OceanGate Says All Five Titan Passengers Have Died (semafor.com) 417
OceanGate now says that all five passengers "have been lost," according to a statement. From a report: "These men were true explorers who shared distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring protecting our world's oceans," the statement reads. "Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time."
The U.S. Coast Guard has confirmed that a "debris field" has been found in the search area for the missing Titan submersible. A press conference is scheduled for 3 p.m. to provide more details. There is no confirmation directly from the Coast Guard on what the debris appears to be, and there is no word whether human remains were also found. However, a dive expert connected to the search and rescue efforts told the BBC that the debris included a "landing frame and a rear cover from the submersible."
The U.S. Coast Guard has confirmed that a "debris field" has been found in the search area for the missing Titan submersible. A press conference is scheduled for 3 p.m. to provide more details. There is no confirmation directly from the Coast Guard on what the debris appears to be, and there is no word whether human remains were also found. However, a dive expert connected to the search and rescue efforts told the BBC that the debris included a "landing frame and a rear cover from the submersible."
A Fool & His Money (Score:2)
Are soon departed.
I mean I feel sorry for the family members who have to suffer now living without their loved ones, but to go to a place that is not really safe for humans in a glorified tin can with no one stopping it leaves many things unsaid.
Re:A Fool & His Money (Score:5, Interesting)
to go to a place that is not really safe for humans in a glorified tin can with no one stopping it leaves many things unsaid.
To be fair: They were lied to by OceanGate at every step of the way.
eg. OceanGate claimed the glorified tin can was designed by Boeing/NASA/University of Washington/etc. but it was all lies.
A Google search for "OceanGate" would have found the related lawsuits and set alarm bells ringing but nooooo ... they wanted to believe.
Caveat emptor.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
So this is now going to be referred to as OceanGategate? I'm sure there is a joke in there about lawyer sharks somewhere but I am just going to walk away now.
Re: (Score:2)
Makes me think of Heavens Gate, a different cult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:A Fool & His Money (Score:4, Insightful)
Then again, as the parent said, he's already paid for his recklessness. I'm slightly curious about how this will play out legally, but not enough to want any more of these stories.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure sure, it was all a big conspiracy theory.
Re: (Score:3)
A small conspiracy, and not at all theoretical.
The more common word would be "fraud," and if any of the perpetrators are still alive, "manslaughter."
Re: A Fool & His Money (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounds much more like hubris than fraud
Made damn sure not to be sued for killing people.. (Score:3)
That's beyond hubris. That's premeditation.
Mike Reiss, who travelled on the Titan last year, told the BBC: "You sign a waiver before you get on that mentions death three different times. ... things go wrong. I've taken three different dives with this company and you almost always [lose] communication," said Reiss.
"They're learning as they go along
Also, recklessly endangering others. Very much knowingly. [theguardian.com]
Stockton Rush, the chief executive and founder of OceanGate - creator of Titan - is among those missing.
...
...
The Marine Technology Society was critical of OceanGate issuing marketing material that stated the Titan design would "meet or exceed the DNV-GL safety standards" while apparently not intending to have the vessel assessed by that same organisation.
The DNV is an independent organisation - described as the world's leading classification society for the maritime industry - which certifies vessels such as submersibles and issues regulations for such products.
Almost a year after it was sent, OceanGate published a blog post explaining why it would not have Titan certified.
...
The company claimed "operator error" was responsible for the vast majority of accidents.
The company was also concerned that the classing process could slow down development and act as a drag on innovation.
"Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation."
In an interview with the Smithsonian Magazine in 2019, Rush complained that the commercial sub industry had not "innovated or grown - because they have all these regulations".
So basically, the "genius" behind the whole thing killed himself and others because "damn regulations" which "slow down progress" while blaming all similar accidents on "bad drivers".
It's really a shame this was an instant-kill event.
It would be really fun to listen to recordings of passengers arguing should they strangle the "captain" to save on oxygen while he rants about "damn regulations" and "progress a
Re:A Fool & His Money (Score:4, Insightful)
So the OceanGate CEO who died, was lied to?
In life you take risks, sometimes you die, if you play it completely safe all your life you eventually die without living. It is up to individuals to determine what risk they are willing to take with their life.
