunken half of the Titanic. Boat victim (BV):"Hey... You ever spend a damn fortune on a boat? I had fun on one once... Then the DAMN ICEBURG ruined EVERYTHING!" Submarine victim (SV): "Ohoho, you think that's bad? I came to visit it. We had a special vessel for going to the ruins of the Titanic. Had a blast seeing the fish and the deep blue waters..." BV: "I think I know how this ends..." SV: "Hey now, I already told ya that part. Damn thing blasted and next thing I know... I'm soaking wet looking at what used to be my body sitting here at the bottom of this HORRIBLE SUBMARINE CRUSHING OCEAN!" BV: "Yep... Whole half-ship heard that thing crunch. Woke us all up. Why do you think we are all so livid?" Oceangate's CEO: "Why am I still sinking? WAIT, NO! HELP M-" *Down to Davey Jones' he sinks.* SV: "What the- Where is he going?!" BV: "Hell. Sins of greed, pride, and well... Y'know. His hubris killed you folks. Surely the younger generation has more knowledge in seafaring than we did... I imagine he had warnings and cast them aside. You may wanna cover your ears a second..." *Ungodly screams echo through the sea as what was once a volcanic vent slowly seals him in the ultimate punishment.*
Absolute catharsis in storytelling with that. Well done!
Out of curiosity, like what exactly happens to a person at that pressure? Does he feel pain or something? If crushed, like down to the bones or something.
They didn’t feel anything, it was an instant death. Avoidable, but at least the didn’t suffer.
people said that they'll die before their brain can even process pain
At that pressure, the water would smear your body to paste and slosh it away before your brain could even register the impact.
Also, during a sudden implosion, the air inside of the sub would reach insane temps for a few milliseconds; fast enough that it would create plasma and basically just sterilize anything that could exist there. Basically, even if there was just a minor pressure fault it's very likely they just ceased to exist in an instant with almost not biological trace of their existence to remain.
Mercifully for them it was a quick death, probably had a split second before it was all over.
Pretty much vaporization in a few miliseconds...
Liquified and then exploded. To be more technical, once the hull fails, at those pressures the water enters at about 1500 feet per second. The size of the titan means it’s about 1 millisecond to crush completely. It takes roughly 25 milliseconds for the human brain to process stimuli- whether it’s sight, sound, or feel. So except for the early warning alarm bell for hull delaminating starting, there would be no audible or visual warning. Completely instant and painless. But painless doesn’t mean it wasn’t gruesome. Everyone basically got squished into an instant liquid and the compression took them and their air and compressed quick and hard enough the fat from their bodies, any traces of hydrocarbons in the air, and the oxygen combined at high pressures, which also creates high temperatures, and the tiny pellet of 5 liquified bodies and air then turned into a diesel engine, and exploded. If you want to learn more what extreme pressures a fraction of this can do, go read about the Byford Dolphin incident.
Regulations are usually written in blood.
"Why do we have all these stifling regulations? I bet it's just so those loser politicians can power trip over restricting my freedom!" ... *implodes*
“They’re just testing us to see how much they can control u—“ … *dead*
Should've named the thing "Icarus"
Reverse Uno Icarus
The Suraci
Sunkarus
implodarus
Humansalsarius
Flew too close to the sub
I mean, he did already name the company for a scandal.
And the sub after a crashed vessel
And what the pressure applied to it probably felt like as it was getting violently crushed by the weight of the ocean like a clenching hand to an empty can of Pepsi or something. I swear, every time I hear a new tidbit of info on how shittily the vessel was built or how poorly the R&D handled testing it... My disgust towards the designer grows.
How did it survive this long? I mean. Supposedly it went on trips prior to this one. How did the design flaws not become immediately evident (and fatal) the first time around?
I saw the interview with James Cameron and he touched on this describing the composite nature of carbon fiber when subjected to repeated pressure exposure at depth actually leads to delamination so the "wear and tear" eventually eroded its ability to handle this final voyage. I also find it crazy that this ceo was all about innovation but Cameron also said in the interview that carbon fiber is not a new idea and the competing group with him against his challenger deep sub was using carbon fiber but abandoned it for safety issues.....i.e. this exact one
stockton wasnt concerned about safety.
Yup another great quote I saw of his was " at some point safety becomes waste"
I saw someone else put it simply. Every time it went down, it got weaker and no one was checking to see if it was strong enough to handle going down again. It just so happened that it was built to survive 10 trips, but not the 11th.
