Submersible visiting the Titanic has gone missing
June 19, 2023 9:29 AM Subscribe

Live reporting at the BBC. It is unclear how many people were on board. The submersible belonged to OceanGate, a company that has been offering tours to the Titanic, two miles deep in the North Atlantic. Tickets: $250,000 per person. A search-and-rescue mission is underway, led by the U. S. Coast Guard.
posted by beagle (1159 comments total) 38 users marked this as a favorite

Oh goodness! I saw this headline earlier and assumed it was an unmanned submarine. I had no idea they were taking people down to the wreck! I hope this ends well for all involved.
posted by hippybear at 9:30 AM on June 19, 2023 [11 favorites]

Honestly, this doesn't seem to be the sort of event that lends itself to a live feed? The CBC have an article here: Submarine bound for Titanic goes missing
posted by sagc at 9:31 AM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thomas Dolby has the soundtrack.

Fingers crossed they make it back safely.
posted by chavenet at 9:38 AM on June 19, 2023 [7 favorites]

Photos of the Titan submersible here, including the interior. It’s a pretty small space.

I hope they are found safe and soon.
posted by mochapickle at 9:43 AM on June 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

...Pushes my claustrophobia button HARD. Fuuuuuck.

Hoping for a good outcome.
posted by Artful Codger at 9:47 AM on June 19, 2023 [9 favorites]

I feel like I’ve seen this movie. In real life, I hope it turns out better.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:48 AM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

There is a reason that almost all deep sea research is done with robots these days. The deep sea, like space, is unfathomably inhospitable to human life. There is nothing down there that requires a human to be present. These people should never have been down there in the first place.
posted by rockindata at 9:48 AM on June 19, 2023 [78 favorites]

...unfathomably inhospitable...

I see what you did there.

So few details in these reports. Was the sub heading to the wreck? On its way back from the wreck? At the wreck?
posted by Thorzdad at 9:51 AM on June 19, 2023 [7 favorites]

Damn; I had seen ads for this on FB, and as cool as it would be to see the Titanic, I was immediately ruled out by the $250,000.00 price tag (among other things). I hope it is just a communication glitch, but this is pretty worrying.
posted by TedW at 9:55 AM on June 19, 2023

I hope it is just a communication glitch, but this is pretty worrying.

There aren't a lot of "just" problems when those problems are happening almost four kilometers below sea level.
posted by mhoye at 9:58 AM on June 19, 2023 [22 favorites]

It was only supposed to be under for eight hours, returning Sunday evening.

Video of the interior.
posted by mochapickle at 10:00 AM on June 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

the submersible is "hours late" from a 2 hour return trip and communications are down. that really does not bode well. hopefully the crew will be recovered safely but I agree with the above, its far too dangerous to be taking tourism dives down there.
posted by supermedusa at 10:02 AM on June 19, 2023 [7 favorites]

There aren't a lot of "just" problems when those problems are happening almost four kilometers below sea level.

Yeah, this isn't good at all. Happy to be wrong but I have a bad feeling about this. The room for error down that deep is miniscule.
posted by fortitude25 at 10:08 AM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

...unfathomably inhospitable...

Actually 2,100 fathoms. Still inhospitable.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:08 AM on June 19, 2023 [35 favorites]

Judging from the Oceangate twitter account (@OceanGateExped) and website they must have gotten through the first 2 dives (maybe 3 or this latest one may have been the third?) in the last few weeks of a planned 18 or so

I really hope they make it back - a hell of an experience to live through. But If the worst has happened, I hope it was instantaneous for those onboard.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 10:13 AM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm having trouble deciding which is the decision displaying the poorer judgement: getting inside a tin can about to go two miles deep in the ocean, or paying quarter of a million dollars for a joyride.
posted by flabdablet at 10:15 AM on June 19, 2023 [30 favorites]

David Pogue's account of going on a previous dive.

And yet, I couldn't help noticing how many pieces of this sub seemed improvised, with off-the-shelf components. Piloting the craft is run with a video game controller.

Pogue said, "It seems like this submersible has some elements of MacGyver jerry-riggedness. I mean, you're putting construction pipes as ballast."

"I don't know if I'd use that description of it," Rush said. "But, there are certain things that you want to be buttoned down. The pressure vessel is not MacGyver at all, because that's where we worked with Boeing and NASA and the University of Washington. Everything else can fail, your thrusters can go, your lights can go. You're still going to be safe."

posted by kirkaracha at 10:15 AM on June 19, 2023 [19 favorites]

British billionaire Hamish Harding thought to be onboard. Here’s his instagram post mentioning a dive that day.
posted by mochapickle at 10:18 AM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I couldn't help noticing how many pieces of this sub seemed improvised, with off-the-shelf components. Piloting the craft is run with a video game controller.

This is such a weird take. You could easily imagine, in the opposite case, someone saying "Rather than relying on well-tested off-the-shelf components with years of industrial expertise and testing behind them, the crew uses a custom-made input board to pilot the craft. It's unclear what advantages, if any, this has over a standard video game controller."

And pipes as ballast? Yes, literally anything with mass is ballast. Any object that falls when you drop it meets the specification.
posted by 0xFCAF at 10:24 AM on June 19, 2023 [22 favorites]

airplane_movie_counterpoint.gif
posted by slogger at 10:24 AM on June 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

it's true. I am a very bad person. I chuckled when I saw the headline in the Guardian. And then I actually laughed when I saw that the Titanic Book Club had tweeted its "thoughts and prayers".

It's true. I am a terrible person.
posted by philip-random at 10:26 AM on June 19, 2023 [29 favorites]

Nightmare scenario. The reports do say the ship has 96 hours of life support so if that hasn't been compromised and the sub hasn't gone too far from where it's supposed to be, it's possible the crew might be recovered alive. But that's a lot of "ifs."

And then there's the question of what could recover them! Probably it should not be legal to undertake activities recreationally where there is genuinely no way to rescue you if things go wrong.
posted by praemunire at 10:28 AM on June 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

David Pogue's account of going on a previous dive.

Even in that article he mentions : But on this dive, communications somehow broke down. The sub never found the wreck. ""We were lost," said Shrenik Baldota. "We were lost for two-and-a-half hours."

So must be pretty serious extended communication loss at this point given they have gotten to the "call the Coast Guard" point given they appear to have been fine with a multi-hour loss before. Also I'm sure somewhere a legal firm is spinning up a team gathering these sorts of comments.....
posted by inflatablekiwi at 10:28 AM on June 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

must be pretty serious extended communication loss at this point given they have gotten to the "call the Coast Guard" point

If there's a billionaire on board, they may be a wee scoche more anxious, though.
posted by praemunire at 10:28 AM on June 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

The company bills the eight-day trip on its carbon-fibre submersible as a "chance to step outside of everyday life and discover something truly extraordinary".

Eight days, and made of carbon fiber. How do you measure carbon fiber fatigue?
posted by jamjam at 10:30 AM on June 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

Likely most all of the passengers are billionaires.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 10:31 AM on June 19, 2023 [15 favorites]

Doesn't look like the submersible traveled under its own power for eight days (which wouldn't make a lot of sense), but rather was brought to the site by a larger ship.
posted by praemunire at 10:32 AM on June 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

I am a terrible person.

though in my defence, I did just see Triangle Of Sadness and it obviously did something to my empathy centres with regard to absurdly rich people finding the kind of dire circumstances that only absurdly rich people could afford to find.
posted by philip-random at 10:32 AM on June 19, 2023 [27 favorites]

Likely most all of the passengers are billionaires.

They occasionally invite artists on board. A friend of mine has been on this vessel and is most assuredly not a billionaire. I hope the crew are recovered safely regardless of their bank accounts. Some of the comments here could be more empathetic.
posted by oulipian at 10:39 AM on June 19, 2023 [82 favorites]

And then there's the question of what could recover them!

Navies that operate submarines have this capability, to varying extents.

Sweden has the Belos. Position last publicly logged at Karlskrona on 6/1 from what I can see online. I don't know how fast it can get to the area, if it's still there.

There are DSRVs that can be airlifted, but I don't know if the USN ever replaced the retired Mystic class. It might be this NATO SRS.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:42 AM on June 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

Likely most all of the passengers are billionaires.