People climb mountains all the time and many die. https://www.weforum.org/agenda... [weforum.org] says Annapurna 29% fatality rate and Everest has a 14.1% fatality rate, people still climb it, its their choice and their problem if they die.
Re:A Fool & His Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, he likely lied to himself. He probably Dunning-Kruger'd himself into believing that meticulous adherence to checklists was a suitable replacement for rigorous safety protocols designed by actual safety experts, and therefore had full faith in his carbon-fiber tin can.
Re:A Fool & His Money (Score:5, Insightful)
There's risks and then there's just stupid risk.
The whole goal is dubious to begin with: Take tourists down to a wreck they can't really tour and have them experience the wreck via screens and a tiny porthole, receiving lower quality than they could just get from screens fed by a robot. You may happen to be nearby, but not in any way that actually makes a difference. It's not like they could scuba on out to be hands on, they would be confined to a "same as remote" experience no matter what. But fine, you want to "be there"
But then there's the myriad of engineering concerns that are just senseless. We already know how to make deep dive submarines, but this guy had to do it differently. Even as engineering analysis said "hey, maybe a material that without warning experiences catastrophic failure in milliseconds will have problems trying to be the hull trying to withstand 380 bar", the answer was "fire the engineer for being such a doubter". While it still wouldn't have been "safe" to my level of comfort, they could have at least been significantly safer without compromising the experience.
Taking risks is one thing, but needlessly taking on risk when there are obviously proven safer ways to get the *exact same* experience is not admirable or noble or "just experiencing life", it's just foolish recklessness. Worse when you sell tickets to people who are oblivious to how badly you are managing risk, in fact it rises to the level of gross negligence.
Re: (Score:3)
Also... Why carbon fiber?
It's great benefit is strength to weight ratio, which is much less important when you're under water and surrounding a big bubble of air. In addition, carbon fibre composites are substantially weaker in compression than tension.
Re: (Score:3)
https://www.weforum.org/agenda... [weforum.org] says Annapurna 29% fatality rate and Everest has a 14.1% fatality rate, people still climb it, its their choice and their problem if they die.
On the other hand this was the third dive to the Titanic, so a 33% fatality rate. But the kicker is that while mountain climbers actually try make climbing as safe as they can CEO Rush mocked safety and boasted about cutting corners.
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"People climb mountains all the time and many die."
Yes, except most don't rent out guides whose experience is limited to Death Stranding.
Re:A Fool & His Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, he claimed it was "diversity", but I think it's pretty clear that was just self-serving nonsense. What he was doing was hiring inexperienced young people with no domain expertise and who didn't have a nice miltiary pension they could live off if they had to. In other words people it would be easy to get to do stupid things and who would be easy to shut up if they figured out it was stupid.
Re: (Score:3)
And don't forget cheap! He definitely wanted them to be cheap.
Experienced submariners who don't have to work if they don't want to don't come cheap.
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It's also interesting to see how many people are triggering on that word "diversity" and immediately thinking "woke" when the very next sentence explains what he means by it:
a variety of different backgrounds
So a dudebro who knows knows how to work with carbon fibre, a dudebro who did a year of undergraduate engineering, a dudebro who does software, a dudebro who can run an impact wrench, a dudebro who once took a diving course, you couldn't get more diverse bunch than that.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:A Fool & His Money (Score:5, Insightful)
A diverse workforce has many viewpoints. Including old white guys.
Re:A Fool & His Money (Score:5, Funny)
Well, it's your strawman so have at it.
Re:A Fool & His Money (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
No, but it does suggest a lack of interest in actual competence, which could easily infect every aspect of their operation.
The lawsuits are going to be epic.
Re: (Score:3)
So, I guess the new meme is:
"Go Woke....Get yourself and a bunch of other innocent people killed"?
How is age discrimination "woke"?
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How is age discrimination "woke"?
It's pretty easy, actually. Most people that use the word in this context can't (or won't?) put a definition behind it. Not hard to use a word when you can make it mean whatever you want.
Re:A Fool & His Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A Fool & His Money (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
And yet when you look at the passenger list, it was mostly "old white dudes", well over 50.
The only exception was the 48-year-old Paki and his nepo-baby.
