I don't think it's wrong to take yourself down in a crazy unproven sub, even if you die. But taking paying tourists (not explorers; tourists) who are not experts and cannot vet the safety of your device -- that's unconscionable and probably criminal had the perpetrators survived.
The 19 year old kid on the sub is the one that gets me. Everyone else should have had the wherewithal to make their own choices - but the kid was just going because his dad wanted him to. Stories are out now that he was freaked out by the idea but went as a Father’s Day “gift”.
I feel so horrible for his family. It makes it hard to be cynical about this tragedy.
That was a rumor that the mother has debunked. She has come out and said that she was supposed to go with her husband, but gave up her seat to her son because he really wanted to go. I'm not sure this makes it better for the mother, but at least he was willing.
This is all speculation but reading the mothers account my impression was that what he really wanted was the speedcubing world record and that this was the lure.
They could easily both be telling the truth. He could have been pressured into it by his father and told his mother he wanted to go while telling a more distant relative his fears caused by his parents
Rando relative who wants media attention most certainly does. One my aunts (and her husband) would definitely lie like this to get in the news, no doubt about it.
Can confirm. I have an aunt and uncle (not a couple; different branches) who both would love to go on TV and say all kinds of crazy shit if I had died in the sub.
Except the relative would get in the news if she said "the boy was obsessed with the titanic, he was eager to go!" Any angle would have given her camera time, she just has an incentive to say _something_.
What she said I think more likely has some truth than the wife of the deceased father the statement throws shade on. Aren't we talking about billionaires here? Mom is likely quite concerned about appearances and her future.
Bear in mind that some people just like to stir up shit. So they say stuff based on no evidence / their imagination / whatever they suspect will cause controversy.
No idea of the situation in this case, but don't discount it could be that too.
Lot's of families have disputes, that relative might have motive to lie. We don't know because none of us really know the family. It's all speculation, including the supposition that the mother is lying to save face for her husband.
The mother seemed very honest during her interview with the BBC [1], not playing the "ZOMG I lost my husband and son!!!" angle, but I did think she might've done this to quieten all the "screw them billionaires, they deserved it!" crowd, by showing them that there are actually people grieving their loss.
Also I think she's only done this one interview. Even the question of "How are you?" was answered with contemplation, not hysterics...
Those rumors were started by his estranged aunt, who apparently just wanted a ton of attention.
Don't get me wrong, it's still horrible, and I still believe he shouldn't have gone down there. But he wasn't freaking out and terrified for weeks like his aunt said.
> Stories are out now that he was freaked out by the idea but went as a Father’s Day “gift”.
It’s said that money just gives you the ability for you to be you. That someone would willfully put his child in that dangerous situation really disgusts me.
He’s 19 though? Pretty sure they wouldn’t have taken an actual kid. If you can join the army you can sure as hell go down in a sub to make daddy happy.
> If you can join the army you can sure as hell go down
I hate arguments like these. The same one for the drinking age and joining the army. The world isn't black and white. There are merits to 18+ enlistment and 21+ drinking age both (along with downsides).
It's just noise in the form of words that doesn't go towards any way of proving a point.
A huge part of maturity is realizing that you can’t be an expert capable of evaluating all risk in your life, so outside forces/standards are necessary.
Untrained smart people can be really bad at risk - a good shorthand is: can you get insurance for it and what is the price?
It’s not perfect, but it at least gets you thinking.
Because the adjusters have to price the risk objectively - house burn down? Risk relatively low. Submarine go pop? Probably not insurable at any price - either because risk is too high or they can’t evaluate it. And if they can’t, you likely can’t, unless you’re Cameron or someone similar.
That doesn’t mean uninsurable risks aren’t worth taking sometimes. Just be aware and realistic.
There are lots of extremely high-risk things that can still be insured.
As a simple example you can get a new life insurance policy as an 89 year old with some generic insurance providers—-it’ll cost you, though, obviously.
Even if you put the risk of death ridiculously high (say, 90%) for each trip, it probably wouldn’t be impossible to insure it. The premium per trip would just likely be roughly the maximum payout and so it wouldn’t necessarily be worth it.
The comment your replying to built that in though. They said look at how much the insurance costs. If the insurance is very high, then obviously it's high-risk
It doesn't surprise me at all. The customers of such policies are quite wealthy and have no actual need of life insurance. Rather, it's an estate tax dodge because life insurance proceeds are tax free.
They might be thinking of whole life vs term life policies.
Whole life policies are basically investment vehicles that are an attractive asset class to a specific segment of the population because of tax reasons.
For those unaware term life pays out if you die within a certain time period. There's a chance that they won't pay out - you're pooling your risk of dying along with that of other people because statistically you're not all likely to die. So the premiums you pay in go to pay out someone who does in fact die.
For whole life the policy is for well your whole life - so the payout rate is 100% because everyone dies eventually. People take out whole life policies which they pay premiums into and those policies accumulate value allowing them to take out loans against the value of the policy. And because of a tax loophole in the United States this allows you to avoid paying taxes on the (what is essentially) investment dividends.
When I worked in the industry the cut off for term life at almost every carrier was 65 years old, though I vaguely remember people introducing policies for 70 year olds which might be a false memory.
Whole life can obviously be sold no matter how old you are. A 103 year old could probably find a carrier willing to issue them a whole life policy for the right price.
There was a whole thing called a tontine that basically worked like inverse life insurance.
The insurers just look at the tables and give you what it will cost. It looks like an 89 year old has between 4-5 years life expectancy so expect to pay in premiums about 20% of the payout. Usually the payout is “burial insurance” at these ages.
I’m sure it’s not the case that any random person can get a quote for something like this, but in the case of Titan the people who can afford the $250k ticket probably can.
Or that insurance companies (in general) have no way to evaluate the risk and therefore make a business decision not to play craps with their shareholder's money (and possibly their careers).
On the other hand, insurance companies may have no interest underwriting unusual risks when the business opportunity is small. "Deep-sea submarine tourism" is a tiny market.
I think there's an argument that even crazy unsafe stuff that only harms yourself shouldn't be exempt from regulatory frameworks purely on the "personal harm only" basis.
Stuff like this triggers costly (and sometimes dangerous) search & rescue parties.
A regular boat has to be registered in most US states.
I'm not a boating expert, but it would seem some combination of "well its not a boat" & "International waters" lead to it being less regulated/inspected than Joe 6 packs fishing boat.
Or more specifically, because the sub is taken out to international waters by its support ship, it would seem the sub falls under less regulation than the support ship carrying it, despite being a higher risk profile..
An interesting counterpoint is that these people are pushing science and engineering forward, and are risking their own time, money and lives in the process. Attempting to rescue them seems like a fair trade.
I don't think this situation is a particularly good example, but I don't think blanket condemning experimental deep sea vehicles is the right response.
But they aren't. As we see here, there was a pretty solid wall of consensus saying that the sub was a death trap. Heck, the reason why it was the only submarine built with carbon fiber is something an engineering undergrad can grasp at glance.
Not only that, but we have known how to reach ever lower depths for decades now. A human being has already reached the bottom of the Challenger Abyss. We know how to do this stuff and, while there's certainly room for improvements, ignoring the properties of the materials you're using and not doing proper testing is not how you get any improvement done. At best, all the advancement this tragedy will bring is a more comprehensive regulation of this kind of activities. Which is exactly what the original Titanic brought to the world.
By international maritime law, any ship at sea is required to assist in search and rescue, if they can do so safely and there is a chance of saving lives. That doesn't mean everyone is required to send expensive assets for deep sea recovery of debris and remains, but for that time that there seemed like there was a chance, however remote, that the submersible might be bobbing on the surface with no way to open the hatch, there was a real legal obligation to search if possible.
> I don't think it's wrong to take yourself down in a crazy unproven sub, even if you die.