From the Pogue article:

"We've had people who have mortgaged their home to come and do the trip. And we have people who don't think twice about a trip of this cost. We had one gentleman who had won the lottery."

One of the people had been saving up to see the Titanic for 30 years.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:43 AM on June 19, 2023 [25 favorites]

Absolutely terrifying. Hope they're found/rescued soon.
posted by obfuscation at 10:49 AM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Probably it should not be legal to undertake activities recreationally where there is genuinely no way to rescue you if things go wrong.

In many places, if you require rescue then you will (after the fact) have to pay for said rescue, which seems like a reasonable approach that balances experience-seeking with responsibility-enforcing. Turns out SAR gets really expensive really really fast; I can't even imagine how much this type of thing would cost.
posted by aramaic at 10:51 AM on June 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

“The pressure vessel is not MacGyver at all, because that's where we worked with Boeing and NASA and the University of Washington. Everything else can fail, your thrusters can go, your lights can go. You're still going to be safe.”

Dangerously close to saying that the state-of-the-art hull makes the ship unsinkable.
posted by mbrubeck at 10:52 AM on June 19, 2023 [104 favorites]

One of the people had been saving up to see the Titanic for 30 years.

I’m happy to stand corrected on this. Thanks.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 10:55 AM on June 19, 2023 [7 favorites]

Are there any orca pods nearby?
posted by hypnogogue at 10:56 AM on June 19, 2023 [22 favorites]

→ How do you measure carbon fiber fatigue?

Fibre-reinforced composites fail in a very different way to solid materials. Since the strong fibres are brittle, they break over time and afterwards contribute very little to the strength of the structure. There's no forgiving plastic yield that make mild steel the lifesaver it is. Mild steel would be about as much use as Raoul Mitgong in this application, though.

Composite structures can look almost fine until they fail. If I were running this vessel (I wouldn't) I'd want to have strict logs of submersion time and depths along with as regular non-destructive testing of the hull for flaws. Any unexpected impacts should require an inspection.

The only merciful detail is that if the hull were breached at 4 km, the end would be mercifully quick. It's about 400 atm down there.

I don't want to think about this further. Godspeed.
posted by scruss at 11:01 AM on June 19, 2023 [34 favorites]

It's cast as "Qualified explorers have the opportunity to join the expedition as Mission Specialist crewmembers whose Training and Mission Support Fees underwrite the mission, the participation of the science team, and their own training. Each team of 6 Mission Specialists will join the expedition for a 10-day mission (8 Days at Sea). The entire expedition is comprised of 5 mission legs." So it's not being sold as this frivolous little thing. (Now, is their research actually useful? I don't know.)

Navies that operate submarines have this capability, to varying extents.

How do you rescue someone from a submersible? Do naval subs ever go this deep?
posted by praemunire at 11:03 AM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

I should note that the BBC's reporting suggests the depths may be beyond the capabilities of the standard naval sub rescue systems; and mating the hatches might not be possible. (Which...not a great design choice if so.)

How do you rescue someone from a submersible?

The wiki article on that SRS talks about it a little, in the naval context.

I'm not sure what the US Navy has for operational or research purposes; the BBC says that naval rescue operations don't typically go to this depth, and the wiki article on the NATO system says it's good to 1000m.
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:03 AM on June 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

I think you rescue the submersible and get the people out, you don't get them out to bring them to the surface.

I thought this was maybe a tethered vessel? They said something about there being a platform it's lowered into the water from, but maybe it disconnects once it is submerged.
posted by hippybear at 11:04 AM on June 19, 2023

The movie Kursk: The Final Voyage - which I happened to watch last week - mentions a sub purchased from the Russian Navy, saying it's now being used for tourists' visits to the Titanic. Is this it?
posted by Paul Slade at 11:05 AM on June 19, 2023

This is such a weird take. You could easily imagine, in the opposite case, someone saying "Rather than relying on well-tested off-the-shelf components with years of industrial expertise and testing behind them, the crew uses a custom-made input board to pilot the craft. It's unclear what advantages, if any, this has over a standard video game controller."

Another datapoint: At least 30 years ago I had a tour of a General Dynamics facility where they worked on control systems for nuclear subs, including a full-scale mockup of the control system. It had around a dozen refrigerator-sized compartments that used to house all the custom-crafted electronics. Even then, in the early 90s, those compartments were largely empty and they had substituted off-the-shelf electronic gear for just about everything.
posted by beagle at 11:07 AM on June 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

I think you rescue the submersible and get the people out, you don't get them out to bring them to the surface.

But if there isn't enough oxygen left to return to the surface at a rate where the bends won't kill you...?
posted by praemunire at 11:08 AM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

British billionaire Hamish Harding thought to be onboard.

Apparently confirmed as onboard by his stepson. I had never heard of him until this thread, but he went on Blue Origin to space, has been to the bottom of ChallengerDeep and done a bunch of other wildly expensive things billionaires do (apparently he helped set up a regular business jet service to Antarctica - which is another thing I never knew existed). He apparently holds the record for Greatest Duration Spent At Full Ocean Depth - which I guess maybe could be useful psychologically to help stay calm. (albeit that record was only just over 4 hours but anyway...)
posted by inflatablekiwi at 11:09 AM on June 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

"bends" ?
posted by ryanrs at 11:11 AM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

More particularly, the NATO system has remotely operated systems that can deploy 'pods' that go down to 1000m, and a recovery vehicle that goes to 610m. I don't know if the deeper remote systems can do anything to raise the downed sub under their power, to a depth the manned one can reach it.

The bends is decompression sickness. Expansion of dissolved nitrogen in the into bubbles due to rapid pressure change.
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:11 AM on June 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

This whole thing is definitely the setup for a time travel story (and probably explains how that billionaire managed to become a billionaire in the first place).
posted by nobody at 11:13 AM on June 19, 2023 [9 favorites]

The movie Kursk: The Final Voyage - which I happened to watch last week - mentions a sub purchased from the Russian Navy, saying it's now being used for tourists' visits to the Titanic. Is this it?

No, this is a brand new purpose built submarine which made its first expedition in 2021.
The film may have been referencing the Mir sub which was used for a private expedition in 2005.
posted by automatronic at 11:13 AM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Isn't Everest high enough that close to the top, attempting to help someone else can have significant risks?
In any case, assuming that the hull did fail, I imagine that it was over pretty quickly at that depth.
posted by Spike Glee at 11:13 AM on June 19, 2023

Isn't Everest high enough that close to the top, attempting to help someone else can have significant risks?
Death Zone
posted by LionIndex at 11:15 AM on June 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

I imagine that it was over pretty quickly at that depth.

But the hull is passive, so it is probably more reliable than the propulsion and comms system (which has failed before).

Gonna be a long ~96 hours in that case.
posted by ryanrs at 11:18 AM on June 19, 2023

But if there isn't enough oxygen left to return to the surface at a rate where the bends won't kill you...?

The sub keeps you at 1 ATM, you don't have to worry about the bends. This is why you have ditchable ballast. The oh shit solution is to drop all your ballast and go rocketing to the surface. If you can't ditch your ballast, it's a REALLY oh shit moment.

Navy subs don't go that deep. Trident subs go past 1000 feet, the Titanic's at 13,000. Military subs don't need to go super deep, just deep enough to be stealthy. Plus, the larger the area you need to keep at 1 ATM, the more hull you need, which is why the really deep research subs are so cramped.
posted by fnerg at 11:24 AM on June 19, 2023 [17 favorites]

OceanGate isn't a huge company. One of their submersible pilots is the CEO himself, Stockton Rush. What would be the chances that their own CEO is on there? All the statements I've seen come from OceanGate the company, not Rush, and they're brief.
posted by mochapickle at 11:25 AM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

So far as the bends are concerned, subs are typically kept at or near surface pressure, afaik.

Not like an inverse of an airliner (where cabin pressure is allowed to drop to relatively high altitude, by the time the plane is up at the 'flight levels' -- thus the rules about diving and flying, which wouldn't be a problem if the plane also stayed at surface pressure).