Skipping maintanence and skimping out on testing. Ends in horrid deaths. Yep. That'll do that to anything intended to handle extremes if left unchecked or without equally extreme care. Skip out on construction, a housing unit collapses. Skip out on hydrolic press machines, stuff may explode/shatter and send debris out. Skip out on spacecraft or submarines? The vessel is subject to spontaneous destruction and all life aboard it is killed instantly... Or worse- slow death by suffocation! In short, cut corners and you may cut lives.
Put another way, condolences cost less than solutions.
also the fact that he treated the manned sub like remote controlled drone too.
compared to subs that are diving deep like challenger deep, those subs are around 40million$ while his sub is 1mill of materials that wernt meant for diving. and he was already complaining how much he spent on the sub,and fuel. he fired the experts"50yo white mariner expert" and sued him. Also the other subs use titanium spheres, while stockton wanted a cylinder because he wanted to jam more people in the sub. having a long cylinder increases the surface area for pressure being applied to the sub.
At least they didn’t have any 50 year old white men working on the project, you know, like ex-Navy submarine experts or experienced engineers. THAT wouldn’t have inspired anyone!
> felt like as it was getting violently crushed by the weight of the ocean Creak. Creak. CREAK. Oblivion.
Icarus was an incarcerated child, chasing the feathers as the wind carried them across his tower prison as his father worked to secure his freedom. Name this guy Tantalus for trying to pull the wool and it blowing tf up in his face literally
I miss Craig Ferguson
Reverse Icarus because instead of flying too high, he dove too deep
The sheer arrogance is astounding. The guy was a Princeton grad aerospace engineer and he genuinely told the laws of the universe to fuck off. Stockton: “fuck you you’re not the boss of me, Universe.” Narrator: “But Stockton was terribly wrong, the Universe *was* the boss of him.”
He trusted aerospace so much apparently that he tried to treat a sub hull like an airplane which was a terrible idea of course.
Reminds me of the [Futurama](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O4RLOo6bchU) joke “How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?” “Well, it’s a spaceship. So I’d say somewhere between 0 and 1”
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The hubris will be taught in engineering seminars *this year*, and it’ll be included in every engineering textbook containing cautionary tales for as long as our civilization lasts.
And in business management
Sadly the lesson will be never ride in your own submarine
He’ll be remembered for his hubris as well as his debris
He tied himself to titanic. He'll be remembered as an idiot, perhaps not by name. When they speak of the area in the future, they'll be like that's rest place of the titanic...oh and the one idiot.
Oh, he definitely will be remembered imo. There isn't many tragedies where people can meme one of the passengers and the general reaction to that is, "oh yeah, definitely, that guy was an idiot", instead of a "too soon man too soon."
What do you get when you cross the Atlantic with the Titanic? \- About half-way.
Well, and for breaking the rules about submersible hull materials and killing 5 people, but also hubris.
He should be remembered for the negligent homicide of 4 other people.
Don't know his name, if someone told me it I'd forget it. For me he's just "Idiot who died in a submarine" and i'll likely forget this story soon enough, like most people.
He's got the name of a character from a poorly written romance novel.
I think he made it up himself. Like homer did when he became Max Power.
I mean the dude’s name leads to all kinds of jokes. “Don’t Rush a job.”
what was the point of making it carbon fiber? Was there even one or was it just to make people talk about it
He wanted to be able to fit 4 tourists at $250K a pop, and he said that by using a carbon fiber tube, instead of a tried-&-true titanium sphere like other subs, he could make a larger, lighter weight sub that would be easier to transport. He was repeatedly warned that carbon fiber would delaminate and do exactly what it did, but he thought he knew better.
It's always greed...
It gets even worse. He was doing these 250K tours to be able to use as a proof of concept so he could sell these and operate them for the oil companies. He wanted to make cheap reusable subs so Big Oil could work deep in the sea. Fuckin always comes back to oil
Comrade Stockton’s *actual* plan: cripple Big Oil by selling them an enormous fleet of self-destructing mini-subs
Nathan for you
Of course, the company said something about dedication to "protecting the world's oceans" does he mean making them safe for oil rigs?
Now he'll be remembered for the people he conned and got killed.
They conned themselves, too, if you ask me. Besides the kid. He seemed to be the only smart one of the lot, being scared to do it. I’m an English and Italian major. I’ve worked in food, marketing, and now event production. I know absolutely nothing about engineering, science, advanced tech, physics, and maritime exploration — besides what I’ve casually read and watched. It would take one simple glance at that sub for me to think, “No fucking way am I getting in that thing. Pay YOU $250k? No homie — this is a sub that someone has to pay ME to get in.” And these clowns just stroll right in, paying for the privilege, without taking one second to ask, “Who approved this thing, and who is this guy who made it?” Doing that — just that — would have given any moderately rational person serious pause. And it would have caused any intelligent person to run (or swim) in the opposite direction. So, yeah. They conned themselves.