I take your point and I dont quible that in hindsight the mission was reckless.
But just to bring some more information to the debate, OceanGate had previously taken the Titan to this depth to visit the Titanic. So, it was "proven". The german entrepreneur who is in this [1] article claims to have visited Titanic twice in the same sub.
> OceanGate had previously taken the Titan to this depth to visit the Titanic. So, it was "proven"
This reminds me of an old joke about an optimist who falls from a 40 story building. As he passes the 30th story he thinks to himself, 'so far so good!'
The analogy would be an optimist who successfully falls two times due to extreme luck, like falling on a passing pillow truck and then goes for a third try.
> OceanGate had previously taken the Titan to this depth to visit the Titanic. So, it was "proven"
This situation is an interesting statistical anomaly. Given that the Titan had a carbon fiber hull which was known to degrade more and more after each dive, the probability of failure increases after each successful dive. So you might think your chances of success are better the more times it came back safe, but the chances are actually worse.
It would not follow a bathtub curve. As the Wikipedia article explains, you have to at least check the in-service products to get a bathtub curve. As this article [1] explains, they did not do that. Therefore, no bathtub curve guarantee.
For argument's sake, let's say it would follow the bathtub curve. You could summarize all the warnings they were given as basically saying that the wear out curve crosses the other two curves all the way on the left. You could also say that they took the bathtub curve for granted, not realizing that it's the result of deliberate work. So again, still no bathtub curve, no matter which way you look at it.
I would say certainly the second trip was safer than the first, as the first trip ruled out lots of non carbon fibre related failures (e.g. the porthole)
I'm not so sure about that, pics of the wreckage being offloaded onshore show that dome being moved with a sling through the hole where the porthole should be. I don't think they would have removed that just to move it, especially before analyzing the debris.
The force of the implosion, as I understand it, would destroy the porthole in any case; it being not attached is not an indicator that it was the point of initial failure.
That is possible, it probably wasn't intended to contain severe pressure from the inside. Of course, being rated to only about 1/3 of that depth from the outside isn't reassuring either.
Any good material science VC reading to recommend by any chance? Blogs, books, success stories too look up? Individuals or firms you consider better than average?
Yes the are not familiar with material fatigue that has to be tested with a lot of repetition to understand how many operations you can perform with a unit.
I don't think this was meant as true, hence the quotes. But I can imagine that quite some retail/non-expert customers could use this kind of reasoning to estimate odds and risks.
With airplanes, a lot of maintenance routines depends on the number of cycles (takeoffs+landings). No one knows how many cycles this sub was safe to perform, but just because it had successfully performed N dives, does not imply that N+1 is safe (or even N for that matter).
The most obvious instance of this is probably the Comet 1. It took about 3000 cycles (about half of them simulated in a tank) to reproduce the catastrophic failure.
But there is data to back that up on planes that are 'battle tested' you can compute failure rates over a ton of data. With something like this, a custom '1 off'... not unless you build a bunch of them and pilot them to depth (hopefully by remote) and wait for failures.
It wasn't proven. They replaced the carbon hull of Titan after it started creaking too much from water intrusion. They had no scientific way to evaluate the number of usable dives and how safe and reliable their bonding procedure would be. Rush was just another fake it 'til you make it tech bro who flew too close to the sun with his willful ignorance.
IIRC, One of the concerns raised with that carbon fiber construction approach was that in case the hull was damaged during a previous mission, they had no equipment to detect that, so it could have been only a matter of time before accumulated fatigue could lead to a catastrophic failure.
Sure, I can "prove" that my sheet of sandpaper works by using it all day. Does that mean it should work all day tomorrow? It's a useful bit of information ... about how it's approaching the end of its service life. If you don't evaluate how much sand is left before using it again, what is there to debate? Either you don't care if it works tomorrow, or you're about to learn an important lesson on how sand paper works.
That 'proven' bit is exactly where the rub is, and apparently there was prior damage from some of those dives that wasn't addressed. Taking this device to a certain depth and ascending again only proves it worked that time but brings the eventual failure that much closer.
It was a bit different. With the Challenger they started with a target (astronomical) reliability rating, and then calculated back to how each part would have to perform. The problem was they didn't actually verify this under real world conditions.
With this sub the number of safe operation cycles wasn't even part of the design considerations.
Meh. The release forms were pretty clear. And if you aren't capable of judging the technical merit - well, that is a decision too. You're deciding to take a leap of unknown risk.
We need to stop being this judgy. People should be allowed to make decisions - including the decision to trust someone else - that turn out badly. They paid for those decisions both figuratively and literally. They weren't exactly tricked.
I think the good lesson here is that if you aren't capable of judging the risk of something, you shouldn't participate in it. Some people will violate that rule and some of those people will die. It's ok. People die for stupider reasons and nobody lives forever. It doesn't make the world a better place by trying to eliminate every possible source of death.
They actively sought tourists. Made them believe the system was safe, sufficiently enough to persuade them to get on board and pay $250k.
Had the company not be deluding itself and be more responsible, they would never have opened the sub to the public.
A test pilot or an astronaut are highly technical people who really understand the risks they get into. And they know that dying is not an unlikely event.
Expecting a 16 year old to be technically competent to know he shouldn't have boarded that death-trap is disingenuous.
You can only be capable of judging the risk of something if you're told the honest truth about the actual risk, or if you have enough inside knowledge to assess that risk. Dying because you've been tricked -lied- into thinking it's safe enough, is a high price to pay for anyone. Saying it's alright to die because you've been tricked is pretty callous.
With a company owner who shrugged off safety to the point of deluding himself, do you think the passengers had any honest way of knowing how unsafe that sub really was and make an informed decision?
It's easy to say they should have done due diligence after the fact. It's like blaming passengers from boarding a doomed flight with a maverick pilot who thinks loading the plane by 300% is alright because nothing ever happened before.
Not a single one of these customers walked in off the street. This is not a mass-market product, it's incredibly bespoke. It's so new and experimental that nobody knows exactly how safe it is. That's why it's literally classed as experimental. There was no trickery here - hell, there are tons of stories from rich folks who declined a trip because they didn't think it was safe.
There's a long tradition of rich people getting themselves killed with experimental toys. Usually it's general aviation. Did John Denver know the risks of having the fuel tank selector valve over his left shoulder? Obviously not, or he probably wouldn't have crashed. But we let people buy and sell airplanes anyway - or at least, we did up until the 80s when we sued aircraft manufacturers into oblivion.
I'd rather live in a world with general aviation and a small but steady stream of deaths, rather than a world with no deaths because we've eliminated general aviation.
I ask you personally: Would you fly on a hypothetical next shuttle launch? Because I think most HNers would, even though the shuttle has historically had about a 2% failure rate. Which, if the 50 dives claimed by the oceangate website is correct, is on par with the Titan.
Except basically all release forms include clauses about "risks of serious bodily injury or death" with the understanding that the people running whatever experience it is have done their job and are mitigating those risks. Instead Mr Death Sub here active ignored experts and violated tons of safety rule in favor of making money taking passengers down.
Yes, the risks are still there even with no safety violations. I bet it didn't say in the waiver forms that the viewport was only certified for 1300m and that they were going way lower than that. That should have been in red and bold text. A lot of people aren't qualified to asses risks and trusted the adults who unbeknownst to them were just wishful thinkers.
There's an implicit assumption that the providers/operators aren't being actively negligent both by the customers and backed up by the fact that negligence can pierce these kinds of releases in most cases.
The 1300m rated viewport was on the (retired/rebuilt) 1st gen sub, not the one that failed. If you pay attention to the photos, the Titan has an obviously different viewport.
If you are this mistaken on such a simple matter of fact, please look inward and maybe reconsider being so assertive and judgmental.