Re:A Fool & His Money (Score:5, Insightful)
"I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational, and I'm not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology, but a 25-year-old who's a sub pilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational," Rush said.
"So we've really tried to get very intelligent, motivated, younger individuals involved because we're doing things that are completely new," he added.
The OceanGate CEO also said that expertise was unnecessary, because "anybody can drive the sub" with a video game controller.
"We can train someone to pilot the sub, we use a game controller. So anybody can drive the sub," Rush said, before talking about how he prioritized diversity.
"And we also wanted out team to have a variety of different backgrounds," he said. "Really get people that have diverse background and then train them, and train and train and train, so that it does come off as a polished and safe operation."
So, I guess the new meme is:
"Go Woke....Get yourself and a bunch of other innocent people killed"?
Wow... you really do just see the world in terms of "wokeness" (of course it was a Breitbart link).
He literally defines "diversity" as a diversity of background, not of race or gender.
And most likely, his issue with hiring "a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys" had nothing to do with diversity of any kind and more due to the fact that experienced personnel were more expensive and would kick up a fuss when they realized how unsafe the craft was.
Btw, you realize who actually got everyone killed?
A rich white guy in his 60s.
Re:A Fool & His Money (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll tell you who I feel sorry for also: the taxpayer who will foot the bill for the US and Canadian Coast Guards' efforts to save the fools' lives.
It's always the same with rich people: when their stunts go well, it's their private thing. When they go south, we get to pay for it.
I sure hope the Coast Guards send the bill to OceanGate.
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I know search and rescue generally sends you the bill when things go wrong on land, so they probably do at sea as well.
Re:A Fool & His Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it's very uncommon for people to be sent the bill for a Search and Rescue callout. They don't want ti dissuade people from calling for help when they really need it.
In this case, a significant portion of the expenses would be paid for anyways. The crews, the aircraft, and other equipment are all fixed costs that get paid whether they're sitting alongside at the pier, or in an active search. What doing the search does do is add the consumables to the costs.
But that said, the crews of the CP-140 Auroras need to fly a certain number of hours each month to keep current in their jobs, and hunting for this thing was a good test of their skills and technologies.
Re:A Fool & His Money (Score:5, Insightful)
It was also a good test of command and control, and interagency cooperation.
Re:A Fool & His Money (Score:4, Insightful)
I sure hope the Coast Guards send the bill to OceanGate.
Unfortunately, there will be no money for the Coast Guard to collect. OceanGate will be bankrupted and put out of business by this.
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Maritime tradition says that if someone is in trouble, and you receive the call and have the ability to help, you help. Because what happens if you're in trouble next, and some dicknuts decides to ignore your SOS?
Trouble doesn't stop at imaginary lines on maps.
Re:A Fool & His Money (Score:5, Informative)
Let's also remember that the coast guard has done this for far less famous or rich people.
They did their jobs to the best of their ability as I would expect of them regardless of who was needing help, whether it be migrants fleeing on entirely unseaworthy craft or someone who's engine died or or or.
I do wish the coast guard got a bit more respect, most of what they do doesn't end up in the papers but I'll bet many are still happy to receive the help when they need it.
Re: A Fool & His Money (Score:2)
Heaven's Gate was also a bad movie and so for symmetry you should expect there to be a bad movie about Ocean's Gate
Rejected real experts (Score:5, Informative)
My understanding is that the CEO rejected real experts with years of experience in favor of young "enthusiastic" people. (This based on his own words).
My impression is the CEO wanted people who would tell him what he wanted to hear.
This was an avoidable tragedy.
xbox controller wireless no less! (Score:2)
xbox controller wireless no less!
Re:xbox controller wireless no less! (Score:4, Informative)
xbox controller wireless no less!
There's nothing wrong with using a cheap consumer-grade controller for this. The US Navy found that Xbox controllers work great for weapons systems on surface ships too. Focus attention on the real problems like the lack of safety checks, not the non-issue of the cheap controller.
Re:xbox controller wireless no less! (Score:4, Interesting)
Wireless introduces an additional point of failure for no reason. I don't even trust it for playing War Thunder.
The type of thinking that would result in a wireless controller being used in a deep-sea submersible is absolutely a "real problem". The lack of safety checks and all the rest of the problems sure to surface postmortem, all flow from the same fucked-up attitude.