The bends would be an issue if you tried to bring a saturation diver up from that depth rapidly.
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:26 AM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

More on Rush planning to pilot for Titanic dives. This project is totally his baby, he put together a themed playlist and has personally picked out the snacks and drinks for the dive. They interview passengers in advance to make sure they're a good vibe for the trip.

I'm perplexed by this line: "There will be 18 dives in total, and Rush himself will pilot each dive in three." Does that mean he does one out of every three dives? Or every dive in three [days? years?]?
posted by mochapickle at 11:42 AM on June 19, 2023

I would've felt differently about this if I hadn't read Into Thin Air (a riveting book by Jon Krakauer on a disastrous season on Mt. Everest). In that case, there were normal income people who had saved for a long time to summit Everest, not just billionaires. So I feel for the terror these people must be (or were) feeling. I hope it has a happier ending that what it's looking like at the moment.
posted by bluesky43 at 11:47 AM on June 19, 2023 [16 favorites]

Presumably a catastrophic hull breach would make a distinctive sound on sonar that should have been detected. So there is still hope.
posted by interogative mood at 11:49 AM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'd like for them to get rescued, but my biggest hope is that nobody gets hurt trying to rescue some folks on a profoundly foolish endeavor.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 11:51 AM on June 19, 2023 [17 favorites]

Turns out Alvin is still in service, operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic and supported by RV Atlantis. It's been to the Titanic a bunch. But the Atlantis is presently moored in San Diego.

There are other Alvin-class DSRVs still operated by the USN (Turtle and Sea Cliff).

France has the Nautile, which can reach 6km, and has been used to explore Titantic and to recover the Flight 447 black box; Japan has the Shinkai 6500 (6.5km).

I don't know if any of these can be flown in and deployed from an unfamiliar ship, or if they need their specific support ships.

I'd expect any feasible rescue would involve somehow raising it rather than trying to get people out at depth.
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:52 AM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

The sub has no onboard GPS, it wouldn't work underwater, so navigation is done by sending text messages from the mother ship.
posted by Lanark at 11:52 AM on June 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

specifications for the Titan submarine.
posted by clavdivs at 11:53 AM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Death from hull failure would have occurred at roughly the speed of sound in water. Merely losing power means that the vessel will quickly cool to the water temp which is somewhere between -2 and 3 degrees C and the occupants will die from exposure.

They’ll need lift bags to recover the hull. Easy enough with an ROV. The current is ~3 knots so the hull drifted at least a quarter mile before impacting the seabed. Finding the hull, even with a good side scan sonar is going to be a challenge.
posted by pdoege at 11:55 AM on June 19, 2023 [9 favorites]

It feels like such a ghoulish enterprise to go down to a shipwreck that is essentially a mass grave. I do hope the people aboard are rescued but I also feel like such expeditions just shouldn't be done in the future.
posted by graymouser at 11:56 AM on June 19, 2023 [29 favorites]

my biggest hope is that nobody gets hurt trying to rescue some folks on a profoundly foolish endeavor.

I understand the sentiment, but there those who willingly do such things at least in part for their own reasons, personal and professional. Like "Swede" Momsen, or Edd Sorensen. Sometimes people are lost doing body recoveries, long after the accident. Dave Not Coming Back.
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:03 PM on June 19, 2023 [7 favorites]

Reportedly, the sub generally carries life support for four days, and was built with a variety of ways to get crew back up to the surface safely in mind.
posted by peppermind at 12:05 PM on June 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

Not to threadsit, but the company’s previous carbon fiber hull had fatigue issues. So, they did the obvious thing and built the new hull out of HY steel

Just kidding! They just used more CF.
posted by pdoege at 12:07 PM on June 19, 2023 [12 favorites]

Mild steel would be about as much use as Raoul Mitgong in this application, though.

Now that's a deep dive. "Don't come back until you have [them]!"
posted by chavenet at 12:09 PM on June 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

Sometimes people are lost doing body recoveries, long after the accident.

I believe people died looking for those four kids who were lost in the Colombian jungle for 40 days. Search and rescue has never been a safe activity, regardless of circumstances.
posted by hippybear at 12:09 PM on June 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

They’ll need lift bags to recover the hull. Easy enough with an ROV. The current is ~3 knots so the hull drifted at least a quarter mile before impacting the seabed. Finding the hull, even with a good side scan sonar is going to be a challenge.

As asked and answered on Pogue's Twitter:

Do submersibles have something similar to an aircraft's Emergency Locator Transmitter (ELT)?

This submersible does not have any kind of beacon like that. On my expedition last summer, they did indeed get lost for about 5 hours, and adding such a beacon was discussed…

posted by snuffleupagus at 12:20 PM on June 19, 2023 [9 favorites]

Uh, no sonar beacon like aircraft black boxes? Sounds like rescue operations were not considered in the design.
posted by ryanrs at 12:37 PM on June 19, 2023

From the BBC:

US Coast Guard confirms five on missing submarine for more than a day

The US Coast Guard has confirmed there were five people onboard the submarine vessel, which it says has been missing since Sunday morning local time.

In a series of Twitter posts, the Coast Guard described the submarine as being 21 feet (6.4m) in length.

It went missing more than 24 hours ago, on Sunday morning, about one hour and 45 minutes into its dive.

Both US and Canadian naval surveillance aircraft are currently searching for it, including a highly-sophisticated P8 Poseidon aircraft with underwater detection capabilities.
posted by chavenet at 12:42 PM on June 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

The sub keeps you at 1 ATM, you don't have to worry about the bends.

Thanks.
posted by praemunire at 12:46 PM on June 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

It would be ironic and poignant indeed were the Titanic to claim even one more life.

Prayers for a swift, successful recovery.
posted by kinnakeet at 12:55 PM on June 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

I am so sorry for these people and their families, and absolutely aghast at the apparent lack of backups and safeties. They couldn't even put their fancy fuckin' tin can on a string? I'd argue for depraved indifference if I thought I could get away with it.

I hope they're found. And if they cannot be found, I hope it was over before they knew what happened. And I hope the jackass running this fly-by-night operation sees the inside of a prison cell.
posted by a power-tie-wearing she-capitalist at 12:56 PM on June 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

Now sounds like Rush really was on board, along with Paul Henri Nargeolet, 77, an expert on the Titanic wreckage and a former submarine pilot himself. That's three so far. I'm not sure whether Nargeolet was there as a passenger or as the expedition expert.
posted by mochapickle at 1:04 PM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yes, the CEO is reported to be on board.
posted by mediareport at 1:14 PM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

If it lost power then the North Atlantic current of up to 2 knots could have them drifting anywhere up to 55 miles in 24 hours, that's a big area to search in complete darkness. Its a big area to search even if the craft is OK and sitting on the surface.
posted by Lanark at 1:34 PM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Coast Guard press conference is underway

News conference begins
Robert Simpson, information officer USCG, is currently speaking and has again confirmed that five people are missing onboard the submarine.

from the BBC live feed
posted by chavenet at 1:35 PM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

And I hope the jackass running this fly-by-night operation sees the inside of a prison cell.

Given he's aboard the lost submersible, that would be a pretty ok outcome for him right about now I'd think. I guess regardless of outcome there will be an incident investigation of this (presumably by the Canadian Coast Guard if the operation and vessel was based out of Halifax but possibly jointly with the US Coast Guard?). Hopefully lots of lessons to be learned about (hopefully) the rescue.

I've been on one of those Atlantis tourist submarine tours where you go down like 75-100 feet for like 45 minutes sort of deal (which compared to this situation is like comparing a domestic plane ride with a rocket to space), but I remember just being very unsettled by being that deep and thinking about all the things that could go wrong..
posted by inflatablekiwi at 1:37 PM on June 19, 2023 [11 favorites]

I'm perplexed by this line: "There will be 18 dives in total, and Rush himself will pilot each dive in three." Does that mean he does one out of every three dives? Or every dive in three [days? years?]?

Or he's doing all 18 dives, and will guarantee he won't need more than three tries for any of them.
posted by Dysk at 1:43 PM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm having trouble hearing the questions, but the Coast Guard press guy just said they have sonar that can reach the bottom, but I think he just dodged a question about whether thay have rescue equipment capable of lifting the submersible from that depth.

