Submarine expert tried to dissuade OceanGate CEO, from taking customers in Titan
insider.com
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I feel so horrible for his family. It makes it hard to be cynical about this tragedy.
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.
Also I think she's only done this one interview. Even the question of "How are you?" was answered with contemplation, not hysterics...
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.
He strikes me as someone who could have had a very bright future, looks like a smart and confident young man.
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.
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.
Untrained smart people can be really bad at risk - a good shorthand is: can you get insurance for it and what is the price?
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.
FWIW, fatal experimental submarine accidents aren't the weirdest thing insurers have insured. https://havenlife.com/blog/craziest-things-insured-lloyds-lo...
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://nypost.com/2023/06/21/former-titanic-sub-passenger-d...
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 submarine got weaker each time they used it.)
Otherwise, we are all in this boat.
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.
If we criminalize puns, only criminals will make puns!
Vote No on Pun control.
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.
[1] https://abc7chicago.com/missing-titanic-sub-oceangate-lawsui...
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)
The average HN knowledge of engineering.
“Scalability turned out to be harder than we thought!”
Or it was statistical reversion to the mean.
One less than the number that it did.
Surely there was a large amount of tail risk.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No you can't. Experimental aircraft have to get certified by the FAA.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultralight_aircraft_(United_St...
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Straw man.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tip: hubris is a tell.
> 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.)
If it was regular tourists who save up for a once in a lifetime experience, I would feel differently.
If people want to do risky things, that's their business.
All of those require search and rescue type operations, should we ban them?
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.
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.
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.
https://archive.ph/20120911003148/http://www.sports-injury-l...
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.
> Under a strict liability theory, the plaintiff merely needs to prove:
- the defendant manufactured, distributed, or supplied a product;
- the product was defective;
- the defect caused injury to the plaintiff; and
- as a result, the plaintiff sustained damages.
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.
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.
https://bgswlaw.com/incorporation-personal-liability-protect...
https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/composite-submersib...
Six weeks. Classic checkbox-driven Technical Program Mismanagement (TPM) by whim of pseudo-technical overreaching hucksters.
I also wonder what changed between the Cyclops 2 and the Titan.
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.
In any case the submarine couldn't avoid the cyclops destiny and cyclopsioned entirely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is not the first submarine build and many of the other are still on duty after decades.
There’s no excuse with this. There’s no fuel or disposable parts so they could have run it a hundred times a day until it popped.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminaut
I only learned about this DSV a few days ago but it was really neat. It seems like the design OceanGate should have used.
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.
The hull was pressure tested in Russia. The amount of engineering was just immense compared to Titan.
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.
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.
SpaceX’s “new thing” was recovering the first stage, which made subsequent launches cheaper.
We have a LOT of engineering experience behind carbon fiber structures. Sometimes, you listen.
https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/spacex-announces-co...
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.
If every innovator listened to expert advice to stop, we’d have a lot less new things in the world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/24/ross-kemp-turn...
Am I just too uninformed or is this actual nonsense?
[1] https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/acoustic-monitoring-...
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
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?
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.
1: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/8PVWQ6hR7SsGLK9PDoCFdU-120...
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...
> 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.
[0] https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/composite-submersib...
[1] https://www.compositesworld.com/podcast/episode/episode-40-s...
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.
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.
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/oceangate-ceo-once-said-titan-1800225...
> Boeing initially declined to comment, but later said the company "has found no record of any sale of composite material to OceanGate or its CEO."
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.
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”.
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.
Now, it’s a woke smack down. Sad.
> But, then I’m a 50+ year old white guy, so unqualified to speak.
> Now, it’s a woke smack down. Sad.
Why?
There are plenty of other potential design flaws. The assertion that fibers are not good in compression is facile.
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.
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).
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!
They would fail immediately under even mild compression.
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.
Sadly, refugee boats capsize all the time in the Mediterranean, and there's no ongoing drama.
There might be a good discussion to be had here about refugee ships, but you'd need to find an angle of intellectual interest.
But if 2 billionaires get lost 4km under the sea level it's not a problem to start a multi-day search which I don't even want to know the cost of.
As usual people in general don't really care about refugees, a lost submarine just tickles our monkey-brains, I guess.
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.
> 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.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/11/27/18103071/psych...