Oh, so they got a class rating for the sun and we can readily see all the paperwork about the equipment on this particular vehicle? I'm sure you'll be along soon to link to that documentation.
You won't because it doesn't fucking exist because there was zero certification of the vehicle. There's no way for potential customers to verify any safety claims of the sub.
The sub was classified as experimental. That literally means "not certified". Everyone, including the people who signed the release forms, knew this.
You can, today, buy any manner of uncertified experimental aircraft and fly them in general aviation. What is the surprise? Experimental vehicles are a thing. If you don't like them, don't fly/float on them.
In the US there's only really one category can carry a person and is unregulated and unlicensed by the FAA and that's Ultralights [0]. <254 lbs dry excluding safety and floatation devices, <5 gallons of fuel capacity, <55 knots and there are strict restrictions on when and where they can fly.
It's not reasonable for regular people to understand the scale of those risks. I've watched video of a previous paying customer talking to Rush about the risks noted in the waiver, and he downplays it so much, almost mocking the very notion that the risk is unreasonable.
Imagine being told that the gluing of titanium to carbon fiber is a risk, but the guy telling you that is saying it's no big deal - just innovation. How are you supposed to have any meaningful understanding of that risk? Like is it a huge red flag or just a YOLO issue? I wouldn't know, I'd have to defer to the "experts" who I am entrusting my life to.
These by definition are not normal people. If you can afford a $250k ticket to the Titanic, you can afford to be properly informed about risk. Hell, you could literally hire your own engineer for a full year to evaluate that risk, go over things, and have money leftover to hire a lawyer to go through the CYA forms.
>I wouldn't know, I'd have to defer to the "experts" who I am entrusting my life to.
We shouldn't consider someone an expert just because they run a business. Stockton was clearly not an expert in any of this, except maybe marketing.
Shouldn't at the very least, rich people be expected to have some personal responsibility? They have no excuse.
Just because you are wealthy doesn't change anything. How are you supposed to know that the fact the pressure vessel isn't certified is a massive red flag, and not just a way to innovate more quickly? Rush painted industry safety as holding everything back and did not properly communicate that you should probably have an independent engineer review the risks. I mean, he was willing to go to the wreck with you, isn't that a hard endorsement of the risk being mitigated?
Again, watch some videos, he downplays the risk all the time. It's a form of manipulation, like buying a junk car from a used car salesman. Yes you could have a mechanic look at it, but it's such a great deal, if you walk away someone else will snap it up. All along the salesman is neglecting to mention the wheels are glued on because the bolts sheared, and the brake lines are held together with duct tape.
> I think the good lesson here is that if you aren't capable of judging the risk of something, you shouldn't participate in it.
A completely unsustainable philosophy. There's a threshold past which a customer certainly would be tricked, and it's possible this situation passes that threshold. We are in situations constantly where we are paying for the guidance and expertise of someone more experienced than us to navigate potentially dangerous situations.
> It doesn't make the world a better place by trying to eliminate every possible source of death.
They are the same release forms that you'll see when you pay some college kid $90 to take you down some cat 3 rapids.
The difference in risk involved in those two activities is many orders of magnitude. As is the difference in recklessness and 'yolo' mindset of the vendor.
A release form isn't an excuse to operate your firm in an unsafe[1] manner.
[1] 'Safe' is defined 'as safe as can be reasonably made, given what we know'. The Titan did not meet this criteria.
>The release forms were pretty clear. And if you aren't capable of judging the technical merit - well, that is a decision too. You're deciding to take a leap of unknown risk.
There's an implicit assumption that the risks are somehow reasonable, or at the very least, that the other party isn't being reckless or negligent.
If you ride a roller coaster after signing such a disclaimer, it's still reasonable to expect that people are tightening the damn bolts. And it's insane to expect both roller coasters to remain a viable business and individual riders to check that they are safe. At best, your attitude makes it nigh impossible to conduct business.
People have died at theme parks, and just as relevantly at local fairs because people aren't "tightening the damn bolts" and because parks didn't hire engineers. How many elevators skip on maintenance and inspection during Covid.
Only a few states have roadworthiness inspections of vehicles; and Tesla autopilot may have driven into a truck; Or we could talk about texting while driving and drunk driving that endanger others, yet 60%/30% of Americans admit to it regularly, while 30k people die.
> We need to stop being this judgy. People should be allowed to make decisions - including the decision to trust someone else
The important distinction is whether people can make an informed decision to trust someone. If you're going to take non-expert passengers on some experimental craft and using loopholes like labeling them as "crew" I don't think you can say they're really making an informed decision.
No, WE need to be MORE "Judgey" because one of the critical elements you're conveniently leaving out here is WE spent literally tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of OUR tax money searching for a sub full of rich, arrogant CEOs and Tourists who may have spent their own money going down, but who offloaded / externalized 100% of the responsibility and expense of any potential search and rescue effort to the taxpaying public.
OceanGate had no rescue plan! Their entire "Plan" for what to do WHEN, not if, something went wrong, was to call in the coast guard / navy and have the taxpayer fund their rescue and from where I'm sitting this whole oeuvre of dangerous, rich-guy-ego-stroking vanity bullshit is an egregiously entitled abuse of the commons that should regulated out of existence with extreme prejudice.
Hardly reasonable and practically not possible, the ideas that every person needs to understand every risk: Ever took any medication? Without the according PhDs??
I don't know. People take all kinds of stupid risks all the time. Life is dangerous, you are guaranteed to die.
Some people might just figure that a once in a lifetime experience is worth it even knowing it's dangerous.
I'm not sure a full risk analysis is really needed here. As long as the participants knew there was a real risk they'd die, perhaps it was worth it to them.
Humans are terrible at judging risk though. I don't think I could accurately judge the risk of driving to the grocery store, let alone a trip to the Titanic.
I don't really see much difference between this and the most expensive/extreme tourist mountain climbing. Plenty of people die on adventures with things where they don't really understand much and put their trust in paid experienced guides.
Its not unusual for a death to be caused by the expert guides being wrong and in the minority of opinion on the right way to do something or planners being wrong on how many tourists can be handled, which tourists are fit enough, etc.
I think many more people who already survived a one time sub trip with that company will ultimately die in safer equipment due to cumulative risk, so one really has to factor in quality of life explanations to argue it is unacceptable, but then maybe from a quality of life POV a once in a lifetime trip was fine.
The real issue I think is the pilot risk which wasn't approaching 100% only because there were other failures that could have shelved the sub besides catastrophic ones.
Informed consent. I'd even say "rigorous, neutral, informed consent". And it's not only paying customers. Personally, I've always felt more angry about Christa McAuliffe. I'm not sure I'd go all the way with banning the general public altogether, but I suppose I'm open to it still.
For those, like me, who had no idea what you’re talking about. From Wikipedia:
> In 1984, President Ronald Reagan announced the Teacher in Space Project, and McAuliffe learned about NASA's efforts to find their first civilian, an educator, to fly into space. NASA wanted to find an "ordinary person," a gifted teacher who could communicate with students while in orbit. McAuliffe became one of more than 11,000 applicants.
…
> On January 28, 1986, McAuliffe boarded Challenger with the other six crew members of STS-51-L. Only 73 seconds into its flight at an altitude of 48,000 ft (14.630 km), the shuttle broke apart, resulting in the deaths of all seven crew members
Wasn't drilling in the actual dangers of climbing onto the Space Shuttle, and that she was taking on the same kind of risk as a test pilot would part of her training?
If so, I don't see an issue. Going to space only looks safe in the movies and press releases, everyone actually working on it knows that it is an incredibly dangerous thing to do.
If it wasn't, NASA really dropped the ball on the training part.
(It also, obviously, really dropped the ball on the O-rings part, but the institutional and bureaucratic failures surrounding that are really well documented.)
Perhaps if she was drilled on the risk of institutional failures. Even then, did she have the ability to comprehend them as the actual astronauts would have?