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This was an avoidable tragedy.
How is stupidity avoidable?
Please let us know...
Re:Rejected real experts (Score:5, Insightful)
For starters you can have older and more experienced people who've already learned from many stupid mistakes and survived them make the decisions. They may not be any less stupid but they will be better at identifying the general patterns of stupid and saying no before you go down a path that will bite you in the ass.
Re:Rejected real experts (Score:5, Informative)
No, politicians are selected by popularity, not competence.
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I repeat, they may not be any less stupid. But yes, if you look at history there is a reason they put age requirements on some of the gigs in politics... younger people ruled during periods called things like 'dark ages.' Younger and inexperienced people thinking they see the light and know better is the tale of every young person ever, every once in awhile one turns out to be right as an exception to the rule but that's just statistics.
Re: Rejected real experts (Score:2)
Yup. Plenty of proof that the CEO didn't want to hear from cautious engineers, because any sane engineer would have told him the unpleasant truth.
The only good thing is that he was on board himself. Karma.
Re: Rejected real experts (Score:5, Insightful)
The only good thing is that he was on board himself. Karma.
To be fair, at least he was someone who eats his own dog food.
Re: Rejected real experts (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the toughest nuts to crack with critical thinking is motivated reasoning [wikipedia.org], which is just a fancy social science term for wishful thinking.
I think one of the tough things about doing that is that wishful thinking plays an important role in innovation. You have to compartmentalize your faith in your idea, entertain challenges to it, especially if you are doing something like this. It's one thing to risk your money, it's another thing to risk peoples' lives.
The story that's emerging is that this guy did the opposite of this. He hired people who were unlikely to challenge his vision -- people who would act like "yes men" -- and fired people who challenged it, even when it was their job to do so. He refused to let his work be validated by independent experts.
Re: (Score:3)
Okay, so if I'm following along correctly anything which spins the narrative toward this being incompetent folly of greedy capitalists cutting costs is insightful and/or funny but any commentary which highlights the simple truth that he hired inexperienced and incompetent engineers due to an overtly stated bias against experienced and competent old white men is trolling and flamebait?
Nevermind that experienced and competent engineers would have advised him on where it wasn't safe to cut costs and had the co
Re:Rejected real experts (Score:4, Interesting)
"I'm guessing it's because you're leaning pretty heavily on the "not old white men" part instead of the "young and inexperienced" part that's the actual issue.
I'm not hung up on it, he was hung up on it. He didn't say 'old people' he said 'old white men.' That is the point. Or at least he claimed he was, a claim which had sadly become plausible in the DEI world. DEI is about being hung up on age/sex/gender for the sake of 'inclusiveness' and diversity of non functional characteristics in lieu of hiring based on any sort of meaningful merits.
"he could have hired a bunch of incompetent old [experienced engineer] white "yes men" just as easily"
In square brackets I've added back a couple criteria I assume you accidentally omitted for your statement to be meaningful in context. Unfortunately I think with them added back in it becomes patently obvious it is false. If it were true he wouldn't have pretended he cared about DEI.
Experience correlates to age and age correlates to reduced diversity and increased selection factor for merit, especially in STEM and STEM education. Having a bias against 'old white men' IS functionally equivalent to rejecting the most experienced and competent talent. The same is true in education which compounds this issue significantly, once diversity infected academia hiring and student selection it drastically increased the probability a graduate would be incompetent. As it progressed to the workplace it drastically increased the probability that someone with experience would be incompetent.
Not only did this give him a mechanism for selecting inexperienced and incompetent engineers, it also gave him a justification for doing so. His new investors may or may not have shared his 'vision' of a new younger and more inspired diverse workforce but despite being completely irrational the evangelists backing it are so rabid it has infected everything. You don't have to share that view for it to have been plausible that he fired his 'old white guy' engineer who was out of touch because he was on a DEI crusade.
Old experienced engineers are far more likely to not only be competent than inexperienced ones but also more confident and trust in their value. We aren't talking about 'yes men' who are stroking his ego, we are talking about signing off on things that will kill people. I'm not saying you couldn't find them, I'm saying that they aren't likely to be naive enough to sign off on killing a bunch of wealthy people without requiring a payoff large enough for there to no upside on that path.
