[flagged]
Of course the danger was considered, be realistic and stop letting class conflict cloud your judgement. Something being judged to be dangerous doesn't mean people won't do it, and people doing something dangerous doesn't mean they didn't consider the risks. People go skiing, base jumping down cliffs with wingsuits, cave diving and swimming with sharks. It's okay to do dangerous things if you know and accept the risks.
While it's not a conclusive link, it seems to me that people with a smaller financial safety net might not be as interested in such activities because they cannot stand the risk.
Offer up $5 USD p/hour and you'll be inundated with people with no financial safety net willing to take on great risk.
eg: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/6/19/cleaning-doha-wi...
That's really the key aspect of this story for you isn't it? Screw them because they're rich; I get that, but just own it.
And for the record, you don't need to be rich to go skiing and break your neck on a tree. A whole lot of working class people save up money for a vacation then go skiing. A whole lot of working class people save up money for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Hawaii and go scuba diving. If you find it hard to believe either of those scenarios then believe this: a whole lot of working class people buy motorcycles and drive them fast. Hell, when I was a teen I used to pedal my $100 bicycle down steep hills as fast as I could. Taking risks for thrills is something that's broadly accessible to just about anybody.
>Did it not occur to anyone that it might be a bad idea? It's hard to be sympathetic in the face of such arrogance
The company advertises the safety of their submersible and an active suite of sensors to detect and prevent failures.
Having been linked this elsewhere in the thread I don't quite like the fact that they're so brazen that they bought internal lighting from Camping World and drive it with a Logitech USB gamepad and using half-ass construction piping as a ballast.
Or the fact that they scrubbed a Titanic launch for the media due to weather (presenting from some kind of briefing room where they presented from a laptop on top of a Breville cooker box), went elsewhere, then scrubbed THAT launch while in the water because the launch platform floats detached...
As opposed to the professionals who went with a microsoft xbox controller? [1]
> Or the fact that they scrubbed a Titanic launch for the media due to weather
Yes? Weather is a thing. This is not a ride at disney land, of course they cancel the operation when the circumstances are not favorable. In fact doing the opposite would be foolish.
The company in question might be full of jokers, but your points don’t quite illistrate this well. They are about appearances and not substance.
1: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/18/17136808/us-navy-uss-colo...
I think what's more telling is that they didn't even splurge on the actual Microsoft Xbox controller. They cheaped out with an unproven logitech gamepad. When you're already doing something in an unorthodox way at least don't half-ass it.
> The company in question might be full of jokers, but your points don’t quite illistrate this well. They are about appearances and not substance.
Your distinction is a bit arbitrary. Every point about this company will always be about appearances unless you have first-hand accounts or experiences. Otherwise, info on the company's technology, choices, strategies or anything else will always be based on appearance. In the absence of more concrete evidence, these small indicators can at least provide something to infer from.
Not really. Here is a substance based argument: there is no underwater FAA. This company, and any other private submarine company is setting their own quality level and then marking their own homework to see if they have met it. In a commercial environment they are incentivised to cut corners and there is no external force resisting this.
Then you can ask them about their tech and procedures. Do they have redundant means of communication? Do they have multiply redundant means to release the ballast? How many hull penetrations there are and how are they implemented? If they are unwilling to discuss these questions that is worse than a bad answer.
Some comments are criticising their choice of carbon fiber for the middle section of their pressure vessel. I don’t know enough about the engineering there to decide for myself if that criticism is fair or not but that is an argument about substance not appearance.
To me, that seems crazy. Having a GPS beacon seems like a no-brainer for safety purposes. It feels indicative of the engineering as a whole.
Please if you are incentivized to cut $10 on the main control interface of your expensive sub that also is to drive your business, you have some fundamental cultural problems beyond "commercial environment".
Please if you are incentivized to cut $10 on the main control interface of your expensive sub that is incredibly low volume production, you have some fundamental cultural problems and its not a business decision.
The Xbox controllers have an astronomical number of testing hours on them by now.
The PlayStation controllers are more popular globally, but have not had a great track record when it comes to operation with anything but a PlayStation.
I get what you're saying, though, and I'm not faulting them for using an off-the-shelf product. I'm faulting them for using a substandard product.
Also, with respect to emergency ballast - cheapness is a virtue. You're supposed to drop it in an emergency, and hesitating because "I don't want to lose my expensive weights" could kill you. This is a consideration for recreational scuba too, instructors recommend buying cheap weight belts (and the companies selling expensive ones usually advertise "free replacement if you use them in an emergency").
Building the controls with wired arcade buttons and an arcade joystick would be a little pricier but you'd get parts designed to take a beating, plenty of real world usage to demonstrate this and no potentially flaky usb/wireless stack that you have no control over to deal with.
Those controllers have millions of hours of playtesting by people that are sensitive to the slightest twitch. I'd trust them more than most automotive components.