"Right now we're focused on locating them."
posted by mediareport at 1:52 PM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

The submarine version of an EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon), the emergency beacon used on boats, is called a SEPIRB. I'm not sure why this submersible wouldn't have one, particularly since it frequents such a dangerous destination.

It is good that they have a lot of extra oxygen.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:56 PM on June 19, 2023

One angle of the press conference is that they are also looking on the surface, so I guess there is a non-zero chance that the submersible has already come up from the depths, which makes a certain amount of sense, I mean if they knew things were going wrong the first thing to do is rise to the surface.
posted by chavenet at 2:01 PM on June 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

I don't know enough about designing these things to understand why there isn't an inflatable bladder on it that is an emergency "hang on folks this is going to suck but at least we'll be at the surface" device.

But then, they didn't feel fit to put even a sonar pinger on it either. So....
posted by hippybear at 2:05 PM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Would those things even work at those depths? I struggle to believe obvious safety features were missed by accident or carelessness.
posted by Braeburn at 2:07 PM on June 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

I struggle to believe obvious safety features were missed by accident or carelessness.

Oh, sweet summer child. They would have been missed as cost-cutting measures, not by accident.
posted by hippybear at 2:10 PM on June 19, 2023 [23 favorites]

I think he just dodged a question about whether they have rescue equipment capable of lifting the submersible from that depth

The deepest known rescue at depth I think was at 1,600 feet and was quite miraculous. And that rescue started immediately and knowing where the submersible was.

This is at 12,500 feet, or more potentially, in a worse case, and currently with no idea where the submersible is. My guess is the Coast Guard need to figure out where the submersible is before they can figure out if any rescue is realistically possible. And it would likely require military assets - who may have to weigh up disclosing they have that capacity (if it exists). It would be a hell of a technological effort to be able to swoop in with very little notice and lift a multi-ton vessel from that deep in very quick order. I hope it's on the surface and just not yet seen.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 2:13 PM on June 19, 2023 [13 favorites]

I don't know enough about designing these things to understand why there isn't an inflatable bladder on it that is an emergency "hang on folks this is going to suck but at least we'll be at the surface" device.

This is what releasing the ballast is supposed to do. I agree that I'd also want some kind of chemically or mechanically inflated lift bag because why not, but it is rather more complex than the equivalent of dumping your weight belt. And adding complexity comes with its own drawbacks and penalties.
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:22 PM on June 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

Just saw the Pogue video where the submersible was being bolted shut from the outside. Makes sense from a depth standpoint; but it also means that if they did surface, they still need to be located so someone on the outside can open the submersible. Life support has to run the entire time.

I would not want to be locked into anything with a bunch of other strangers. Human factors can exacerbate an otherwise survivable situation.
posted by meowzilla at 2:22 PM on June 19, 2023 [8 favorites]

The submersible doesn't have a hatch- an article mentions that passengers are bolted in with 17 bolts, which is good in that it maintains the pressure but bad because there's no way to get out without a third party outside of the sub. This means that even if a submersible or ROV can reach them, there's no hatch to connect- the only way out is up.

If they've (hopefully) come up and just haven't been found, that's almost as big a problem as if they're still down there- the clock on air is still ticking until they vehicle is reopened. There's a toilet on board (in case you were curious), and a privacy screen. There's only a single button on board, the rest is done via two touch screens and modified video game controllers. (Which is fine- those are designed to survive being flung around, and they carry several on board). The controllers connect via blue tooth. The standard 'mission' is three guests/tourists, a pilot and a tour guide (Operations Specialist).

Really, really hoping this turns out okay, but am not optimistic.
posted by Torosaurus at 2:22 PM on June 19, 2023 [11 favorites]

Running out of the air on the surface would be a really dark outcome. Is it certain there aren't provisions for that scenario, at least for ventilation if not egress?
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:27 PM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don't know enough about designing these things to understand why there isn't an inflatable bladder on it that is an emergency "hang on folks this is going to suck but at least we'll be at the surface" device.

The pressure at Titanic's depth is just short of 400 atmospheres. An inflatable bladder, if even possible, would be a hell of an engineering feat and still has multiple modes of failure.

For a submersible dropping the ballast is the emergency device — the submersible itself is positively buoyant, it's only the ballast that makes it sink. A large part of that buoyancy is the pressure vessel itself… and if something goes wrong with the pressure vessel at depth there's no emergency recovery, just recovery.
posted by nathan_teske at 2:36 PM on June 19, 2023 [14 favorites]

I'm no submersible safety guy, but it seems insane that there is not 1) a way to automatically drop the ballast, 2) a way to open a hatch from the inside, and 3) one of those iPhone 14s that can do a satellite call.
posted by dirigibleman at 2:37 PM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don't know enough about designing these things to understand why there isn't an inflatable bladder on it that is an emergency "hang on folks this is going to suck but at least we'll be at the surface" device.

Other submersibles have done something similar. Make the submersible itself positively bouyant and then attach a shitload of ballast to it to make it neutral/negative. Set it up so that keeping the ballast on requires power -- if you lose power, the ballast drops off naturally and the submersible floats to the surface. ISTR Trieste used a big electromagnet to keep the ballast attached.

Like air brakes on a truck where the air pressure only prevents the brakes from being applied.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 2:39 PM on June 19, 2023 [20 favorites]

Radio doesn't travel through water very well at all.
posted by zengargoyle at 2:40 PM on June 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

Running out of the air on the surface would be a really dark outcome. Is it certain there aren't provisions for that scenario, at least for ventilation if not egress?

No idea, but hopefully if they made it to the surface (assuming they still have electricity) they can turn on all their lights (40k lumens apparently) and turn on their sonar / laser scanner etc. Basically try and make as much visible/electronic/acoustic noise as possible. Which may help find them
posted by inflatablekiwi at 2:42 PM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Even on the surface they will struggle to get a signal through all the steel.
posted by Lanark at 2:42 PM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

As a scuba diver in my teens, this is just so terrifying.

And it got me thinking, along with the comments criticisms above...

This is what happens when 3/5 of your "crew" are tourists. Mark Watney would not have made it off of Mars if everyone on that team was not skilled and competent. The deep sea is not a lot different from Mars in terms of possible bad outcomes. Maybe even worse. Water pressure is a thing.

Hope they were able to surface and are floating around in the dark.
posted by Windopaene at 2:42 PM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

I struggle to believe obvious safety features were missed by accident or carelessness.

Oh, sweet summer child. They would have been missed as cost-cutting measures, not by accident.

Yes I'm exaggerating-to-make-a-point but this sounds like the (direct-or-indirect) cause of loss-of-life on every other video of (non-natural) disasters on channels such as Fascinating Horror, where safety measures are cut-back/eliminated/not implemented due to cost-cutting, complacency, "it-can't-happen-here" mentality, etc.

Really hoping this incident doesn't eventually end up on one of said channels (unless it's a "disaster-averted" episode) but yeah, this isn't looking good.
posted by gtrwolf at 2:42 PM on June 19, 2023

Yeah, Pogue didn't elaborate in that tweet, but you'd expect an emergency beacon to be something attached to the hull that would be released to float up and broadcast the position at depth (as a vessel this small isn't going to carry a really long tether). Even the VLF that naval subs use requires them to be relatively shallow.
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:43 PM on June 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

This is what happens when 3/5 of your "crew" are tourists. Mark Watney would not have made it off of Mars if everyone on that team was not skilled and competent. The deep sea is not a lot different from Mars in terms of possible bad outcomes. Maybe even worse. Water pressure is a thing.

I mean, you know that The Martian is a made-up story/movie, right? That it's equally true and meaningful to say that they never would have gotten the Ring to Mordor if Merry and Pippin weren't as pure of heart as Sam and Mr. Frodo?

The expertise and skill that matters is on the outside of the submersible; they're literally bolted in to the thing. Unless it comes out that both the pilot and operations specialist were both somehow disabled and the remaining people weren't informed whatever emergency procedures are required to drop ballast or whatever else (very much facts not in evidence), then the only way having three more pilots beats three tourists is if they don't breathe as deeply.