Squished (Score:3)
They got squished when a fake submarine built by a conman collapsed under pressure.
On the bright side: The conman got squished too.
Re: (Score:3)
To be fair, we don't know what happened. Maybe an O2 tank ruptured, or some explosion. It might not have been the fault of the pressure vessel, though that seems like a likely cause.
Re:Squished (Score:5, Informative)
Carbon fiber composite is particularly susceptible to cyclic fatigue, which was flagged in a report written by their in house quality control engineer David Lochridge, as a result of which he was immediately fired. Carbon fiber and titanium have different thermal expansion characteristics, and a cylinder deforms differently from a sphere, both causing mechanical stress that may cause delamination and degrade the polymer matrix. Each deformation cycle reduces structural strength, so the structure must be thoroughly inspected after each use by such means as x-rays or ultrasound, which was not done. Delamination was discovered after an early test, and repairs were claimed to have been made, though details are sketchy.
Carbon fiber composite cyclic fatigue is also a problem in aerospace applications, which problems have been overcome by years of materials and fabrication process research, and maintenance protocols. Not so with this submersible. In time, this design approach will be validated and become reliable, but this is no place to cut corners.
TLDR: it wiggled until it broke. RIP.
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Stop with that nonsense.The CEO hired people who told him what he wanted to hear. https://www.forbes.com/sites/k... [forbes.com]
The pilot who told him the craft was unsafe was quickly fired. Old white guys are experienced and would have raised the same safety concerns. That's why none were hired.
No they were not (Score:3, Informative)
These men were true explorers who shared distinct spirit of adventure
They most certainly were not true explorers: 4 of them were rich guys with too much money looking for a one-of-a-kind thrill they could regale their rich friends with stories of back at the country club, and one of them was a submarine operator.
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No, apparently the operator WAS the CEO and when you combine those two points it either means he was one the founding explorers OR it means a CEO was playing at being a submarine operator and likely caused the whole thing.
Re:No they were not (Score:5, Informative)
Two of them were wealthy men looking for some excitement. One was the 19-year-old son of one of those men. Paul-Henri Nargeolet was a legitimate explorer and world-renowned expert on recovery of undersea items, working to find and identify several wrecks. He also participated in missions to 3D map the Titanic. Stockton Rush was the pilot as well as the OceanGate CEO. His wife is a descendant of victims of the Titanic.
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Paul-Henri Nargeolet is just as stupid as Stockton Rush and the other passengers. Paul has the experience needed to know that this sub was terrible from the getgo. The only person who could get a free pass on not seeing all the red flags is the maybe 19yr old, whose father was a failure on all fronts.
Mistakes (Score:4)
Lawyers, start your engines! (Score:4, Insightful)
The victims may have signed waivers, but their families certainly did not.
Of course I fully expect OceanGate to "suddenly" need to file for bankruptcy any day now.
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The victims may have signed waivers, but their families certainly did not. Of course I fully expect OceanGate to "suddenly" need to file for bankruptcy any day now.
I think it is safe to say OceanGate is done regardless. And hopefully Titanic tourism will no longer be a thing either.
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Unless they can recover enough of the wreckage to take a stab at what precisely went wrong, it may be awfully hard to sue the company at all.
Re:Lawyers, start your engines! (Score:5, Informative)
Their carbon fiber tube fractured due to cyclic fatigue, just as their fired quality control engineer said it would.
Coast Guard (Score:4, Informative)
The US Coast Guard confirmed at the 3pm EST press conference that within the debris field was found the fore and aft bell, conclusively confirming the complete loss of the vehicle. RIP to the explorers and condolences to their families.
More Explorers died just East (Score:4, Interesting)
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/17... [cnn.com]
They weren't rich and the boat wasn't titanium, but a whole lot more than 5 died. No C-17s, No Coast Guard or multi-nation search effort.
These people were trying to explore things like paid employment, functioning sewers, schools with a roofs. Not quite as glamorous, but definitely more adventurous than sitting in a tube looking out a 21 inch window.
Re: (Score:2)
My wife and I were talking about that yesterday, how the news is more interested in a handful of rich dudes dying in a submersible than a bunch of people dying who were actually trying to make a better life for themselves.