The astronauts weren't informed with the problems with the boosters, either. The recovered hardware said the seals were frequently failing at ignition (as it goes from ambient to 1000 psi), just not to the point of destruction.
In fact the O-rings were never working as designed in the first place and NASA (but not necessarily those astronauts personally) knew it from the start. This was recognized early on in the program before the Shuttle ever flew. Those SRB joints were originally meant to have two O-rings as redundancy. But in testing they found that the first O-ring was being extruded, pushed past where it was meant to be into the joint and some hot gases were getting past it, meaning the second O-ring was no longer redundant. It was then determined that 'This is Fine'; instead of changing the design they changed the designation of the second o-ring to acknowledge that it was no longer redundant. They flew with that arrangement even though they already knew the primary O-rings didn't function correctly.
We have "accredited investors" whose wealth and sophistication makes them able to take financial risks in unregulated markets where scams would destroy naive investors. I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that any billionaire entering a dangerous situation can have or access whatever experts on risk mitigation they want. I have no sympathy towards the "cannot vet the safety" argument.
If it was regular tourists who save up for a once in a lifetime experience, I would feel differently.
I'm pretty sure they only went because the CEO/owner went along. Seems like a reasonable assumption to make as a customer that the CEO wouldn't risk his life.
Again, they don't have to make assumptions. They can have their own engineers provide due diligence. These are people who can trivially afford that level of care on an experimental submersible.
Making the argument that customers should have had their own engineers conduct an assessment if they wanted safety is definitely a solid plan if your goal is to be torn to sheds by the judge/jury.
I'm sure the legal case before the judge is "check page 2, subsection 4 of our indemnity clause" and the case is tossed before it even gets to the jury. I'm specifically talking about people trying risky things. And yes, billionaires who want to risk their lives on experimental deadly craft should hire engineers.
I prefer to let people make their own choices, otherwise the alternative might just be to ban everyone from doing everything even remotely dangerous anywhere on the entire planet (who's laws will apply?)
If people want to do risky things, that's their business.
Bullshit. When the expectation is that we'll fund any potential rescue efforts when something invariably goes wrong with our tax dollars, it becomes the rest of our business pretty damn quickly.
I keep seeing articles being pushed that the victim's families have no case. But with the whistleblower lawsuit, the conversations and tweets, the CEO seems to have just skipped engineering warnings and worked harder at convincing people. He convinced people that dangers he knew of weren't dangers. I don't think that can get waivered.
Then one of the articles has a sub-title saying that the families will have a hard time finding a lawyer to take the case. I'm pretty sure the billionaires can find a lawyer for this if they choose. They could have lawyers lined up around the block working on contingent for the high profile nature of this and the possibility of getting work with billionaires.
The only thing holding back lawsuits would be the lack of potential payoff.
>I keep seeing articles being pushed that the victim's families have no case. But with the whistleblower lawsuit, the conversations and tweets, the CEO seems to have just skipped engineering warnings and worked harder at convincing people. He convinced people that dangers he knew of weren't dangers. I don't think that can get waivered
Liability waivers have approximately zero standing in court. It's just something the defense can hold up and say "look, they were warned!". It doesn't legally absolve you of any liability whatsoever, and any jury is highly unlikely to be sympathetic to the defendant here.
OceanGate as a company effectively ceased to exist the moment this happened. Most likely their assets will be liquidated, and whatever's left will be a court battle with insurance companies for years to come.
Liability waivers have a lot of standing in court, they just aren't a blanket exemption from liability like some believe. Under the law of tort, prior to injury, the specific risk must have been known to and appreciated by the plaintiff in order for primary assumption of risk to apply. Liability waivers serve to establish that the risk was known and appreciated.
For instance in CA
> Releases and waivers of liability are usually enforced in California. They are considered contracts that, if properly drafted and executed, are recognized as valid agreements that limit your rights.
> There are four ways to challenge the validity and binding effects of a release or waiver of liability:
> ... Gross negligence or recklessness: The California Supreme Court recently held that releases are valid only to protect defendants from being sued for negligence. They are invalid if you can prove that the other party's conduct was more than negligent, e.g., gross negligence or recklessness.
> There are four ways to challenge the validity and binding effects of a release or waiver of liability:
You only include gross negligence/recklessness, but two of the others also potentially would apply here (jurisdictional issues aside):
* Fraud or misrepresentations, and
* Products liability: A valid release does not prevent you from pursing a case against the designer, manufacturer or distributor of a defective product.
>... Gross negligence or recklessness: The California Supreme Court recently held that releases are valid only to protect defendants from being sued for negligence. They are invalid if you can prove that the other party's conduct was more than negligent, e.g., gross negligence or recklessness.
That's the key here. Regardless of acceptance of risk, gross negligence cannot be excused. If this were a legit operation using a certified vessel, we'd be having an entirely different conversation. But what Rush was doing is the very definition of recklessness.
We don't know for sure yet why the sub imploded. Its still possible that it was due to some design or manufacturing defect no one foresaw, in which case recklessness would not apply. But I agree it most likely imploded due to one of the design defects that Oceangate was warned about and recklessly ignored.
There are primarily two requirements that must be followed in order to maintain corporate protection:
1) The Rule of the Prudent Person. Board members are trusted individuals and this protection is provided as it is assumed that the board member will act reasonably for the best interest of the business. The prudent person rule essentially states that board members are protected from personal liability as long as they act “as a reasonably prudent person under the same or similar conditions”. So basically, if your peers would think you acted contrary to your duty, then the protection may not be available.
2) Duty of Loyalty. As a board member, conflicts of interest should be avoided. Therefore, the protection otherwise provided may not be there if actions or decisions are made to benefit yourself instead of the business. Commonly, this occurs when a board member votes in favor of an action to provide himself or his family with financial gain or support a business venture he owns. Keep in mind, while financial gain is a typical motive, it is not required to breach the duty of loyalty.
> Length, 2,540 mm; outside diameter, 1,676 mm; service pressure, 6,600 psi; pressure safety factor, 2.25. “They basically said, ‘This is the pressure we have to meet, this is the factor of safety, this is the basic envelope. Go design and build it,’” Spencer reports. And he was given six weeks in which to do it.
Six weeks. Classic checkbox-driven Technical Program Mismanagement (TPM) by whim of pseudo-technical overreaching hucksters.
Interesting find! Lots of information about the winding and the materials used. I wish there was more information about the epoxy used to adhere the titanium endcaps to the hull.
I also wonder what changed between the Cyclops 2 and the Titan.
I believe it’s both really. My understanding is the end caps are bolted to a titanium flange, not the carbon fibre hull directly. The titanium flange the caps are bolted to is epoxied to the hull.
Yea, you generally try to avoid drilling holes or even casting threaded bosses into carbon or other composites, especially this extreme pressure rig, because it really reduces the strength versus an strong adhesive that evenly applies pressure without breaking/disrupting the composite material.
They use some sort of glue to seal the titanium rings to the CF hull, then the Titanium hemisphere end caps are bolted to the rings. Here’s their own YT vid showing the construction process: https://youtu.be/WK99kBS1AfE
I suppose the article meant cap itself was a carbon fiber/epoxy build, implying nothing about the connection?
On a separate note, although the submarine failed catastrophically, that doesn't mean every decision it took was wrong. I wonder if the bolts actually make sense under high water pressure.
I assume that just the name. Cyclops was a monster that lost his one eye in battle. The submarine had one window and the name suggests that window being damaged at some point. Titan suggests a more positive and strong image without suggesting the bad parts.
In any case the submarine couldn't avoid the cyclops destiny and cyclopsioned entirely.
I never understood what all the people who were going on and on about "water intrusion" were saying, because it was never explained. But I think I understand now. Boring old A36 carbon steel is good for like 30ksi (30000psi).