I'm more curious to know how they run the control lines. A thruhull at 400 atmospheres must be something special. Or maybe it's wireless to the machinery outside? But the carbon fibre and titanium enclosure would be a problem.
The company lost a submersible for four hours on a previous dive. They don't talk about that. In fact, they killed the internet so the reporter that happened to be onboard couldn't report it. (That's what we call, a "cover up".) Putting much weight into a company declaring their commitment to safety is a bit of a fool's errand. Even the most reckless company says that safety is paramount.
Looks like they did a real half-assed job at exactly that.
Also, they were there visiting a place filled with dead and probably long decomposed people, can’t say I’m very sympathetic.
I've got no real thoughts on the "stupidity" of doing this, but visiting the wreck of a famous ship doesn't seem an obviously unsympathetic thing to do compared to visiting the ruins of a city.
> Organic materials fared better in the anaerobic conditions, and so wood, cloth and leather are often in very good condition, but objects exposed to the currents were eroded by the sediment in the water, so that some are barely recognizable.[43] Objects which fell off the hull into the mud after the nails corroded through were well protected, so that many of the sculptures still retain areas of paint and gilding. Of the human remains, most of the soft tissue was consumed, leaving only the bones, which were often held together only by clothing, although in one case, hair, nails and brain tissue survived.[44]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)#Deterioration
The brain in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD8xOCoct4w
And generally, visiting ~none of those other places is a brag-worthy way to show off being one of the modern 0.1%. (Which, these days, gets very little sympathy in many quarters. Even without the "vultures draped in diamonds" aspect here.)
I'm trying to explain the sentiments which user paganel originally voiced - which I suspect are kinda common. My sense is that the strong negative feeling are tied to how much of a "just too many emotional points against it" corner case this is. A famous & famously tragic shipwreck, the dangers inherent in their extreme tourism, how very few people can imagine "it coulda been someone like me in that little sub", the "mass grave" scale of death, the kinda-mythical "forbidden underworld" aura to the site, etc., etc.
If this had been the original diving expedition to the Titanic to find the wreck for the first time, or even the followups, and people had potentially died then, I doubt we would have had this many people out in the comments about how its distasteful and they're hoping it would dissuade anyone from doing it again.
At least "I hate rich people" is a consistent view whether you agree or not. Trying to make that view more socially acceptable by adding new and inconsistent layers on top about how visiting a place people died is inherently something that makes them unsympathetic just feels weird.
Yes, some. But my feel is that if a similar number of even-richer people had (say) died in the crash of a luxury helicopter ferrying them to Everest Base Camp, then the negative reaction would have been far less notable.
But to sell tickets (worth a staggering 250k) in order to visit the burial place of a couple thousand people is just not ok, it destroys the place’s sacred aura.
Just imagine if they had left the ruins of the Twin Towers in place, including the dead and decomposing people under those ruins, and if they had started selling tickets in order to visit said place. Totally not ok.
It's not as if they're going to look at the dead bodies, and as someone else points out, there's almost no chance there's intact remains left at that depth after all this time. There's plenty of less-deep shipwrecks all over the Caribbean or other coastal areas where people probably died that are normal enough to scuba dive into and I'm not sure people think that that's distasteful.
The "you spent how much on this" part is something I'm absolutely fine with people taking issue with, but it doesn't seem that much more gauche than flying to space or just flying your private jet around.
Of course the risks were considered.
There is absolutely no need for the arbitrary hostility.
Billionaire: "Tell me about the risks"
OceanGate: "We use military grade equipment! It's risk-free"
Billionaire: "Sign me up"
Jokes aside, I wonder if billionaires do assess more thoroughly the risks than any normal person. They can easily dedicate a team to assess the risks to their various activities.
There is no worry about not being able to go to work if you get injured.
There is no worry about getting fired for "not representing the corporate values" because you did something sexy.
Same for substance use or abuse.
Only the people in the middle have to care about all that stuff.
Rush also said during the interview, "You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed."
"Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything," he added. "At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk/reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules."[0]
Were that not our inclination as a species we'd never have left the Earth or sailed the seas.
I'd also imagine that the tourists trusted the reputation of the operator. Both the state of the equipment and that their safety checks and processes were stringent. Especially since they claimed to aid in the science.
There aren't many priors for civilian submarine disasters.
Seriously: this is off the charts dangerous, the reputation of the operator is as good as their last dive.
Those things work right up to the moment that they do not, this stuff is at the cutting edge of technology and tourists simply have absolutely no place there. The only reason those rich folks tend to do stuff like this is because they like to brag about such stuff, not because they're interested in the science behind it (if they were they likely wouldn't go). The Titanic is less accessible than space.
Across history, for every 4 people who have summitted K2, 1 person has died trying.
It’s quite possible that they considered it and felt that it would compromise the structural integrity and the risk would be higher than not having it.