Re:More Explorers died just East (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of the deplorable other replies to this notwithstanding, I do feel I should point out that one of the reasons this gets so much attention is that it had the drama of a ticking clock rescue. While a lot of people from that ship are considered "missing" it's already pretty well understood that they're dead. Everyone who lived probably got fished out of the ocean. While we now know that the people in the sub are dead, and it looks like they probably died pretty much instantly, previously it was believed that they could be in a disabled sub trapped on the bottom of the ocean waiting for rescue. We also had plenty of media coverage about 12 kids trapped in a flooded cave. When 458 children died in flooding in Pakistan, that's 38X as many children, but there wasn't 38X as much media attention, or probably even 1X as much, even though the children in the cave weren't rich either.
Not only billionnaires -- a legend submariner (Score:5, Informative)
We read on the internet some bad jokes about billionaires, but we should not forget the legend submariner that was in this mission. From Wikipedia: "Paul-Henri Nargeolet, former French Navy commander, diver, submersible pilot, member of the French Institute for Research and Exploitation of the Sea (IFREMER),[32][35] and director of underwater research for E/M Group and RMS Titanic, Inc.,[65] which owns salvage rights to the wreckage site.[66] Nargeolet has led several expeditions to the wreck, supervised the recovery of thousands of artifacts, and is "widely considered the leading authority on the wreck site" according to The Guardian.[65]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Nargeolet was the author of the first and iconic footage of the bow of the Titanic in 1987, while commandeering the deep dive submarine Nautile. As a side note, the Nautile, operational 1984-2021, dived to the Titanic wreck 32 times and recovered remains from Air France AF447 that rests by 3980 m / 13060 ft off the coast of Brazil. It was retired after 2000 high-sea dives, some of which at 6000 m / 19700 ft (the Titanic rests by 3821 m / 12536 ft). It seems that some engineers know to use safety margins better than others.
Re:Not only billionnaires -- a legend submariner (Score:4)
Wait. so someone who knew better was on that thing, too? Jesus. And people above are asking how you avoid "stupidity."
billionaires should avoid bargains (Score:4, Insightful)
The submarine was partially made of carbon fiber to reduce weight. Traditional deep-diving craft are made entirely of thick titanium. OceanGate was trying to innovate in weight reduction, not strength enhancement. Why? To bring the operating cost down. A lighter vessel requires less lift capacity to deploy, hence a smaller mothership. This reduces the cost-per-visitor and enabled them to charge just $250k for tickets to the Titanic.
In retrospect, which is much more reliable that futurespect, it should be surprising that an actual billionaire would be pursuing the cheap-ticket ride to the Titanic. I would think they would say, "Oh, just $250k?!? I'll pass. Waiting for the submarine made with 10' walls of titanium that costs $2 million to ride in."
Re:billionaires should avoid bargains (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with carbon fiber is that it has a nasty tendency to just... fail.
It's one of the problems with a carbon fiber bicycle - you get into an accident in that thing and while the frame might still be immaculate, there can be hidden damage that will cause it to just randomly fail some time in the future. It is not a material that will give much warning that it's about to fail, it just fails. One minute it looks all A-OK, the next minute it fails catastrophically.
No warning.
Re: (Score:3)
I see how Carbon fiber has fantastic modulus and tensile strength, but I'm not sure about its compressive strength
For days the use of carbon fiber in that application has seemed nonsensical to me for that very reason. But now, after further consideration, it must be that the carbon fiber composite tube was mechanically coupled to the rigid titanium end caps. In that case, negative and positive internal pressures place equal tensile loads on the fiber.
That raises hard questions about how to design the mechanical coupling between the tube and end caps because that joint must withstand the same tensile load as the carbon
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Deep sea exploration is hard, really hard (Score:2)
...even for the best of the best, with big budgets, using state of the art designs and materials
This is not a place for low-budget improvised hacks
Hopefully, something of value will be learned
Well, I guess they didn't suffer (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlike the 100 children in the hold of Andriana, it appears that those aboard Titan did not suffer.
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Navy (Score:4, Informative)
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Wait... Cameron's dive documentaries are considered 'suffering' around here? Really??
Why the fuck am I on this site.
