... and still they did not abort the dive. In fact, they continued to go even deeper. Think about that for a second.
That's the stuff those explorers (and the people backing them) were made of. No wonder nobody has been to the Moon in 50 years. I can't even imagine where you would find an institution willing to let its employees take such risks today.
Uhm, OceansGate?
[1]From Schlock Mercenary's "Seventy Maxims of Maximially Effective Mercenaries".
https://www.ovalkwiki.com/index.php/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Ma...
The crew of the Trieste continued to descend knowing full well that their vessel was damaged.
That's not the same thing in my mind.
I feel like OceanGate did not really pay that much attention to window safety.
There was nothing abstract whatsoever about the lack of adequate preparation and responsibility taken: they did not certify, and they used components that were not rated for the depths of their dives, among many other things. This was not ignorance. This was boldly deciding not to care about safety. They ignored very vocal and direct outspoken concerns from all their peers in the industry for years, specific concerns about what they were doing that was not safe, and they ignored that too. Not abstract.
A reckless teenager driving at 120mph on the highway with no seatbelt is obviously in serious danger, but to their young, impulsive mind the danger may feel completely abstract.
> At 30,000 ft. a sharp crack rang through the ship, shaking it violently. The water pressure outside wasmore than 6 tons per sqare inch., and even a slight fracture in the hull would have meant certain death. It proved to be only an outer Plexiglas windowpane which had splintered under the pressure. The inner hull remained watertight. "A pretty hairy, experience," admitted Walsh.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070202144233/http://bjsonline....
They died all the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_expeditions
I don't know why that's laudable: if you die before you make it back, for most of these locations, that means whatever you've learned is lost as well, and someone has to take identical risk to learn it for humanity again.
Seems to be better to see the cracked pane, return to the surface with your lives, write a letter to your submarine enthusiast magazine group or whatever the equivalent of a web forum was back then noting that such and such glass installed in such and such way cracked at N depth, try a new method, and dive again.
> No wonder nobody has been to the Moon in 50 years.
Why bother when the ocean is infinitely more interesting?
> Observation of the sea outside the craft was conducted directly by eye, via a single, very tapered, cone-shaped block of Plexiglas, the only transparent substance identified which would withstand the external pressure.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trieste_(bathyscaphe)#Design
At least that's what I'd tell myself.
The guts it takes to not abort the dive seems just clinically insane to me
This article describes it in more detail: https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/don-walsh-describes-the-trip-t...