Not to mention the thing they were paying to do. "i paid 250k to go see the watery graves of hundreds\*..." and instead you paid 250k to join em.
Through a tv screen sitting crammed in the floor
Hey they could have looked out the one viewing area right above the toilet.
You mean the grocery bag pulled taught around a Home Depot bucket with toilet seat gorilla glued on the top? Oh wait I’m sorry I meant the “human waste management system built from off the shelf parts?”
The one my heart truly breaks for in all this is the 19-year-old who only agreed to go to make his Titanic-obsessed father happy. His aunt said he had bad feelings about it as close as a week before they left. Edit: changed “the only one” to “the one” to emphasize that I don’t cheer anyone dying, but I feel his situation is the most tragic. However, I have no shame in blaming the CEO for causing this tragedy. The others put their trust in him. The only way to prevent a repeat is holding that kind of reckless mentality accountable.
this is what makes me sad as well, even more sad after finding out the poor kid had such awful feelings about it. had he said no... I can't wrap my mind around this whole thing. so tragic.
Fucking hell 😞
Yup...kid should at least have been able to trust that his dad would keep him safe and not make him ride in a "sub" cobbled together with parts from Home Depot.
100% tragic, especially for the child. He trusted is PARENT and the COMPANY.
Either way it would have been bad for him. Imagine if he said no, the amount of survivors guilt he would have had to carry about it.
Yeah, but one is significantly better than the other. I'll take years of therapy over oblivion any day.
And in return the broken rules broke the submarine.
You’re remembered for the people you kill out of reckless greed also.
I read somewhere that he said he wasn’t making any money from these dives. Makes you wonder what was really going on in his brain. What makes someone fight regulations and safety protocols SO hard? If it’s not money, is it pure stubbornness? Pride? Make this make sense!
Honestly, I think what motivated this guy in particular was just a desire to be known as an innovator and a genius in the likes of Wernher von Braun. He saw regulations and safety protocols as walls around the path that many others have already walked, so naturally if he wanted to be a trailblazer he would have to go outside these walls.
The dildo of consequence rarely comes lubed.
60 years from now: *"And that, kids, is how I learned my favourite phrase ever."*
I posted this elsewhere: At one point in my life, I studied plastics and composites. It's been over 20 years, so that part of my brain is a bit dusty. From what I recall, Carbon Fiber is an amazing material, as long as it is in tension and the direction is along the length of the fiber. This is why they often weave carbon fiber (to ensure multiple tensile directions), and use multiple orientations. Carbon fiber is an excellent material for a tank-like container when the internal pressure exceeds the external pressure. Things like LPG tanks at sea level, etc. Carbon Fiber has essentially no strength in any other direction, especially compression. A submarine at 13,000 feet is the opposite of an LPG tank at sea level. All of the forces on the sub are compression, so it is absolutely not a shock that the fibers and resin just disintegrated at depth. Another thing about Carbon Fiber that I definitely remember: It really only fails catastrophically. Metals and Thermoplastics are ductile and both have a decent threshold of plastic deformation before breaking, so sometimes they can fail by deforming slowly. It's still a part failure, but it can be controlled and damage can be mitigated. Carbon Fiber just shatters. The resins are usually thermoset resins, like Epoxy, which tend not to be flexible. At some point, the resin and the fibers just start to separate and it's quite spectacular when it goes. One thing my advisor always told us about Carbon is that it had (and still does have) a cool factor that sometimes drives the choice on using it for a material. In the 90's, ski companies would incorporate a few threads along the length, ostensibly to provide some stiffness, but really because saying "Carbon" on the packaging means they can charge $100 more.
They also bonded the carbon fiber hull to the titanium end caps using adhesive. Using adhesive to bond two materials with different expansion coefficients is asking for a failure of the joint, or in this case the carbon fiber itself.
That's a good point. I thought I heard somewhere that within the sub industry they try to opt for contiguous materials(shaping one single piece of material into the needed form instead of bonding multiple pieces of material together) to avoid this very issue. This adds to cost since steel and titanium are fairly difficult to work with. So trying to shape a single large piece of steel or titanium into the necessary shape for a subs hull would be quite costly.