Re:Oh no! It's a disaster! (Score:5, Insightful)
No shit! Cameron is a wealthy man that does it right; with engineers, marine experts and puts the money and effort into making those dives as safe as possible. And you know what, I'm going to wager that Cameron never, not even once, took for granted that he was journeying to one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet, and then at any moment anything could go wrong. To me he seems like a man that is profoundly respectful of the massive forces at play when you're diving down over 12,000 feet.
I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but everything I read about Titan makes it feel like some sort of fly by night. Obviously the owner believed in it, because he was on board, but it really goes to show you how quickly something so profoundly complex and risky can be normalized, and how inevitably that will lead to fatalities. There is nothing ordinary about a region of our planet with a pressure of around 375 atmospheres.
Honestly, it's also the best way that this could have gone. They almost certainly died before their brains could even register something had gone wrong. We should all be so lucky to go that way. Worse would have been marooned at 12,500 feet, freezing to death and suffocating, with enough time even after the oxygen ran out to ponder how horrible things were. Even worse than that would have been surfacing, but because the hatch is bolted from the outside, you might be able to see sky, but if they don't find you, you suffocate with breathable air only a few inches away.
Re: Oh no! It's a disaster! (Score:2, Insightful)
You can easily identify the tankies in this site, they always have been around. Their philosophy can be summed up thus: Anybody who is doing anything with their money beyond "feeding starving children" is doing something completely pointless and wasteful.
I mean, what good has exploration ever done anybody? Absolutely nothing at all other than let more children starve!
Why the fuck would anybody visit space when there are plenty of pictures of it on the internet? I mean, we're perfectly capable of studying it
Re:DEI finally got people killed (Score:5, Insightful)
His commitment to firing people who told him what he didn't want to hear is what got those people killed.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Both things could be and/or are true. It isn't an XOR operation.
Also, one fact does not diminish the other. In fact, one fact definitely could actually explain the other, but it could have been just the convenient "woke" excuse for being a douchebag. Which is kind of the reason to flex being woke in the first place "Hey, I'm a shitty CEO, but ignore that because I say the PC words certain people just LOVE To hear." I don't know which option is worse, being woke or just using it as a contrivance for being a
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Oh come now. I'm sure there are thousands of people dying and millions suffering because of varied CEO's commitments to crap like DEI. That crap is rampant throughout the medical and hospital industry for example. Not to mention the impact their academic counterparts are having, churning out incompetent medical practitioners and attorneys.
But he likely might the first where it is direct and can't be hidden by phacking and selective choice of statistics.
Re:DEI finally got people killed (Score:4, Insightful)
Or, could it have possibly been that they had an engineer that told them that their post-dive inspection routine wasn't adequate, and hi-lighted exactly the problems with using a carbon fiber / titanium construction - different thermal expansion rates lending to movements at the seams and joins combined with stress damage to the carbon fiber itself that would only be visible with x-ray imaging that they didn't do. And when carbon fiber gives up while under load, it usually does it in a very spectacular fashion. More beer-can crushing and ejection of the titanium cap at high speed than "hey, should there be water on the floor right now?"
What did they do? Fire the guy that told them the truth. This isn't woke run amok, this is ego and hubris run amok.
Re: DEI finally got people killed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: DEI finally got people killed (Score:5, Informative)
They had an engineer who warned them that their design was unsafe. They fired him and sued him. [abc7ny.com]
Does this at all change your appraisal of the situation?
Re: (Score:3)
Right, so if a young brown engineer said the same thing, they'd have listened... in your opinion.
Mod parent down (Score:3, Insightful)
I get that the OP is a troll, but there's people who believe this nonsense. Some of them even on this forum. Don't you ever get tired of being lied too?
Those lies have consequences. Maybe you'll ge
Re: (Score:3)
I for one would have taken the regulations with a grain of salt rather than the innovations being held back if said innovations were produced by uninspiring and experienced '50 year old white guys.' Increasingly the regulations are influenced by over-educated and inexperienced woke diversity hires this guy favored hiring.
The same 'screw experience and merit, we need equity' attitude is influencing the choice of education, the educators, the science, the peer review of the science etc that is used to program
Re:DEI finally got people killed (Score:5, Informative)
Then please read the transcript from a past interview with Rush. [breitbart.com]
He specifically puts down experts as "a bunch of 50 year old white guys"...and proudly espoused his diversity hires in place of experts.