PS: in The Martian, every single person except one who participates in the rescue is not stuck on the surface of Mars.
posted by Superilla at 2:54 PM on June 19, 2023 [55 favorites]

The deep sea is not a lot different from Mars in terms of possible bad outcomes. Maybe even worse. Water pressure is a thing.

That's rather why the deep sea is different than Mars, which is at 0.095 psi at sea level -- compared to Earth's 14.7 psi.

The early space capsules had bolted hatches; but depth being different than vacuum it might well be that providing for emergency ventilation or having explosive bolts was feasible in way that it isn't in a pressure hull that's going to 4km under. Astronauts were in space suits; these people aren't in pressure suits and the ones we have for oceanic use observe the same depth limits as manned DSRVs.
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:58 PM on June 19, 2023

I mean, from where I'm sitting, this is a situation where literally only thought, prayers, good vibes, etc are what I have to contribute.

It's the 2023 baby in well, kids in cave watch-by-the-moment news story. Wheee.
posted by hippybear at 2:58 PM on June 19, 2023 [13 favorites]

That's rather why the deep sea is different than Mars, which is at 0.095 psi at sea level

Mars has a sea level? oO
posted by hippybear at 2:59 PM on June 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

I've done some research from submersibles (this one) and it's a strange mixture of fascination and curiosity and just a little voice in the back of the stomach telling you to go home. We did get lost on one dive - at shallow depths anyway the pilot navigated by triangulation to beacons/pingers at each end of the mother ship, which stayed at right angles to the sub - anyway, we got off course when following an ancient river channel from -140 up to -10m, got in amongst some reefs and kelp, lost the mother ship pings, and we surfaced remarkably close to a bedrock extension of the shore. I didn't know any better and thought, (a) cool and then (b) we only got 3/4 of that survey line done and really only now, I am thinking (c) that was halfway to a bad thing.

Anyway, all to say, I have a tiny inkling of this situation, it's not a good feeling. Fingers crossed for a good outcome.
posted by Rumple at 2:59 PM on June 19, 2023 [23 favorites]

Mars doesn't actually have a sea level (anymore), it has a zero altitude, defined in reference to water's phase (as best I understand it, like so). But, still. Mars is a low pressure environment, relative to being on Earth's surface.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:00 PM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

But mostly because, like climbing Mount Everest, people don't visit the Titanic because it's safe, whether they're billionaires or not.

And the difference between Mount Everest tourist 'expeditions' and two-miles-under-the-sea tourist 'expeditions' is that there are no Sherpas with gills.

I'm in full Dr. Malcolm mode on this one. Think 'should' before 'could.'
posted by delfin at 3:09 PM on June 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

Assuming they know the direction of sea current, the search area is (currently) around 55 square miles.
So for a search aircraft to get within 1/4 mile they would need to traverse the area 4*55 = 220 times, at 55 miles for each leg that is a total of 12,100 miles to fly.

Assuming a constant flying speed of 200 mph that would take 60 hours to cover the area.
The C-130 Hercules the coastguard has dispatched has a maximum range of 2,300 miles.
The Titanic wreck is 430 miles from Newfoundland, so 860 miles of that range will be needed just for getting there and back.

I'm not optimistic they will be found in time.
posted by Lanark at 3:11 PM on June 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

I hope the best for those on board the lost submersible. It would be a tragic irony if the Titanic claimed more lives 111 years after it sank.

And I'm a little awed by how knowledgeable people in this thread are about deep sea craft operations. I mean, I'm not even sure what terms to use when describing that category of information.
posted by orange swan at 3:16 PM on June 19, 2023 [21 favorites]

The similarity of the Everest tragedy is you have some one in charge, selling rides who thought they had calculated all the variables and had created a “safe” adventure. Then they ignored the many warning signs and went ahead anyway. The previous failure of communications and getting lost was a huge warning. I’m pretty pessimistic about the odds of this tiny craft ever being found. It might drift around deep in the ocean for years without coming to rest until eventually the hull fails and it finally sinks to the bottom. That might take decades.
posted by interogative mood at 3:27 PM on June 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

The Mt. Everest not-dying-rate is actually pretty dang high, like 99%:

Mount Everest summit success rates double, death rate stays the same over last 30 years

Even if the actual percentage of successful summits is much lower, 66%.

I doubt this submersible has even gone on 100 successful dives (to the Titanic) total. It's been only running since 2021, and this year's dive was likely the only one this year.
posted by meowzilla at 3:44 PM on June 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

I guess I don't mind if people want to risk death but things like this always involve hired help who are doing it for the paycheck, and yet they tend to die also. Risking your life on an "adventure" is one thing, dying because you needed the money and ended up as some rich person's crew -- or having to rescue them--is another.
posted by emjaybee at 3:47 PM on June 19, 2023 [17 favorites]

The Mt. Everest not-dying-rate is actually pretty dang high, like 99%:

On a related note -- I just looked up K2's stats for something that came up in another thread.

As of February 2021, only 377 people have completed the ascent to its summit.[17] There have been 91 deaths during attempted climbs.
posted by philip-random at 3:52 PM on June 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

I don't find it surprising that people aren't in the mood to empathize with wealthy people doing a fully unnecessary, very dangerous thing. I do hope it works out, but I assume all people on board went in with eyes fully open as to the risk involved.
posted by imabanana at 4:22 PM on June 19, 2023 [9 favorites]

I'm projecting because I'm claustrophobic, but I've been having small kine panic attacks for this crew ever since I read about this. I so hope this will be a harrowing tale they all get to tell later instead of a tragedy.
posted by Joey Michaels at 4:25 PM on June 19, 2023 [9 favorites]

I hope they find the sub in time to get everyone out alive, but there's an awful lot of sea ice this year and I'd imagine that will make it more challenging to spot.
posted by peppermind at 4:28 PM on June 19, 2023

I’ve been traveling and not looking at the news today. Just as I looked at this story, the bus shut the inside lights off, making me jump a bit.

I hear the anger and bitterness behind the jokes, and I am not here to plead for the rich. But they are in my absolute worst nightmare right now, and I can’t be happy to see strangers down there, I just can’t.

Guess I’m not going to catch up with my new copy of Iron Lung for a while.
posted by Countess Elena at 4:34 PM on June 19, 2023 [17 favorites]

question for nautical folk: wouldn't the Titian have an emergency beacon that can be ejected from the sub?
posted by clavdivs at 4:47 PM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm on the record a dozen or two comments up as a real heel, saying that "I'm sitting out the thoughts and prayers on this one." That was too flippantly said, and people downthread who thoughtfully disapproved of mine and similar sentiments have a point. Fuck me and my whataboutery and ghoulish glee, as it's piquantly but fairly put just above.

Guys, I don't wish a watery grave on anyone, and certainly join everyone's hope that this submarine ship and crew are found safe and sound.

But I can't let go of the fact that I see a very unusual set of moral/practical facts here, one that exists in mountain climbing and cave diving and free diving and not a lot of places in most people's everyday lives. Some people, with various levels of wealth and privilege but certainly with ample knowledge, have not just chosen to do a thing that is extremely dangerous, but have chosen to do it in large part because it is extremely dangerous. I don't think that's disputable. I think that it might change my intuitions about how to feel if the danger catches up with them. I hope we get a chance to find out how they felt and what they thought during this time of danger.
posted by sy at 4:48 PM on June 19, 2023 [31 favorites]

I linked above to a Wikipedia article on the successful rescue of the Pisces III submersible at 1,600 feet after 80+ hours. I keep on re-reading it. I mean it does give hope - and it does reinforce that even in the darkest of situations small things can make a big difference - like the Pisces III crew ceasing all physical activity (even talking), keeping as high up in the vehicle as possible to stay above the worst of the foul air, etc. Big differences in the story here for sure - but there is still some hope at the moment.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 4:53 PM on June 19, 2023 [11 favorites]

WBZ reports crews from the Coast Guard station in the North End (Boston) are at the scene, roughly 900 miles east of here.

posted by sammyo at 5:19 PM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

In Indian River, MA, there is a tiny but amazing museum which focuses on the Titanic survivors’ stories and relics. Seems a young man decided to attempt correspondence with survivors and over time befriended many, who over the years gave him things they took with them when exiting the ship. The collector is deceased but at last check his sister was running the museum.

