New evidence strongly suggests that OceanGate’s submersible, which imploded and killed all passengers on its way to the Titanic wreck, was unfit for the journey. The CEO, Stockton Rush, bought discounted carbon fiber past its shelf life from Boeing, which experts say is a terrible choice for a deep-sea vessel. This likely played a role in the submersible’s tragic demise.
That guy was a backyard inventor and charlatan, like those 19th century backyard aircraft inventors. It’s one thing to take yourself out of the gene pool through your own recklessness, it’s another to take others with you.
Rush bypassed over a hundred years of engineering lessons learned the hard way with the rationale it stifles innovation. He even fired and sued one of his own employees for calling him out on it. The sub had zero certifications and then he lied to customers about it saying his designs were approved by NASA and Boeing who never even heard of the guy.
Aside from the lack of safety engineering and lack of proper fail-safes in his design, there’s a reason engineers don’t use carbon fiber composites in subs. They have a tendency to delaminate. When used in aircraft, composites have to be examined and certified at a regular service interval with special inspection equipment.
I think that sub was an accident waiting to happen from day one. The hull probably failed due to inspection negligence and a failure to detect delamination. That’s even if the hull could have been rated properly for 4km. If it wasn’t the hull, it would been one of the other jury-rigged systems.
I can’t believe people smart enough to acquire the wealth for that excursion weren’t smart enough to check out the qualifications of the company hosting it. I think it was plainly obvious just looking at the sub yourself. A navigation system that consists of a consumer laptop PC and Logitech gaming controller should have been a dead giveaway.
You do not need to be smart to acquire wealth.
Of the people in the sub, I am confident that 4/5 of them were born into wealth, and I can’t really find any information on the other one.
The Dawoods (father and son) were only wealthy because their father/grandfather was wealthy.
Stockton Rush was also born into wealth, his family made their money from oil and shipping.
Can’t find a lot of information about Hamish Harding, but he was flying aeroplanes at 13 and went to a prestigious private school called The King’s School, so it’s safe to say he was also born into considerable wealth.
The 5th guy worked for the company that owned the salvage rights to the Titanic, was a professional diver, and was considered an expert on the Titanic, and he’d been on a lot of dives before to recover artifacts and map the wreck.
He more than anyone should have known this was the crappiest sub he’d ever been on, but he was seemingly obsessed. I can imagine he was invited and didn’t pay for a slot.
The Titanic expert diver seemed to act as a tour guide, based on video of a previous excursion.
Initially, I thought Stockton Rush couldn’t be a total moron because he had a degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton, but having followed the college admissions scandal, we know what those degrees are actually worth. Crap.
The college admissions scandal was for people who didn’t have enough money to donate for an entrance ticket. If you’re rich rich you just donate a bunch of money and your kid gets in, no scandal necessary
I don’t get why carbon fiber was used in the first place. The composite material is known for its great tensile strength: tensile as in tension, not compression. Carbon fiber is actually also known for being lousy at handling crushing (compressive) loads. If you crush carbon fiber, it’ll fail shortly after.
Going under water would place the vessel under compressive loads, which at a quick glance would be the wrong type of loads for carbon fiber. That’s my initial take on it, however I haven’t spent any real time trying to engineer one.
First, he was an aerospace guy and several things he’s said make me think he was sort of chauvinistic about deep sea exploration in general, stuff like “It’s perfectly fine. Having all these certifications for airplanes is one thing, but the carbon fiber was perfectly sound.”
Second, his business model, taking four people down with him in something other than Cameronesque claustrophia, and doing so without the cost of owning a proper launch vessel, instead renting any ship that could hold and then monitor his launch sled, meant it was critical he make something big and light, by deep sea submersible standards, that was at least nominally expected to handle the load. Shit, I guess in some sense, he did, since it went down and back two or three times or whatever. At the absolute best, though, he’d invented a disposable sub, and he clearly didn’t worry about that limitation any more than the rest.
— How l’any atmospheres can the ship withstand!?
— Well, it’s a spaceship, so I’d say anywhere between zero and one…
Wait right here! …toilet flushing sounds in background…
Fiber composites are complex. Carbon fibers can be made to withstand compressive loads in that you make composites with the CF and other materials. Even so carbon fibers are about half as strong in compression as tension. Even so, carbon fiber might have a specific strength of around 3000 kN-m/kg, steels might be around 63 kN-m/kg. So it’s not as simple as “carbon fiber isn’t as good in compression as tension, never use it in compression.” A lot of current research in aerospace is to produce better manufacturing methods and resins for carbon fibers to phase out aluminum and steel parts. Mostly in tension yes, but compression too, all parts without preloading generally are some degree in compression during their stress lives.
Should he have bought expired carbon fiber for a submarine? No. Is carbon fiber completely absurd in submarine usage? I don’t imagine so. Though steel is plenty fine for a submarine, normally the hard part is the sinking by design, not the floating, so weight savings aren’t super important.
I have absolutely zero knowledge on deep sea submersibles but every bit of reporting I’ve read or listened to over the past week has said that carbon fiber is a very poor choice for a deep sea vehicle. Given its propensity to eventually delaminate, it is much more likely to fail over repeated uses than titanium or the other materials the industry uses (I’ve primarily heard comparisons to titanium).