This isn't made up the a right wing source...search around this interview transcripts can be found in any number of places out there on the internet.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
My advice: Exploit all this press coverage.
Now is the perfect time to advertise your real submarine, complete with fancy 3D renders.
Re:A tragedy for the rich (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The leopards ate well (Score:5, Informative)
I'm just glad it was $250k a ticket so at least the odds are good people of a similar mind are the ones who died.
One of them was a kid. His father was wealthy, sure; but let's not be too glib about the loss of life here.
Re: (Score:2)
I thought all passengers had to be over 18.
At some point everyone has to be responsible for their own life (and death, as it turns out) decisions.
Re:A German cartoonist captured my sentiments well (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:unsurprising (Score:4, Insightful)
To be honest: ballast made from construction steel pipe works just fine. Sub-optimal because it uses more space than necessary, but so what. Even marking it with tape and sharpie: why not? You drop it anyways.
Now, using only a game controller to steer? Listening to my kids complain how easily they fail: Yep, that one is pretty stupid, unless you brought several (tested) spares.
A carbon fiber pressure vessel? Well, carbon fibers are strong when pulled, not when pushed. Hence they needed many layers. And it will fail catastrophically w/o much warning. At least they were aware of that, it seems, even if there mitigation was, ahem, experimental.
Connecting carbon fiber to titanium to withstand those pressures? Also something I'd rather not have MacGyvered - who knows how well that works. Overall, if the guy had just jumped in by himself: sure. That's what explorers, adventurers, fools, or crazy people do. And that is totally ok, as long as you only endanger yourself.
When I read that they had 4 independent ways to detach the ballast (incl. the rope dissolving after 24 hours), I gave them that this was indeed a smart approach (did they test it? who knows). At least you would come up unless you tangle up. But I also was pretty sure at that point that likely they had imploded days ago.
Just reminds me why I neither want to travel into space nor to the bottom of the ocean. With professionals, that is. Forget about all the others.
Re:unsurprising (Score:5, Insightful)
This entire company was run by a delusional, brainwashed idiot. My favorite quote is "we don't hire 50 year old white guys that are ex-military because that's not inspiring" (paraphrased) (so he's one of those white savior, "minorities and women are less than me" types)
That's a whole lot of projection when in that breitbart article [breitbart.com] you're presumably referencing he doesn't say a damn thing about minorities or women. He's just talking about hiring young people who don't know anything about subs.
“So we’ve really tried to get very intelligent, motivated, younger individuals involved because we’re doing things that are completely new,” he added.
The OceanGate CEO also said that expertise was unnecessary, because “anybody can drive the sub” with a video game controller.
He also thought safety regulations and inspections and compliance just got in the way of innovation. Well, that didn't age well. Turns out building a sub with parts from the local camping supply store and labeling the ballast with masking tape and a Sharpie are actually bad ideas after all
On this we agree
and everyone else who isn't a delusional lefty was right. Who would have thought! THAT is what led tot his disaster. Don't let wokeness kill you. Don't be like this guy.
Funny how you see a story about an old rich white guy not following safety procedures and regulations and see a story about a lefty woke going awry.
Maybe just let a tragic disaster be a tragic disaster and don't try spinning it for your alt-right politics?
Re: unsurprising ... ? (Score:5, Insightful)
t0qer opined:
What a day to not have mod points. I don't see anything wrong with your comment. It's an actual quote, actual facts. The only troll/flamebait I see here is the CEO. If mods want to be mad at anyone, be mad at the CEO who said and did this stuff. CEC-P is just pointing out what was said and done.
So, "everyone else who isn't a delusional lefty was right" somehow isn't trolling?
You and I clearly have different definitions of the term.
The facts are facts. The quote is real - but the spin CEC-P puts on it is purely political.
The CEO's claim about diversity was an obvious smokescreen, as his denigration of "old, white men" makes clear. He was unquestionably a psychopath who hired and retained only people who wouldn't contradict him. Another "reality distortion field" MBA asshat, who was clearly convinced he could bend the laws of submarine engineering to his dominating will, and prove all the experts wrong, merely because he needed them to be wrong.
The dichotemy here is not between left and right. It's between sane and delusional ...