The water pressure is only say 6ksi which is significantly less. That means that the steel is much stronger on its own, in every direction, than the water pressure pushing on it.
The epoxy in most epoxy composites isn't rated for 30ksi, it's generally less than 10ksi and perhaps even less than 5ksi. Epoxy on its own is capable of standing up to less pressure than the composite will see at 13000ft deep.
So the concern is that it's not if but when water manages to wiggle it's way past some of the epoxy between the carbon strands. Sure the bulk composite material can stand up to 6ksi, but if the glue that holds it together is weaker, well, the water can push it out of the way.
However deep the water gets it has reduced the effective thickness and this strength of your composite at that point, if it goes deep enough it shoots through and that's the start of a very quickly evolving collapse.
I'm a cyclist. People DO worry about the failure mode of carbon fiber when riding, and the stakes in bicycling are FAR LOWER -- I mean, you'll almost certainly live.
From the factory it's gonna be fine, but the worry people have is getting a nick or dent in it in such a way that it compromises the strength in an important dimension. Carbon fork failures used to be a thing, and that can end REALLY REALLY BADLY for a rider on a road bike.
So going deep enough that a vessel failure means effectively instant disintegration in a carbon sub? F*ck no, like, on the face of it.
The other part is that carbon fiber is good at handling expansive pressure (pressure coming from the inside of the vessel) and bad at handling compressive pressure (pressure outside the vessel).
It kind of intuitively makes sense. Carbon fiber is roughly like a fabric. If you make a tube out of a piece of fabric, there's almost no resistance when you try to compress it between your hands. There's far more resistance if you try to move your hands apart inside it, up until the fabric rips.
It was a terrible material for this to begin with between the risks of delamination and carbon fiber being specifically bad at the kind of pressure they were dealing with.
Not necessarily. CFRP is plenty strong to handle the task. But it's a complicated material - though not necessarily new. I think one complication people underestimate when comparing to steel or titanium is that CFRP is NOT isotropic - meaning that its physical properties are NOT the same regardless of orientation. Another is that CFRP has so many dimensions to its strength (e.g. orientation of resolved force vs fiver orientation, fiber diameter, fiber length, fiber material, epoxy material, etc). Yet another is the concept of fatigue life. Steel is very forgiving in this regard - as long as you don't strain it enough to reach plastic deformation, you're good almost forever. CFRP (and even aluminum) have a lifetime no matter what. In that case, you need decent non-destructive testing techniques of which I'm certainly not an expert.
I have one major unanswered question about it though...is there any reason they needed the weight savings one gets from CFRP? Every sub I've ever heard of requires additional ballast to dive even when using tried-and-true steel hull. If they didn't need the weight savings, it was completely absurd to use CFRP.
The metal pressure vessels are very negatively buoyant. The bathyscaphe Trieste used 32000 gallons of gasoline to achieve positive buoyancy. Modern DSVs use incredibly expensive and fragile syntactic foam.
A CFRP pressure vessel can be naturally positively buoyant, or much closer to it. Titan's dry weight was less than DSV Limiting Factor, despite having much greater internal volume and carrying 3 more people.
Also, being able to load and launch in the water, rather than loading on the deck and needing a human rated crane to launch as most DSVs do, probably saved a lot of money operating Titan.
If I picture myself in this CEO's shoes (wanting to innovate in the materials/approach to DSVs), I imagine instructing my team to design a system that can perform test dives autonomously and then use that to gather data over many duty cycles. Of course, I have no idea what I am talking about, so maybe that is simply impossible or impossibly expensive. It does seem cheaper than just YOLOing it and getting yourself and four other people killed though.
> so maybe that is simply impossible or impossibly expensive
Sorry for swearing, but I too can't believe that there's a problem in setting this thing to auto-dive 3 or 4 kilometers and then pulling it up via an f-ing tether.
I understand why you wouldn't tether the sub when floating into the titanic wreck. But test-diving? come on...
The amount of equipment you could fit inside this sub is incredible. Probably unparalleled. I can't believe there isn't enough market to be profitable while you test the experimental hull.
I believe the Aluminaut had a larger internal volume; at least it could carry more people. Up to 7 vs 5 in the Titan. It had a deeper test depth too, and like the Titan, didn't need syntactic foam for bouyancy.
What exactly would they bring though? Anything inside the sub could not be dropped off anywhere. Maybe they could have collected research data to sell to certain scientific institutes, but that doesn't sound like it would recoup much of the costs
The goal is just to run on the blue, so that they are not pressured to finish their testing earlier. I can't imagine there isn't enough to film at that depth so that they can't find people willing to pay for the operational costs.
Or building the inspection equipment that could determine if my new hull material was breaking down with every dive towards an inevitable disaster I've been warned about by many different people.
It's incredible seeing the late CEO talking so much about how this and other super deep subs were built by amateurs as the reason he could conceivably safely build the Titan. Completely ignoring testing like this or that the Chinese sub was built by a government design bureau. They were projects headed by excited amateurs for sure but they were going to exceptionally traditional engineers to implement their ideas.
But the other cost of pressure tests is stress to the hull of the pressure hull; To know its failure point, you have to see it fail, in which case you have to build a second one.
Yes, and that's cheap compared to loss of life. You may even want to destroy several of them to get a better statistical base. Essentially they are a consumable in this design.
> "I suspect no deep diving sub did 50 MOD dives before non-essential crew were taken," Rush said.
This right here. Just a casual dismissal of what an expert said because he didn't want to do that. An expert whose advice he explicitly sought out to make sure what happened wouldn't happen.
Bucking the recommendations of those experienced in the activity you are performing because you feel you are special and your pluck is going to vindicate you makes for a good film or episode of television, but it's a poor way to conduct your business.
The guy seemed to believe his own dogma. He was both sincere in his belief but also blinded by it. He was also a tenacious salesman —looks like he would lean on his (potential) customers pretty hard.
It's interesting to imagine how different the narrative might be if he'd been equally convinced the sub was safe but just didn't happen to be on that particular mission by sheer luck.
This combination is pretty common in start-up founders as well. Separating the ones who believe their own bs from the ones that have done their homework can sometimes be quite hard.
The lesson here is that skin in the game isn't really enough. You almost have to be delusional to start a company, so seeing the CEO take on a risk means very little.
You could say the same about Elon Musk or Nokola Tesla or many others. Just sounds like pure survivorship bias to me. "This crazy innovator died so clearly future innovators should listen to the experts!".
I think you are using it in the exactly opposite way. "Crazy innovator succeeds and makes it rich! Future innovators don't need to listen to experts!" is the "survivor" in this situation. The number of "innovators" to failed/died/etc will be much higher than the ones who are successful.
That was a simulated payload for a test flight. SpaceX actually has an extensive testing, certification, and quality assurance process. A lot of it is driven by NASA and a lot of it may seem like "regulations," but NASA created those regulations because of the number of people who have died along the way.
Musk is not an inventor. It's more apt to compare Musk to Edison instead of Tesla. Of someone who paid others to invent. Though not a fair comparison to Edison since even Edison invented things on his own. Remember, Musk has an education in economics.
Elon Musk's successful companies were all him just taking credit for what the experts he bought produced. How is that in any way related to what OceanGate did? People doubted that Elon's companies could deliver on their goals, but they didn't really doubt the fundamental safety or engineering practices behind them. It's not like for the Model 3 Tesla just decided that suddenly cardboard was a great way to contain a battery pack. And SpaceX has absolutely been doing test flights "by the book" like the generations of rockets before them?
But still risky; as clear from the recent rocket explosion; stage landing mishaps, space shuttles before them (the reason why SpaceX has a client in the US is because shuttles weren't reliable enough to continue)
Hopefully SpaceX is listening to pressure hull tests and Nasa now pays attention to ambient temperatures and orings.