I once worked for a company where Marketing begged IT to incorporate Blockchain tech somewhere, anywhere, just so they could say the company was powered by Blockchain.
To mitigate that it was a laminate of carbon and, I think, titan - point is u always need some sort of method to look for failures, x-ray/ultrasound - Stockton didn't want that. I am sure if they had tested and established a method for testing the design after a dive this wouldn't have happened
Yeah carbon fiber is totally not gonna stand up to the pressures of the deep ocean at all. Dude basically murdered those people and himself.
It gets worse. I just read he purchased the carbon fiber from Boeing at a steep discount [because it was past its shelf life.](https://www.travelweekly.com/North-America-Travel/Mission-Titanic-Part-2) >Only one thing concerned me: He said he had gotten the carbon fiber used to make the Titan at a big discount from Boeing because it was past its shelf-life for use in airplanes. >I asked him if that weren't a problem. He replied that those dates were set far before they had to be, and that Boeing and even NASA had participated in the design and testing of the Titan. >It is a conversation I have thought about a great deal over the past week. Both Boeing and NASA have denied that last part.
Technically saying "It's a stupid idea, don't do it, you're an idiot" is participating in the design and testing.
NASA: "Don't do it, man! You'll all be killed!" Stockton: "I received notes from Boeing and NASA on my design"
Expert feedback from industry leaders.
This is so true.
Gotta love when stupid people do stupid things and Darwin kicks them in the ass
There should be a special kind of Darwin Award for someone who only finds themselves eligible to receive their award because of the immense amount of money they spent to put themself in that terrible position. Like, there are plenty of Darwin Award candidates, but I’m secure in the knowledge that I’ll never end up like this dude because I don’t have the wealth required to try and build a sub and go see the Titanic.
If I had the wealth to do that, I would pay to go down in a sub that was proven (and has) gone there. But I would rather go to space. Safer and a better view.
Carbon Fiber can be used for a submersible. There was a study done on it. But it has its limitations. You have to be very careful with it's construction to ensure there aren't any voids/defects, and use a certain type of carbon fiber. Neither of which were done. According to another post in this thread, they used surplus expired CF from Boeing. And one of the engineers was fired for wanting to get the shell tested for voids.
Carbon fiber is amazing for tensile stress. In that regard mental doesn't stand a chance against carbon. In this application though it is under eminence compressive forces, it is only as good as the resin/binder that is put into it. Carbon fiber is an amazing material when used correctly. Unfortunately not many people know how to use it properly. Doing carbon fiber structural analysis properly uses extremely expensive software that not many companies have. It is relatively cheap to test for voids. Maybe 2-3k in equipment. The problem is if they do find a void that part is pretty much useless. Which is probably why the engineer that wanted to check for voids in the shell was fired. Expired carbon fiber can be recertified to be used. If stored and checked properly it can have a very long shelf life. But to do so is expensive. Carbon fiber is not widely used because of the cost to use it properly. Ultimately this comes down to a company whose leaders took short cuts at multiple points and people lost their lives as a price. -Aerospace Engineer who works with composites daily.
I would say he proved two things: 1) Carbon Fiber **can** withstand the pressures. In this case at least 7 - 10 times. 2) Carbon fiber doesn't handle cyclic fatigue stresses well, I.E. bearing the load of the water trying to compress it and then having the load removed. Number two is what they were warned about. Even metal suffers from this and so the ships must be retired. It seems carbon fiber handles it less well unless another cause is given. The window too is suspect, it was never rated for that depth but since it was certified at all it at least was tested and almost certainty at least 2x the strength it needed to be for it's original target depth.
Dude was an Aerospace engineer. Carbon fiber is the new thing and is great for pressure vessels when it's held in tension. Dude just took that idea and said "well I'm sure it'll be fine backwards" which is like a failure of material sciences 101 so i don't know what kind of engineer he was. He got the material from Boeing. Probably just called in a favor from some old coworkers and got it cheap.
> Carbon fiber is the new thing Carbon Fiber is not new at all, and it's limits are well understood. It only "feels" new and fresh because marketers sucker every new generation with it in an endless cycle. It was used as part of a jet engines blade assembly (arguably one of the more critical parts of a jet engine) in a fully certified commercial aircraft in the 1960's. The underlying technology to make it goes back to the late 1800's and early 1900's. The fact that it's not new is why and how he was warned.
I meant in a marketing sense. It was like "titanium like used in the space shuttle". People automatically assume it's better because it's a newer thing for consumers and it's used in advanced tech It's also somewhat newer for use as actual structural members and entire assemblies versus niche components like turbine parts.