Delamination is just carbon fiber composites main mode of failure. As long as the material you use is rated for its stress life it’s fine. Buying expired material means the resin was decomposing, making the carbon fiber composite more prone to failure.
All materials eventually fail, some have endurance limits with infinite stress lives, like most steels. Some don’t, like aluminum. Without knowing the details of their design there’s not an easy way to say whether carbon fiber was even a bad choice at all. But buying expired carbon fiber absolutely is a bad idea for anything critical.
The stress life curves for carbon fibers vary a lot, they certainly won’t be as nice or long lasting as most metal alternatives, but that just means more replacement or maintenance, something a luxury submarine doesn’t necessarily care about as much.
He learned nothing, he is dead. Hopefully others will learn from that.
“Safety regulations are written in blood”
That’s putting it harshly.
Would be interesting so see a statistic on deep water sub excursions versus fatalities. Probably somewhere between astronauts and WWII bomber crews.
There is little regulation for deep sea subs since they operate in international waters out of jurisdiction. You can pretty much do whatever the hell you want out there. If someone manufactures within jurisdiction, regulations may apply. Though they would be easy to circumvent.
Definitely good safety and engineering practice is written in blood, but regulations are not always enforceable.
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Some record breakers don’t bother but those are always manned by one person as a private venture and still follow those rules as guidelines. They just don’t bother with the formality. The challenger deep wasn’t for example. No one balks at that because the people involved knew what they were doing and used pretty sound and tested engineering.
Protip: you can set dates on a Google search to avoid recent news when trying to look up historical information.
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Can you set times to ignore new articles? I thought you can only ignore old articles.
You can do a custom date range including an end date.
Problem with the norms is it’s harder to fit five people in a proper sub than a cheap sub. He wanted to “innovate” (cut corners for profit and fame) not do things the right way
Honestly, the most surprising thing is that they managed 6 successful dives to titanic before it failed.
And that they convinced multiple billionaires, who are generally assumed to be smarter and better educated than the rest of us, to step aboard that blatantly-unseaworthy deathtrap.
Guess what, billionaires aren’t smarter than everyone else. Usually it’s just existing wealth, luck and a lack of morals that gets them there.
The system is rigged to make it much much easier to make money if you already have money.
There are a lot of different types of characteristics that get described as ‘smart.’ Risk aversion is often categorized as ‘smart,’ as in “I’m too smart to do something that risky,” but that is definitely not something billionaires are known for - you can’t get that much money without big risky bets paying off.
Rich people don’t really seem to be smart so much as they just have a sort of rat-like cunning that confers high performance at screwing people and stealing shit.
On the contrary, I’ve long been of the opinion that anyone can claim their slice of the American Dream, just as long as they aren’t too picky about who they carve it out of. There doesn’t even need to be risk, per se, just some ambition, enough intelligence to know the limits of you can get away with, and a complete lack of shame.
Lack of shame doesn’t do you any good financially if you aren’t using it to take social risks that people with shame wouldn’t
But that’s my point. The only real risk is that somebody with an overgrown sense of morality might think badly of you. As long as you don’t cross the line of hurting someone who matters (in the sense of being rich or powerful) you can just reenact that meme of Jason Statham wiping his tears with wads of cash, and get on with the exploitation.
Stress fatigue and fractures doesn’t show itself after one dive without completely tearing down the craft and inspecting components - and this was probably the deepest dive they’ve been on.
pressure increases on a log scale the deeper you go, so you need to account for that, evidently, they did not account for it, and they also failed to understand requirements for regular teardowns and inspections of prototypes.
Honestly I don’t find it surprising at all.
There are multiple times where people have died due to fractures as a stress fatigue in different areas.
I remember a story about the crash of United Airlines flight 232, in where a DC-10 suffering an undetected stress fracture after many flights finally broke an engine to the point of it severing out all hydraulic lines to the control surfaces - they had to try and land the plane via throttle. It’s actually a very interesting story if you want to look it up - they even made a movie for it.
The issue here is the number of dives it took before something failed catastrophicly - you usually engineer it to withstand the stress for X number of dives - 6 dives are far too few and and it is indicative of poor design and poor maintenance. - compare UA232 where it only happened after multiple years and 200+flights before it finally failed catastrophicly.
Pressure increases linearly in water because it’s not compressible. You’re probably thinking about the exponential increase in air
Whoops, I guess I made a mistake. Ah well.
I have met several gazillionaires. Some are quite smart, some not so much - but every one of them thinks that they’re smarter and more capable than they are
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Being smart is a strict non-requirement for acquireing wealth. You really don’t need to be smart to get wealthy. You need to be unscrupulous enough to rip off others. You need to be happy to gamble a lot of money on risky ventures and you need to be lucky enough that the risky ventures work out and don’t blow up.
And inheriting lots of money and connections usually helps as well.
Incidentally, this seems to fit the bill for someone who’d pay a quarter million to poop in front of 4 people on the way to an assisted suicide where in the best case you can watch a video feed of the Titanic.
I wonder if there was some level of wealthy person peer pressure involved. Rich people aren’t that stupid (I’m being generous here and looking for reasons) and maybe there would be some backlash in not going ahead with things, even if red flags were found. It’s not like those flags were hard to see, apparently anyone in the submersible field knew this guy and what he was doing wrong.