There does seem to be a lot of poor choices made along the way here, but it’s also worth noting that you can find an expert who gave (or was willing to give) any innovator the advice to not create their product.
If every innovator listened to expert advice to stop, we’d have a lot less new things in the world.
They didn't innovate anything. Submersibles have been around for a long time. The technology is mature. Their innovation was using completely inappropriate materials and cheaping out on safety.
True, but there is a way to prove the detractors wrong without killing people: lots of testing.
They just put people on this thing way too soon.
Take space launch for example. Every significant part of a rocket is tested to destruction multiple times unless it’s already flight proven, then the whole rocket is flown many times before we consider putting people on it. Still dangerous, but this makes it not totally insane.
I think there are two different kinds of innovation: doing new things, and finding cheaper ways to do existing things. The latter case tends to be about either interesting insights about the actual value that let you find a better point on the cost curve, or entirely new manufacturing technologies that let you bend the cost curve entirely.
Trading away safety for cost isn't usually an innovative trade-off by itself, and making that trade-off without any interest in quantifying it is a red flag.
>If every innovator listened to expert advice to stop, we’d have a lot less new things in the world.
However, for something to be useful you have to prove it. Rush could have contributed if he used his VC money to rigorously establish how many deep sea dives a carbon fiber submersible could make and concomitant with that whether carbon fiber was cheaper than titanium. Rush seemed to object to serious scientific validation but instead did minimal testing. Despite taking paying customers we don't really know anything more about carbon fiber submersibles that we didn't already know before OceanGate came along selling their undersea tours. Maybe scientifically you'd have to replace the carbon fiber hull after 10 deep sea dives to maintain a safe operating environment and maybe that would be more economical than titanium hulls, but seems like OceanGate wasn't even looking for such data. It's not like the hull rating groups were unwilling to work with him on carbon fiber, but he instead refused to work with them.
That's the problem with innovators. Innovators are not good inventors. Inventors make new things, Innovators take inventions and squeeze money out of them.
Except generally those innovators were making a new app or company not a machine responsible for protecting people in an environment arguably less hospitable to exploration than outer space.
IANAL: I regularly see articles about how the passengers who were killed signed various liability waivers and therefore how their families have no case to sue OceanGate and others into oblivion. Liability waivers generally only exclude ordinary negligence, if that. In general, you can't waive your legal rights protecting you from gross negligence or wilful misconduct (definitions may vary -- the UK doesn't have gross negligence as such, but you can't waive the risk of death in most cases).
The people who were on the sub were very much wealthy enough (and now are high profile enough) to afford the kinds of legal teams that probably won't worry too much about liability waivers in these kinds of suits. I hope they extract every penny from OceanGate and any related entities.
The British documentary maker Ross Kemp turned down the opportunity to film on the Titan submersible, on which five people died this week, after the vessel was deemed unsafe following third-party checks.
> Rush sought to reassure Stanley that the issue with the noises was being looked at and suggested that it was improving, albeit with a caveat: "Our analysis of the past dives shows a definite reduction in acoustic events, but only having data from ...
Am I just too uninformed or is this actual nonsense?
It's not nonsense to use acoustic events to detect slow failures in engineering structures. In fact this is somewhat common, for example to detect failing steel inside reinforced concrete structures.[1] It's definitely nonsense to assume that because the boat didn't immediately implode after a big cracking sound was heard that you're all good.
I mean, if I were jumping on a wooden board and it started reducing in snapping noises, I'd probably feel the board weakening, not hardening and improving. The logic in above quoted sentence seems to be drawing a completely opposite conclusion from intuition.
It probably depends on all kinds of things - like the materials involved and the nature of the overall structure. I could see there being "settling" events where a structure is stronger overall after a bunch of noises but I suspect that doesn't apply to a carbon fibre cylinder.
Lahey is the real deal though. If you want to see how an actual (certified) full ocean depth submersible is built, can't recommend enough this documentary they made about the design and construction of DSV Limiting Factor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5j9oeZCm0
> I don't think if you push forward with dives to the Titantic this season it will be succumbing to financial pressures, I think it will be succumbing to pressures of your own creation in some part dictated by ego to do what people said couldn't be done.
This quote really stood out to me. "Doing what they said couldn't be done" is such a powerful narrative in our entrepreneurial culture that it inspired a man to rush recklessly to his own death.
The year is 2011, an expert has said that SpaceX's Falcon rocket is unsafe. This happens repeatedly. In 2019, will SpaceX's planned Crew Dragon safely transport astronauts?
For the physicists here I would greatly like to hear an opinion on what presents the greater physics challenge: keeping the ocean out at the depth of 13K feet or containing a spacecraft's atmosphere in the vacuum of space. I suspect it's the former but don't have the "mathy maths" to back it up.
Obviously there's a difference between pressure vessels that have to keep pressure in (like a spacecraft) vs one that has to keep pressure out (like a submersible). I believe keeping pressure in is generally easier.
But the much bigger factor is the pressure difference we are talking about here: At 13k feet you have about 1 atmosphere of pressure in the sub, and about 400 atmospheres of pressure outside, for a difference of about 400. In a spacecraft you have about 1 atmosphere inside and about 0 outside, for a difference of 1. 1 bar of pressure is much easier to deal with than 400.
This also changes your emergency procedures: In a spacecraft, losing pressure means you need a pressure suit and a breathing apparatus. Because you still have the spacecraft for general shielding these can be pretty sleek suits like [1] that you can just wear the entire time and connect to an oxygen line as needed. In a submarine at these depths your best defense against sudden hull damage is being in a part of the sub that isn't damaged and has a solid bulkhead to the damaged section. Which isn't viable in a small submersible.
Spacecraft are challenging for other reasons: you want to go up fast to spend less time fighting gravity, which provides challenges because of aerodynamic loads; and when you come back down all the momentum of your orbit gets converted into heat as you slow down, which necessitates a decent heat shield. On top of that you try to minimize weight of everything, because being heavier means you need more fuel, but more fuel means you need more fuel to carry that fuel up, meaning you need more fuel, etc.
there's only ever a difference of 1 atmosphere or so between a spacecraft and vacuum, we're talking about a 400 atmosphere differential at those depths
You're dealing with a lot more pressure at these depths. You get to 1 atmosphere of additional pressure for every ~30ft when diving. That means 13k feet = 433 atmospheres of pressure.
>> "I think it was General MacArthur who said: 'You're remembered for the rules you break,'" Rush told the Mexican YouTuber alanxelmundo.
The problem with this approach is that the CEO failed to distinguish between human rules (to which MacArthur was referring) vs. laws of physics.
Laws of physics do not know about, care about, or yield to any human action or intention. They are absolute, and will kill you if you get on the wrong side of them.
If he wanted to go himself on this device, that is fine, but the way he was actively selling this as safe is just fraud. He got what he deserved, his passengers were fooled to their deaths.
Owning a carbon fiber composites design & fabrication business which builds both aerospace and subsea components, nearly everything I've read and viewed about this CEO's practices ranges from creep-me-out to 'looks criminal'. Compiling just references to the bad practices and failings would fill many pages, but perhaps the worst is the assumption that "hey, it went down there once, so it's good to go as many times as we want.", and refusal to even get any kind of ultrasonic or radiological testing of the carbon fiber hull.
Plus, to think that you can with acoustics, outrun the cascading failure at those kinds of pressures is nothing less than hard stupidity. The core function of carbon fiber composites is to spread the loads through the matrix with the extremely light and high-tensile-strength carbon fiber. This works great until it doesn't, so the failures are well known to be nearly explosive in rate and
catastrophic, unlike metals which tend to deform first. When the load is exceeding the maximum — especially in a well-designed & well-fabricated part — it is spread throughout the material. When it exceeds the maximum, either by fracturing the matrix between layers, or by fracturing some fibers, the load is now borne by proportionally less material, so is more focused, that material breaks, etc.. Even at normal pressures, this happens in microseconds. See the standard open hole compression test at about 1:46+ [0]. The pressures at that depth, would only increase the failure speed.
