RIP to these guys, yes it was a risky trip. But it was into international waters and they were AFAIC explorers.
Stuff like this can not be done without risk.
Hopefully future subs will have more safety features.
Stuff like this can not be done without risk.
Hopefully future subs will have more safety features.
Just in our solar system, we have found evidence of oceans on Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus; Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto; Neptune’s moon Triton; and on Pluto.
If we want to explore these oceans we will need to understand how to build lightweight subs that can tolerate extream pressures.
This tragedy will help humanity explore the solar system. I for one salute the explorers who died they have helped push us all forward.
It should be safer, but everything is done to a price point and I'm sure those on board recognised the risk of such an expedition.
Optimist.
I don't think Covid is by any means "just the flu", but I definitely think the risk of dying from it is significantly less than a visit to the Titanic.
https://twitter.com/MikeReissWriter/status/15450925299718184...
https://bleav.com/shows/what-am-i-doing-here-with-mike-reiss...
Repeatedly cycling carbon fiber in compression is a bad idea, and a CEO that throws out the rulebook and shows a very cavalier attitude to safety is fine if it is just you on board but with paying passengers it is utterly irresponsible.
I'm quite curious about this, too. I'm not so sure. I think even if you are not an engineer, it should be quite easy to understand how under-tested this vehicle is compared to, say, a commercial jet airliner, and how much more difficult the application is at the same time. These were business men running companies of some size. It should come with basic work experience to reason about how proven processes or articles are.
I think it's more likely that the threshold for "you know what? let's take our chances" works differently for different people.
For example: I would never get LASIK eye surgery, safety statistic be damned, because the consequences in the unlikely event of failure are too large for me. And yet many other people know the data just as well and make a different call.
We're comparing technology where safety is measured in incidents per hundred million miles traveled to one where the total number of annual travelers can fit into a single jumbo jet.
Even helicopters have a fatal accident rate that's at most 1 per 100,000 flight hours (in the US at least).
This sub seems to have a fatal accident rate of 1 per 1,000 hours at best
Challenger's disaster was the 25th shuttle flight.
Columbia's disaster was the 113th shuttle flight.
I'm pretty sure you could find large numbers of people who would happily climb on board a shuttle mission today, even knowing that history.
For policy purposes, killing people has a cost that can be estimated by the statistical value of a human life (especially if the people are volunteers with full knowledge of the risk.) The value of a human life is about $9 M (which comes from estimates of how much government spending is needed to save 1 life, for example by medical care, installing guard rails on roads, etc.). If there was a 2% risk of death of the seven crew on a flight, this would have added $1.26M to the expected cost of a launch. This was small compared to the actual cost of a launch.
Viewed another way: a $900 M (say) shuttle launch would be killing 100 statistical people each and every launch (in the sense that the money spent on the launch, if spent elsewhere, could avoid 100 deaths). If the results of the launch are worth that many statistical deaths, why not .14 more?
[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1461368.stm
But I still hope that this will bring some innovation - in form of stricter regulation for tourism.
I'm sad for everyone that died TBH. The website for OceanGate was taken down, but when I took a look yesterday it was full of stuff about how their pedigree and NASA/MIT tech, etc. I can see myself buying that, I'm not exactly a marine expert.
Not to mention it went down there something like 40 times already? It's not really fair to assume the passengers would have known the things that have come out since the submersible went missing.
Most damning to me, is that the sub's design was derived from Virgin's DeepFlight Challenger, which was scrapped because they could only be sure it was safe for a single dive due to the carbon composite hull.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepFlight_Challenger
As a final point, one of the victims was a seasoned explorer (Paul-Henri Nargeolet) and Titanic expert, having gone on multiple prior expeditions. Kind of arrogant to assume we'd all know better and somehow have all this knowledge that has come out since the sub disappeared.
From an engineering standpoint, Titan didn't have any safety features at all. What any sane engineer would recommend as a last-ditch backup system Oceangate relied on as a single-point-of-failure.
No phone. No beacon. Budget bluetooth controller and touchscreens. Electronics you'd expect to find in an RV. All from a CEO who flaunted his corner-cutting and apathy towards safety.
We should never do this again.
After this, anyone boarding a future tourist sub to the Abyssal Zone or deeper is asking for it.
This isn't quite true. It had multiple redundant ways to drop ballast, for example.
What I would say from what I was able to find out (and with some familiarity of safety engineering processes from work; I make cars) is that it's safety-concept was very spotty. It had solutions to some problems, but also large gaps in the safety concept. Safety was not addressed in holistic fashion.
It's interesting to compare this with solutions found in other subs. For example, Titan had four different ways to drop ballast, but from the list I saw, all of them required manual intervention by a non-incapacitated crew and electronics to be working.
On Cameron's Deepsea Challenger--by another rich guy who funded a vanity dive, and relying on homebrew innovations in material science--ballast was held by corrosible wire that would be corroded by seawater in a set time, so the sub would eventually surface automatically. Ballast drop was also triggerable remotely by an acoustic signal, more reliable than radio. The available info is pretty bad, but Titan may not have had those solutions in place.
I'm very much out of my depth (no pun intended) on naval/submarine engineering, and I'm hoping for someone with better knowledge to extend that comparison somewhere.
Would an iPod glued to the inside that played yellow Submarine by the Beatles.
At what range would that be detectable? How long could it last?
Edit: even better this banger on loop https://youtu.be/uzR5jM9UeJA
'FSD' scam killing people and the myriads other problems aside:
1. https://www.autoevolution.com/news/we-need-to-talk-about-tes...
2. https://www.slashgear.com/1075194/whats-up-with-teslas-whomp... https://www.flickr.com/photos/136377865@N05/albums/721576584...
I wouldn't even buy a used carbon fiber road bike.