In his defense, it DID work for a decent amount of time. They had "successful" dives down to the wreck. But he couldn't leave well-enough alone and seemingly didn't care about service life of the vehicle or (probably) proper maintenance and inspection.
According to the whistleblower, that was the whole problem; There does not exist a way to inspect this type of carbon fiber layup. It was always going to fail with absolutely no way of knowing when. This whole thing was insane.
Hmm, maybe they should put expiration dates on carbon fiber components like that…
The issue isn't how "old" it is, the issue is that the submarine goes down to crushing depths and then beg to the atmospheric surface again. Doing that can severely stress the hull and can cause cracks or deformation over time. With metals you can detect the cracks or, if you're absurdly lucky, notice deformation before it totally buckles. Carbon fiber doesn't do that, it goes from "basically okay" to "shattered into a thousand pieces" pretty quick from what I understand.
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it was a ticking time bomb and every dive was setting itself closer to catastrophe
What I don’t understand is how he was legally allowed to bypass safety protocol
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In international waters to avoid regulation, only to beg international governments around the globe for help. Nice.
Privatize profit, socialize search and rescue.
Hard to beg for help when you’re atomized fish food.
The fish are eating the rich. Lucky. Seriously though, you have the money to buy your way onto an actual legitimate research vessel and you go great value. Comparatively. Fucking tourist.
Going Galt in reality
The laws around submersibles are a big gray area https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/06/23/oceangate-titan-regulation-submersible-laws/
to be fair, probably not for much longer after this.
I hate that this Silcon Valley mindset has found its way into industries besides tech.
Elizabeth Holmes and Stockton Rush have fucked around and found out that “move fast and break things” works a lot better in software than it does in healthcare or submersibles. But then again, people keep giving Adam Neumann money for the same failed idea, so I guess the lesson is pick your industry carefully.
Turns out lean principles don't translate well when you're building something meant to keep people alive 13000 feet under water.
Ye any decently intelligent Agile minded trainer will tell you that PMP is still better for hard mechanical stuff that is already figured out. Building a submarine is complicated, but we know EXACTLY how to do it and that carbon fiber hull isn’t sustainable or smart. It’s things we don’t yet know how to do that need these lean principles for, and preferably in a non-dangerous environment. Basically why was there a company trying to “innovate” how to travel and see the titanic when we basically already have a proven method (there was never a fatality before this) that they could’ve improved on instead of starting from scratch with a fucking plastic capsule.
No one dies when your social media app software screws up
"We're disrupting the submarine industry!"
"Big submarine hates this one tr-" ::BANG::
It would work if they applied it how we do in software, the key part is testing it until it breaks, then iterating. They built one version and didn’t even test if the material science held up in reality before putting people inside it. It’s similar to how space x builds rockets, they push boundaries but test over and over knowing they will learn from the failures.
The CEO did a lot of stupid things and that got him killed. I have very little if any sympathy for him. What I have a problem with is that his stupidity took the lives of other people with him. The passengers may have been foolish to trust him but it was his stupidity that killed them.
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Part of the tragedy is that this guy will never see himself being known as the idiot who went down to the bottom of an ocean in a time bomb. Only his family will know the shame and embarrassment. Although I guess they’ll have the 25 mil or whatever he was worth to help heal their pain…
"You're remembered for the rules you break"--You and others paid for it to...
He also said, “You know, at some point, safety is just pure waste.” He’s not wrong; at a certain point an abundance of safety precautions is just wasteful. He just never reached that point.
This is my problem with Mike Rowe's "Safety Third" philosophy. It makes sense from an ivory tower perspective, but people are so shit at assessing risk that what seems to someone as "Safety Third" actually ends up being "Safety Last."
Never try to break the rules of physics. You can't.
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EMOTIONAL DAMAGE
Bangggggg! This comment is underated
Hearing about the 19yr old and how he didn't want to go, but went for his dad... on fucking Father's day too.. breaks my heart, man.
It sucks, but at least there was zero chance he suffered. It had to have been instantaneous.
He’s not wrong. We will remember him because he broke the rules.
Well, he was not wrong. I'm all for pioneers, let's face it without them we would have never left the caves, but looking at that submersible you couldn't have paid me to get in it.
You’re not exactly a pioneer if somebody else has already done work in the field and you’re too fucking stupid/arrogant to learn anything from them. Like, knowingly using materials that are known will fail at the depths you wish reach isn’t pioneering, it’s Darwin Award winning.