The tech guy got fired from the Titan project (w/10min to clean out his desk) for pointing out that the acoustic flaw-detection method the CEO wanted to use would not work, and would give them only milliseconds of warning. He was right.
What I do find a bit surprising is that James Cameron (himself a very accomplished depth explorer) says he heard from his sources that the Titan had dropped its weights and was ascending trying to manage an emergency, which indicates they actually had seconds or maybe even minutes of warning. Could mean that it just took longer with the 5in thick hull. So, it'll be really interesting to see the final reports...
> > "I think it was General MacArthur who said: 'You're remembered for the rules you break,'" Rush told the Mexican YouTuber alanxelmundo.
> The problem with this approach is that the CEO failed to distinguish between human rules (to which MacArthur was referring) vs. laws of physics. Laws of physics do not know about, care about, or yield to any human action or intention. They are absolute, and will kill you if you get on the wrong side of them.
To be fair, there's a difference between the actual laws of physics and our beliefs about the laws of physics. You can get the math right but misinterpret its practical implications. For example, around the 1940s, full inertial guidance of missiles was widely believed to be physically impractical due of Einstein's equivalence principle, which makes acceleration and gravity indistinguishable. If you propose to create such a guidance system, many experts would attack its feasibility.
From time to time, researchers with an unorthodox view would then successfully challenge these false beliefs with hard evidence. Today, everyone knows that the equivalence principle is only a thought experiment, it's valid within a infinitesimal point in space and time. Meanwhile, for practical purposes it's indeed possible to distinguish acceleration and gravity - for example, the gravitational gradient between different heights are measurable - so it was simply a precision measurement problem in engineering.
Of course, I'm not saying it was what OceanGate did, due to inadequate testing, they certainty did not have any hard evidence on the safety of its design...
>>What is your view on the liability of Spencer Composites?
Yikes!
(good question)
I read elsewhere that they were given six weeks to design and build the cylindrical hull. And that he OceanGate CEO had sourced a bunch of out-of-date prepreg carbon fiber from Boeing, getting a great deal, and said that 'those aerospace guys may need those dates but we don't'.
The right answer to both of those is: "Those ideas are too insane or too stupid to work with us. Either let us help you with a better idea, or come back when you have one".
Six weeks is an insanely short time to even make a few test coupons and a single full-thickness panel and maybe a 50% scale short tube section to test things like curing rates, production methods, compaction/void rates, actual yielded properties, and so forth, plus, whether the epoxy in that out-of-date material was even still any good. At least if you want to have a clue of what you are doing.
Six months is an insanely short time to do development on the titanium endcaps, the surface on the composite tube to which they will mate, the adhesive, the process, etc.
The few snippets of video I saw and the CompositesWorld article [0] indicate that they likely did a decent job with the resources they had.
But, damn, there was a LOT missing.
They said that they worked with NASA, but listening to Sarah Cox, the director of composites at NASA[1], she talks at length about the need for extensive testing at every stage from test coupons (small panels), sub-assemblies, full parts, and in and after operation.
Just the video of the bonding process gave me the creeps. It would be fine for something like an art show piece, or maybe even on a test mule automobile. But there was nothing but a person using a manual straight-edge Bondo applicator (flexible plastic rectangle) trying to spread an even thickness. There was zero protection from any warehouse/shop debris, no evidence that pressure would be applied after the mating, and no vacuum to eliminate entrapped air. I guarantee there were voids, air pockets, unbonded sections under that titanium ring.
The key thing is that undersea does not require less caution than space flight, it requires MORE, a lot more, because the pressures are insane.
As for Spencer Composites' liability, I'm no lawyer, but I'd be worried even if they made the Oceangate CEO sign in blood that the craft was experimental, not their design, only a best effort, and definitely not fit for the intended purpose.
The only thing that might save them is that there were a few dozen dives on the hull before it imploded, so they could say "it worked when we gave it to them, how they abused it, maintained it, monitored it, etc. is not in our control, so not our problem.".
But those sorts of issues are for the lawyers, judges, and juries to sort out. I expect they'll all have more fun than they wanted.
The lack of vacuum is the first thing that jumped out at me, (besides the material choice to begin with), anybody that has done carbon fiber work and that has done this professionally knows the amount of air that is trapped in a structure this size has to be significant. The second was that one some of the photos there are screws visible that go straight into the carbon fiber part of the hull. If the hull was 5" that means that at least 1.5 or so of that would already be compromised.
It looks like we're in full agreement on their liability, I expect OceanGate to come up bankrupt at the first sign of trouble (and we're well past that) so my guess is that the bigger guns will be aimed at Spencer, especially because (1) they are a player and likely have some money and (2) they effectively designed the craft, even if it was on faulty instructions. The number of dives to significant depth on that hull is likely very low. Low single digits.
Thank you for the elaborate answer. And super nice company you have.
Regarding screws, they seem to have screwed the stuff into a liner inside the hull, not the hull. (Source, hearsay from other HN discussions, and you can see the liner in some of their other pictures.)
Gawd, I hope that is true, because there is absolutely zero reason to screw into that hull for something like mounting electronics. I have adhesives in my shop that are something like 7500 Lbs/SqIn strength. Just mount a screw block anywhere you want of any material you want (I'd use structural foam), then screw into that, and it'll be as secure as you want.
> I read elsewhere that they were given six weeks to design and build the cylindrical hull. And that he OceanGate CEO had sourced a bunch of out-of-date prepreg carbon fiber from Boeing, getting a great deal, and said that 'those aerospace guys may need those dates but we don't'.
Apparently Boeing denies this ever happened[1]. The story comes from a claim that Stockton Rush made to a reporter - weird thing to lie about, for sure.
He may not have gotten it directly from Boeing. He may have gotten it from any other aerospace mfgr and just claimed/conflated it was Boeing.
Most likely, he got it from one of the small herd of composites recyclers who got it from Boeing; so it was from Boeing, but not directly. The path would have been something like [Major Carbon Prepreg Supplier] -> [Boeing] -> [sit in freezer for 19 or 25 months] -> [Recycler] -> [Oceangate]. Thus, "I got a great price on this outdated material from Boeing.", and Boeing has no clue or legitimate involvement.
Boeing is also going to want to stay as far away from this as possible, even tho donating/selling known outdated material, specified as such, is perfectly fine. They're just coming out of their own huge issues.
Exactly my thought. But, then I’m a 50+ year old white guy, so unqualified to speak.
In my personal experience w/ carbon fiber overwound tanks for compressed natural gas — my very first thought when I first heard they used a carbon fiber “pressure vessel” was:
“Wow, ballsy; carbon fiber composite is great in tension, worthless in compression”.
Funny, the downvotes from people who (like the CEO, apparently) … don’t have a clue.
When you hear a “pop” or a “crunch” from a carbon-fiber wound composite tank: it means some part of the fiber/resin matrix has delaminated, or allowed intrusion of gas/fluid into its matrix.
This means that this layer of the vessel now allows relative motion under torsion or compression.
If the intruding material is higher pressure than the average within the matrix — it will push the matrix apart, causing more delaminating, at ever deeper levels (now exposed to the intrusion).
At the massive pressure differentials in this situation (800 bar), failure of this vessel once compromised would predictably happen in milliseconds. As it turns out…
There was a time people came to HN because of the interesting comments by subject-matter experts.
The downvotes might be from people that don't realize that "But, then I’m a 50+ year old white guy, so unqualified to speak." is a reference to something else the OceanGate CEO said
Composites are used all the time in applications in which they undergo cyclic compression. So your first thought is one you should have dismissed. You know what else is good in tension but not in compression? Bicycle spokes. And yet...