Reading the accounts and seeing the relics is emotional. One fine, delicate woman’s scarf was described as having been worn in a lifeboat and viewing it one could almost feel the keen bite of the night air.

One wonders how the museum’s donors, all gone now, would have felt about today’s situation.
posted by kinnakeet at 5:22 PM on June 19, 2023 [21 favorites]

With respect to the navigation challenges, some of y'all might find this interesting -- scientists are working on a way to use muons (yes, really) for navigation in extreme environments. It looks to be exceptionally clever work.
posted by aramaic at 5:25 PM on June 19, 2023 [18 favorites]

Regardless of how you feel about billionaires and people who think this is a good idea to try, this isn't a death you'd wish on anybody. I hope they can be saved.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:38 PM on June 19, 2023 [10 favorites]

And hope, just as much, that no one suffers death or injury in the process of finding and recovering them.
posted by delfin at 5:46 PM on June 19, 2023 [7 favorites]

If the sub is on the surface and they are saved by the fact that someone on board had a multitool with a drill bit on it I'll consider finally actually carrying one rather than merely owning them and leaving them in a drawer.
posted by srboisvert at 5:49 PM on June 19, 2023 [11 favorites]

this isn't a death you'd wish on anybody

I get anxious riding BART underwater to the East Bay. Titan’s tiny space with so many people triples that and the depth infinities that. I’d be scrambling for the train operator alarm or at least the “next stop” button.

I hope…
posted by bendy at 6:00 PM on June 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

according to the CBS video these trips burn over a million dollars in fuel
posted by glonous keming at 6:26 PM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Costs aside, some of the tech and math involved in a search and rescue mission for this sort of setting is pretty cool, though.
posted by eviemath at 6:31 PM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

I’ve been on a homemade submarine a couple times. The deepest I’ve been is about 800 meters. The two bad scenarios on my trips would have been losing structural integrity, which would be instantaneous crushing, or getting hooked on something or having another malfunction making us unable to surface, which would have been about 24 hours before running out of oxygen in our situation (plus maybe any impacts of not being able to effectively scrub CO2?). The sub we were in, and I assume it is universal in subs going to this depth, was at one atmosphere, so no risk of the bends or any other decompression issues. It looks like these folks were paying about two orders of magnitude more than I did for seats, but there is a lot of inherent risk in this kind of thing. Hopefully there is still the possibility of a good outcome.
posted by snofoam at 6:32 PM on June 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

(To elaborate on my previous comment: We almost certainly won’t get an eventual movie about this search and rescue if it’s unsuccessful, but I imagine there will be, possibly already is, some ingenious problem-solving under time pressure that ends up advancing the state of the art, kind of like as had to be done during the Apollo Mission to the Moon.)
posted by eviemath at 6:38 PM on June 19, 2023

Multitool nothing. I hope the onboard emergency kit includes an electric drill and an assortment of spade bits.
posted by chrchr at 6:39 PM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

(I was only mentioning the cost of my sub trips to give the context that I knew I was doing a pretty risky, low budget thing, and to say that even if you are paying top dollar, this kind of thing still has so many unknowns it is really risky.)
posted by snofoam at 6:42 PM on June 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

I lack a certain amount of empathy for a few reasons. One is counting how many years at my highest salary it would take me to earn 250k (12) and how long it could sustain me (at least 25 years).

Another is I'm enough of an adventurous type to think.... Dying on some crazy, stupid quest isn't the worst thing in the world. If someone offered me a seat on the next submarine, I'd take it. You understand the risks of what you are doing in life.

I am not opposed to reasonable search and rescue operations, but honestly, if I got myself in the situation I hope nobody at all risks their life or significant self harm to save me.

I genuinely wish them the best, even if I'm calculating how likely they are to finance bigotry or hate laws. I hope this story has a happy ending. But.... You don't ride the tiger expecting to never get bitten. Sometimes the stories are worth it, because humans constantly strive to challenge the boundaries of the world. I'm not going to trade that ever.
posted by Jacen at 7:19 PM on June 19, 2023 [8 favorites]

I hope everyone turns up safely. One quote from the promo video did strike me, though:

"...it is a completely privately funded endeavor..."

Well, it was. Coast guard cutters cost a *lot* to run, and that's when they're saving people who at least make a token effort to keep from dying while they're doing jobs on the seas that our society depends on to function.
posted by tigrrrlily at 7:31 PM on June 19, 2023 [13 favorites]

Very little commentary in the thread seems to mention the research work being done as part of OceanGate Expeditions. I don't know the value of the research, but it mentions documenting flora and fauna and assessing changes in the habitat. So this may have some value aside from just viewing the wreck.

If I had that kind of money, I'd love to plumb the depths of the ocean and see sea life that few ever get to see. Maybe, just maybe, you'd discover some deep sea animal that had never been discovered before. Years ago I got to go on a polar bear expedition, and that was amazing seeing those creatures up close – I can only imagine witnessing some deep sea being no human had seen before.

Here's hoping they're found safe. I may not have their means, but I can understand the desire to take the trip.
posted by jzb at 7:33 PM on June 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

It's not about the explorers. Why impune the rescuers? The material conditions of late capitalism and the military industrial complex will not disappear if this rescue isn't performed. Sub rescue capabilities won't cease to be funded. We pay for them anyway. We pay for them to conduct exercises that are probably more expensive than this live rescue. Will they conduct one less exercise, will the company's insurer pay for it, or the Billionaire whose life is saved? I don't know.

What I do know is that for those directly involved, efforts like these involve being the best we can be in all aspects all at once, and they are to be respected.

Airlines operate under capitalism, are you mad at Sully for being competent? Are you mad at Edd Sorenson for rescuing the Thai kids, or the idiot weekenders who get less press?
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:35 PM on June 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

I think part of the conflicted feelings here are due to the fact that the sole selling point of the endeavour was to rubberneck a mass grave site. (There are plenty of places to document deep-sea flora and fauna that are not world-famous mass grave sites.)

Also, isn't this scenario literally the ending of that one Arthur C. Clarke novel? (Although an undersea landslide burying the sub and the wreck would probably have been picked up on seismographs.)
posted by heatherlogan at 7:35 PM on June 19, 2023 [32 favorites]

I have a very large capacity for sympathy, but it is limited when it comes to billionaires and their dangerous, damaging wealth and lifestyles. I had no idea there was tourism to the Titanic. It's grotesque, frivolous, ghoulish. This company may have been doing valuable research (I have no idea), but the tourism aspect of it is genuinely shocking to me. I certainly won't celebrate this billionaire's death, but I'm with corb on this one.
posted by Mavri at 7:41 PM on June 19, 2023 [42 favorites]

"The Ghost from the Grand Banks" is the name of the Clarke novel.
posted by Earthtopus at 7:43 PM on June 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think it's more the insane amount these folks paid to be on this expedition. And, as I tried to suggest upthread, going to these depths is similar to going to Mars, or to the top of Mt. Everest, (a rabbit hole I have fallen into today), and if something goes wrong, you'd better have your shit together. Watch Apollo 13 FFS. When 3/5ths of the crew are tourists, yeah, wouldn't be counting on them to perform in a crisis.

Yes, there will always be Schadenfreude on Metafilter when billionaires are doing stupid shit and then bad things happen. I don't think that makes us a terrible place. It's kind of the ethos around here, for good or ill.

I hope they are all found. I wish we could fund science without having to involve "tourists".
posted by Windopaene at 7:48 PM on June 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

"If I had that kind of money, I'd love to plumb the depths of the ocean and see sea life that few ever get to see."

Yeah, I can see that viewpoint, but that doesn't seem to be what was happening here. They spent $250k to go down 2.4 miles and look at a screen of what's outside. I don't see any difference between this and sending down a drone and watching the feed, except the former can kill you.
posted by imabanana at 7:53 PM on June 19, 2023 [16 favorites]

Agreed. But there was theoretically some scanning and "science" going on. Which is awesome. Taking Random Rich Billionaires down as most of your "crew". Well, you are braver than me. Same with the "go to space" tourist seats.