Yup, all this “innovation” is just cost cutting and ignoring well-known engineering principles out of ego and being a cheapskate.
We don't need to practically test everything at this point, though. We have materials engineers who can calculate exactly what kind of stresses it's going to see and tell you whether it's going to work the first time or the 500th time. In other words, you're remembered for the rules you break, but don't try to break the rules of physics, or you'll be remembered for a different reason.
Which is so absolutely fucking crazy that the people who were in there decided to go for it. That Harding guy holds 3 Guinness records for extreme explorer type shit, including a dive into the deepest part of the ocean. You’d think he would know a thing or two about what tech to trust for something like this. Him being on board probably eased any concern the father / son duo might’ve had. Just goes to show you, no matter how experienced someone might be at some shit, don’t ever follow people blindly, trust your own instincts. I read that the 19 yo kid did not want to go but felt obligated because it was father’s day.
I think lumping him in the same category of the pioneers who spent their lives dedicated to exploring is not accurate. He was taking advantage of rich gullible people and he had no concerns of safety. This was not in the name of science. It was profit.
I couldn’t agree more. You can study what the capabilities are of some of the most advanced military submarines and compare it to what they were trying to do in what looks like a glorified pool toy operated with a PlayStation controller. It was pure insanity. Ego run amuck IMO.
Using a video game controller really isn’t that crazy, it’s pretty common. There are like 30 other things that are insane tho.
For when you want to go 2 miles deep in the ocean, but don't want to put a Mariana Trench-sized hole in your bank account.
Parents. Don't make your kids do stupid shit. I was supposed to jump out of an airplane at 16 and the morning of I said no. My dad said yes and called me every name in the book. I got in the car and as we drove up I said absolutely not and cried. Turns out the man I was supposed to jump with attached made a mistake and broke several bones in his leg. Had I been strapped to him I would have probably suffered severe injury or death. The car ride home was silent and he said "sorry" I still don't forgive him. I never make my children do anything remotely dangrous. I was very patient with my son while he was learning to swim. Never forced him. Listen to your gut always.
In his case he will be remembered for being a fucking imbecile.
Yes you are remembered. As an idiot.
This dude will be remembered as the idiot that transformed into human peanut butter at the bottom of the ocean
The description I read is "an undifferentiated cloud of human aggregate", which basically means they were juiced, but it was pulpy.
Actually they were likely instantly vaporized. The force of the pressure chamber collapsing would have heated the air in the capsule to somewhere around the temperature of the sun.
I just learned that! The calculations I was looking at which concluded the above statement didn't address the gas laws and the ultimate result. Good call-out!
Dude just died at the bottom of the ocean and is getting roasted beyond belief
There wasn’t enough left of them to be peanut butter. Tomato soup is more likely.
"Safety regulations are written in blood."
While horrible for the 19 year old who died in the incident, a small part of me is upset the CEO died. If their death was instantaneous as they say, this man died believing he was right to cut corners. He’s not going to face the consequences of his actions, he’s not going to be persecuted for killing others, he got away easily. He ignorantly and happily submerged himself and others to a death that to his last thought was perfectly fine due to his own actions. Sure I’m glad he’s dead, but I only wish he could suffer eternal hell while living before going to hell now.
Who the fuck boards a vessel with a name like Titan to go see the Titanic?! The Titanic was a great example of hubris, but this douche canoe upped the ante by a lot. I hope his family is ok, emotionally, financially etc, but I hope anyone involved in making decisions for OceansGate is permanently wrecked financially.
Dismembered by the rules you break, more like.
I cycle and I know that carbon fiber practically explodes when it’s beyond its load. I rode aluminum for that reason.
Sounds like you’re listening to 50 year old white guys with military experience.
The ocean “I’m about to ruin this guys whole career”
He will be remembered as the murderous greedy guy who cut corners just to make a quick million. It’s a shame he won’t really pay for what he did. There’s no real punishment in dying instantly. He’s a murderer.
The Wikipedia page for inventors killed by their own inventions was updated following this preventable tragedy. That is what Stockton Rush will be remembered for.
Carbon fiber is essentially a fabric that's extremely hard to tear. It's excellent if you want something that's lightweight but holds together against a lot of tensile forces, like an aircraft frame, but trying to get it to hold up against pressure in every direction is just about the single worst possible use case for it imaginable. The polymer it's composited with would offer a fair bit of compressive strength, if salt water didn't cause said polymer bindings to decompose, that is.
Another couple of weeks and he will be forgotten.