There are plenty of other potential design flaws. The assertion that fibers are not good in compression is facile.
Any compression pressure gradient that causes the N-layer composite to yield beyond its natural elasticity, and causes any breakdown of level 1 in the N-layer matrix allowing intrusion of fluid beyond that level, has now caused a permanent failure.
You now have a vessel of effective thickness N-1 (the outer layer will be sheared away and lost).
However, your new N-1 layer vessel now has an average pressure gradient across N-1 instead of N layers, increasing the deflection of the remaining layers, resulting in accelerated cracking, failure and loss of the next layer.
This all occurs over < ~1 millisecond at an 800bar pressure differential.
This failure mode is radically different than the failure modes of carbon fiber composites under tension. The capacity of such vessels for compression vs. tension is so comparatively low that it would be deemed effectively zero in most cases.
The same reason they're a good choice in airplane construction which also undergoes many cycles of compression. In order to conclude that the choice of composites rather than how they were integrated, interfaced with other components, or a myriad other possible flaws you're going to have to do better than this.
It seems like folks don't understand the reference to compression in airplanes, so let me share some examples.
Airplanes are supported by their wings, which deflect air downward and are in turn deflected upward. The wingtips flex upward, which puts the bottom surface of the wing under tension and the top surface under compression. This is true of all wing materials, but the point is that carbon fiber is used for wings and works fine as long as it is specced and constructed to handle the load and cycles.
The fuselage is supported during flight by the wings at the wing root, so the nose and tail of the aircraft want to droop down; this puts the bottom of the hull under compression and the top under tension. Again--true of all aircraft hulls but carbon fiber works fine in hulls too--again, as long as it is engineered correctly.
Finally composites (of which carbon fiber is only one type) are used extensively in marine applications. Fiberglass, aramid, carbon, and other fiber-based composites are commonly used in boat hulls, where they experience static and dynamic compressive loads. A jet ski smacking into the face of a wave at 50 knots puts a lot more than 1G of compressive force on its composite hull.
There's really no physical reason that a composite hull could not work in a submersible. However there are a lot of reasons folks don't usually use composites for that purpose--primarily that the cost-benefits of composites disappear as compressive forces go up. A composite hull that performs as well as a metal hull, at the pressures we're talking about, is possible but would be more expensive and have a shorter lifespan than the metal hull. This is why huge ship hulls are still built out of steel, even though almost all smaller boats have composite hulls these days. It's cheaper.
Coming back around to the Titan, the concern with the carbon fiber hull was not that it's physically impossible to do right, but rather suspicion that it only looked like a good idea because they were cutting corners in the engineering (because if they weren't cutting corners, it would not have looked economical).
Airplanes are not crushed though, they actually are overpressurized compared to their environment. In any case, the level of pressure differentials is huge compared to a sub.
In any case, I'm a basic scientists, so it's all I know about carbon fibres. Seems like a weird choice to start a composite with that needs to deal with pressure, love to be educated!
In aircraft they are mostly used for their tensile properties. "compression" in terms of an aircraft hull is compression inside the hull, not from the outside. The result is that in an aircraft the forces acting on the carbon fiber do so in tension.
Multiple submarine experts gave him advice that the Titan was unsafe. I just saw a submarine expert in Alameda who was interviewed by the local ABC station. She gave the same advice!
It's clear why it is so easy to find quotes from this guy complaining about safety experts harshing his buzz. He was hearing so called experts telling him it was unsafe all the time and it was clearly getting to him. He specified a safety factor and everything so what could possibly go wrong? He rounded up from 4.75" hull to 5" on the design. What more could they want? It's made out of carbon fiber, the wondermaterial of the future that all of the best stuff is made from.
It was clearly unsafe, but an expert saying it's unsafe after the accident means nothing. News orgs won't find an opposing view for this, and a "submarine expert" might not be a structures expert.
Sorry, but I intend to raise a bit of guilty conscience. I know it's unpopular and useless, but I feel I have to, once in a while...
A week before this submarine exploded, a boat capsized near Greece. Between 400 and 500 persons died. In both cases, it's a tragedy, but I have much more empathy for those who fled (mostly from Pakistan and Afghanistan), struggled for weeks or months on a very dangerous path, and hoped for a better life in Europe. Their deaths were probably much more painful than the crash that suddenly ended the lives of the Titanic tourists.
There is still a mist of mystery around the refugees deaths: the Greek coastal guards had been cruising near the boat, and they have changed many times their story of it. They finally admitted that they tried to tow her, but deny other claims from reporters, NGOs and even the European coast guards. There's a suspicion of unintended mass-murder, or at least (racist?) negligence. Shouldn't that draw as much focus as the failures of a submarine company?
I know that news coverage is unfair. I believe that most people don't even realize that they're biased on this — we all are in different ways. It's the same with Russia: I think most people are sincere when they say that this war is unprecedented, that our human values are at stake in this war, and that UN and international justice should act against Poutine. Ever heard of the mote and the beam? In a near past, USA invaded Iraq. And today, our country leaders lick the boots of MBS, the dictator of Saudi Arabia that started a war in Yemen which killed 380,000 persons, and who ordered thousands of bombings on mostly civilians targets. The irony is that MBS' order of chainsawing an opponent brought him trouble, while this bloody war and the regular decapitation of dozens of opponents went almost unnoticed.
The sub story caught traction for the same reason Balloon Boy did in 2009: there's an element of the unknown and a rescue angle. Same as the kids in the Tham Luang cave.
Sadly, refugee boats capsize all the time in the Mediterranean, and there's no ongoing drama.
Also, submarines are generally newsworthy even when they aren't going missing. The numerous media appearances the CEO did before the accident are evidence of this.
HN isn't intended for discussing things proportional to their moral value. It's for discussing things that are intellectually interesting. This story is interesting to many HN readers because of the technology involved (carbon fiber subs) and the entrepreneurial risk taking / hubris.
There might be a good discussion to be had here about refugee ships, but you'd need to find an angle of intellectual interest.
There is clear intellectual interest in comparing and contrasting why certain events receive outsized attention compared to objective outcomes (e.g. number of casualties).
There's a formal field of study related to the newsworthiness of rare events like accidents. Essentially, you sum up the "value" of people that died all at once, and certain thresholds elevate that to "local news", "national news", or "international news".
Sure, it might seem horribly cold to think of people as having value, but they do. A simple metric is to take their annual income, and pretend it is an interest payment on some cash in a bank account. Typical westerners are hence worth a few million dollars.
Lebanese refugees? A few tens of thousands each, if that.
The billionaires in the sub added up to more than the refugees on the boat. That's it. It's that simple.
If Trump, Bezos, Gates, or Musk die, it's guaranteed to be global news, one hundred percent. If ten ordinary people die? Eh... nobody cares.
To put things in perspective, in the same period of time that the sub was being searched for, about a week, globally we lost:
About 25,000 people to car crashes.
About 30,000 to preventable diseases.
About 50,000 to industrial accidents and work-related diseases.
And a mere 5,000 or so to the war in Ukraine.
That boat near Greece? It barely rates. It's a statistic.
This is just demagogy. Huge efforts have been put to rescue other people also. Spanish institute of oceanography worked for months to find and recover the corpse of (a non billionaire) little girl kidnapped by her father. Her body was recovered from a bag sank 1000m deep after months of effort. All just to give his family a sort of closure, and not, nobody wanted to know the cost of the submarine robot.
> As usual people in general don't really care about refugees
The resources spent by several countries to rescue immigrants is much, much more higher, by ten nautical miles and sustained since decades so please, stop with the moral BS.
If your point is to stress that billionaire's relatives have more resources and money to hire rescuers, well... yep. Color me surprised.