And of course the company that runs this is based here in Western Washington, so, dominating the news...
posted by Windopaene at 7:58 PM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I was freaking obsessed my the wreck of the titanic when I was a kid. I had the National Geographic issue with and a problem read the article 500 times. I also did my 6th grade ocean report on Alvin instead of whales or jellyfish because I was so into underwater exploration.

I am sure there are others like me and can see why this is getting. I understand that $250K is a lot of money, but that is not out of reach to say to dentist or other professional who has saved a budgeted their whole career.

Sending positive thoughts for those on board and everyone doing the search
posted by CostcoCultist at 8:03 PM on June 19, 2023 [7 favorites]

They couldn't even put their fancy fuckin' tin can on a string

My (very limited) understanding is that attaching a deep sea submersible with string to a ship at the surface makes it very difficult to maneuver the submersible carefully to your destination as the ship at the surface is buffeted and moved around by wind and waves.

This is so horrifying to think about. I wonder about temperature and how long they might last before dying of cold exposure if they're trapped somewhere with no heat. Couldn't that happen much more quickly than the 96 hours of air they have with them?

And just saw this on Twitter; don't know how accurate it is:

Max operating depth was 4km and Titanic sits at 3.8. Repeated dives and stresses to within 200m of max depth is insane.

It likely imploded
posted by mediareport at 8:05 PM on June 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

Also to an earlier commentthis government report put the fuel consumption of a coast guard cutter at 290 gallons per hour. Of course the full crew is going to be more expense than just the fuel. I do hope that the government recovers some of the cost from billionaires.
posted by CostcoCultist at 8:09 PM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

If it imploded, that would be a good way to go. Instant. It's all the other scenarios that are so hard to imagine.
posted by Windopaene at 8:10 PM on June 19, 2023 [7 favorites]

Unsung Science: Back to Titanic Part 1

Discusses details of the sub's buoyancy controls and emergency ascent capabilities, as well as other systems.
posted by ryanrs at 8:18 PM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

A submarine is the most sadistically dangerous vehicle ever invented, because it combines the shortest interval from the moment when someone makes an error to the moment everyone on board is doomed, with the longest interval from the moment everyone is doomed to the moment everyone is dead.

I'm not going to cast aspersions at people for wanting to go down in a submarine. If it wasn't so dangerous I'd love to go down in one. Not going to resent the ticket price either. But wow, I hope submarine tourism just plain stops.
posted by ocschwar at 8:25 PM on June 19, 2023 [34 favorites]

Personally I would love to go on a deep dive expedition like that, in the sense that I would be incredibly terrified the entire time but would eternally regret passing on the opportunity if I didn't go and would no doubt have fond memories if I went (and survived).

Anyway, I'm going to go rewatch "Under Pressure: Making The Abyss," the documentary that shows Jim Cameron nearly drowning Ed Harris in a flooded nuclear power plant, just to cure myself of any such urges.
posted by brundlefly at 8:35 PM on June 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

Unsung Science: Back to Titanic Part 1

Thanks for that podcast link, ryanrs; the transcript is much more detailed than the CBS video clips I've seen from the same journalist who went down in the sub. The section on multiple ballast failsafes is the first thing that's given me hope that they may actually have made it to the surface:

First, there are three enormous, heavy, black, beat-up lead construction pipes on each side of the sub.
KYLE: These triple weights, we call ‘em, are hydraulically driven. So we operate ‘em inside, doesn’t take any electricity, can be done manually, and those drop away and gain us a lot of buoyancy.

Dropping that much weight onto the sea floor means the sub starts rising. But what if the hydraulic system breaks? Well, then they have roll weights.
KYLE: Ah, so, we’ve got these weights here on the side, these are roll weights, we can actually roll the sub and those come off, and that gains us some buoyancy to come back to the surface.

These are pipes that sit on a shelf that juts out from either side of the sub, held in place only by gravity. If everyone inside the sub shifts their weight to one side, the sub tips enough to let these pipes roll off. If that doesn’t work, there are ballast bags, full of metal shot, hanging below the sub.
KYLE: These bags down below, we drop those off using motors and electric fingers.

OK. But what if the electronics go out, and the hydraulics fail, and everyone inside has passed out unconscious?
KYLE: There’s fusible links within these that actually can dissolve and come back in time if it’s drop off.

Fusible links are self-dissolving bonds. After 16 hours in seawater, those bonds disintegrate, the weight bags drop off automatically, and you go back to the surface.

And even those four systems aren’t the end of it. The sub’s thrusters can also push it up; the pilot can jettison the sub’s legs as dead weight; and there’s even an airbag they can inflate to provide buoyancy. All told, that’s seven different ways to get the sub back up to the surface.

Part 2 is here, and includes the tidbit that the CEO's wife Wendy works communications with the sub from the ship above:

Meanwhile, I was up at mission control, on the bridge of the ship. That’s where Stockton Rush’s wife Wendy works communication with the sub. See, radio waves can’t travel through sea water. Fortunately, sound does travel—so the only way for the ship and the sub to communicate is to exchange short text messages through the water column, using acoustical signals, like over a 1990 modem.

If all you've seen is the short TV clips of that story, the podcast transcripts have a lot more information.
posted by mediareport at 8:55 PM on June 19, 2023 [29 favorites]

They spent $250k to go down 2.4 miles and look at a screen of what's outside. I don't see any difference between this and sending down a drone and watching the feed, except the former can kill you.

They're not going down to watch on a screen. There's a dome window in the bow of the sub. OceanGate's previous submarine, Cyclops 1, had the biggest dome window ever constructed in a submarine, at 1.4m / 56" across. The window on the Titan is smaller due to its higher depth rating; the rest of its forward dome is titanium.
posted by automatronic at 9:00 PM on June 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

Yeah, I'm not sure where the "no windows" thing came from. I heard that as well, but I looked around more and yeah, there's definitely a window.
posted by brundlefly at 9:05 PM on June 19, 2023

Fusible links are self-dissolving bonds. After 16 hours in seawater, those bonds disintegrate, the weight bags drop off automatically, and you go back to the surface.

All other things aside, that's pretty neat.
posted by brundlefly at 9:06 PM on June 19, 2023 [12 favorites]

from part 1 of the podcast transcript, on the particulars of the toilet mentioned upthread:

"RUSH: We have a toilet."

"Well, kind of. If you have to go to the bathroom during the dive, you can crawl into the window end of the sub and hang up a black cloth for privacy. There’s an 18-inch square box on the floor that contains Zip-lock bags—and that’s your toilet. Stockton promises that they turn up the music really loud while you’re in the…bathroom."
posted by Earthtopus at 9:11 PM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

The tiny porthole counts as a window? Fair enough, I still don't see the point of people doing this, but as I said earlier hope it works out for them.
posted by imabanana at 9:11 PM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

and from the same article:

"[company CEO Stockton] RUSH[, who has been named as a passenger]:

You know, there’s a limit. 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. 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."
posted by Earthtopus at 9:19 PM on June 19, 2023 [13 favorites]

Those unsungscience links (Part 1, Part 2) are amazing. Almost every line is quotable, but this one sticks out:

It turns out that an aerospace engineering degree actually has helped me do things in the submersible world that people who don’t understand compressible fluid flows didn’t quite figure out

posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:20 PM on June 19, 2023 [7 favorites]

I wouldn't call it a "tiny" porthole, if this pic is an indication.
posted by mediareport at 9:20 PM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Titan Image Gallery
some images showing the sub with ballast: a b c d e
posted by ryanrs at 9:35 PM on June 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Enveloped by water,
the deep all around me,
my head wrapped in seaweed,
I went down beneath the mountains,
the earth with its bedrock
forever above me.
--The Book of Jonah
posted by jabah at 9:53 PM on June 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

Lander Lab #4: Underwater Releases
How to release weights from your ocean sampling probe.

None of these are directly applicable to a manned submersible, but it is interesting to see the various techniques.
posted by ryanrs at 10:04 PM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Whew, just came on duty to a huge pile of flags. As I try to work my way through them, I will ask everyone to please discontinue the derail arguments about unsympathetic responses, etc., and to also discontinue responses that are just about expressing lack of sympathy. Please go forward with the discussion of the news and facts about this situation, and if you'd rather discuss the social response, perhaps you can find an article about that to post. Thanks.
posted by taz (staff) at 10:15 PM on June 19, 2023 [41 favorites]

You know, there’s a limit. 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. 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."

This is fucking criminal. If people die in that sub, you can look squarely to Rush for responsibility, risking other people's lives so they can pay for his gravesite joyrides.
posted by Dysk at 10:36 PM on June 19, 2023 [16 favorites]

The controllers connect via blue tooth

Oh god no
posted by Dokterrock at 11:05 PM on June 19, 2023 [34 favorites]

Okay, so, I've tried to trim this back to a point where it's actually a manageable / readable thread about the posted story. Let's try to focus more on this as a developing news story, with additional history, background and adjacent information (possible rescue scenarios, costs, etc.), and address the social issues regarding how people feel about it (debates about how much sympathy is deserved, etc., tone of public response) in a separate post once there is thoughtful or useful commentary online about that. Thanks again.
posted by taz (staff) at 11:14 PM on June 19, 2023 [34 favorites]

Also, yeah. Bluetooth? I missed that. The various levels of ballast sounded cool as hell, but wat?
posted by brundlefly at 12:35 AM on June 20, 2023

BBC now reporting the 2 other people aboard the Titan are Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman.

Also quotes an Australian submarine rescue specialist confirming the sub has to reach the surface before it can use any of the multiple signaling mechanisms it has available, and noting the "several hundred kilos of metal" it can ditch to get back up to that point.
posted by mediareport at 3:08 AM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Dangerously close to saying that the state-of-the-art hull makes the ship unsinkable.

The ship being unfloatable would seem to be the bigger problem.

While this smacks of rich people's problems may they make it to the surface, alive and then the well off pay for their rescue. Same for the retrieval of whatever is left.
posted by rough ashlar at 5:00 AM on June 20, 2023

Oh man, his son is 19.
posted by Mchelly at 5:04 AM on June 20, 2023 [7 favorites]

I would doubt that there's something of scientific value to these missions that couldn't be accomplished by an ROV.

It s just that you can't get that science funded..

Remember how we know the flow rate from the BP Deepwater Horizon, because the mission was funded by journalists? Yeah.
posted by eustatic at 5:36 AM on June 20, 2023 [9 favorites]

BBC News

“Just in the last hour or so... another commercial vessel, a very capable pipe laying vessel, modern ship, with ROV (remotely operated underwater vehicle) capabilities, is actually over the site now and we’re just hoping that it has the capabilities to reach those kind of depths – 3,800 metres – to search for the submersible and have the ability to recover it

It has two ROVs that can operate at those depths.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:39 AM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

On a CNN interview a friend/explorer said there were 7 different systems to cause an ascent. The only thing to prevent it would be if it was trapped by the ship or something like a fishing net.
posted by sammyo at 5:39 AM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Or a sudden catastrophic hull breach.
posted by ocschwar at 5:40 AM on June 20, 2023 [8 favorites]

if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed.

Actually in mortality statistics "bed cloths" (sheets I think) are a significant measurable line item.
posted by sammyo at 5:43 AM on June 20, 2023 [14 favorites]

It seems amazingly lucky that a ship with ROVs that can reach that depth happens to be close enough to get there so fast. I wonder what the ROVs are capable of.

Before this news, I was really thinking that 3-4 days of oxygen was maybe too much. If I was stuck at depth and probably quickly exhausted any measures I could take, it seems like it would be so mentally brutal to sit there for that long. Maybe it would be better to be sedated or unconscious and have less trauma if you are rescued. It is so hard to imagine.
posted by snofoam at 5:58 AM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oceangate are very careful to describe the 5 as Mission Specialists/Crew and not tourists, I would bet that is because they have public liability insurance which would apply to tourists (members of the public) but not to employees or crew.

I'm guessing that they have everyone sign a very comprehensive liability release form, but depending on how this all turns out, that language seems likely to be tested in court.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:17 AM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

I was freaking obsessed my the wreck of the titanic when I was a kid.

So was I, in the early 60s. One day I read in the New York Times that there was to be an observance, at the Seamen's Church Institute on the Battery, downtown Manhattan, of the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the ship. It appears this was the only major observance of the event in New York. It consisted of a brief memorial service, a few prayers, a few speeches, some music by a military choir (maybe the Coast Guard?), a showing of the movie A Night to Remember, and some refreshments. There were a few hundred people there, including a few little old ladies who were survivors or friends/relatives of survivors. It would be quite a few years before the Titanic became a whole industry.
posted by beagle at 6:23 AM on June 20, 2023 [16 favorites]

Excerpts from the waiver that "mission specialists" sign:

“The experimental submersible vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body. Any failure could cause severe injury or death.

The support vessel is an industrial vessel not designed for passenger operations and present many hazards, including…property damage, injury, disability, or death.

If I choose to assist in the servicing of the submersible, I will be exposed to high-pressure gases, high-voltage electrical systems, and other dangers that could lead to property damage, injury, disability, and death.

I hereby assume full responsibility for the risk of bodily injury, disability, death.

posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 6:26 AM on June 20, 2023 [10 favorites]

It's early so all reports should be taken with a grain of salt, and judgement and blame-assigning should be withheld both until the search is concluded one way or the other, and until a reliable picture of what happened is formed. However, this information seems relevant to the search:

When CBS correspondent David Pogue took a trip on the Titan down to the Titanic wreck last year, on the invitation of OceanGate, he said the hatch was sealed from the outside with 17 bolts – there was no other way out. (CNN)

If this is still true (and there is no venting system too small for human egress but able to provide air), getting to the surface doesn't save them unless they can be located in time in the vast and moving ocean.
posted by cardboard at 6:28 AM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

Just being trapped on something wouldn't explain the communications not working.
posted by Dwayne_Allen at 6:30 AM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

It seems amazingly lucky that a ship with ROVs that can reach that depth happens to be close enough to get there so fast.

Certainly it is lucky, but if a vessel with that capability is nearby, under a long-established code of the sea it is actually obligated to render assistance to a ship or individual in distress. This is even codified into U. S. law, and in the international Law of the Sea.
posted by beagle at 6:30 AM on June 20, 2023 [15 favorites]

I'm keeping up with this but I second another poster waaaaaaay upthread that this ticks all my personal terror boxes: claustrophobia, water-based catastrophes, and uh, MOAR claustrophobia. The idea of not being able to get out is seriously giving me the water willies.
posted by Kitteh at 6:33 AM on June 20, 2023 [18 favorites]

I’ve now seen some pictures of the inside of the capsule. Sure, death in a submarine is one of my greatest fears, but I am also not paying any amount of money to spend hours hunched over cross-legged in a tiny room full of stinky sock feet and one window. I know it’s as hard to take stuff down there as it is to space, but you’d think billionaires would get some lumbar support.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:34 AM on June 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

I get claustrophobic in a regular sized room, above ground, with fresh air, in the daytime, with someone standing in the only doorway.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:43 AM on June 20, 2023 [14 favorites]

I was struck by the same bare bones accommodation. Not a pleasant looking cabin, even under the best of circumstances.

I'm also curious how the extreme pressure at the bottom affects the volume inside the sub. I know that when Cameron did his ride, the materials of his craft (essentially a fancy diving bell?) compressed quite a bit and reduced the interior volume significantly. This shrink had to be accounted for when the craft was designed. It apparently got quite cramped at depth.

This sub is made from carbon composites. Perhaps they don't undergo compression the same way as metal (which I assume Cameron's craft was constructed out of).
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 6:43 AM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

They will never find that sub.

It's going to be interesting how this all plays out in court. If they never find a billionaire what happens to his money? Is he dead if there is no body? So many lawyers are going to make so much money from this.

This will also be a good test case for when one of those Amazon or Virgin suborbital space launches inevitably fails and kills the passengers. It's a very similar concept. At least in those cases they'll know what happened.

Here's hoping for a good outcome but if a deep sea vessel is missing it's probably not going to end up good.

I know that when Cameron did his ride, the materials of his craft (essentially a fancy diving bell?) compressed quite a bit and reduced the interior volume significantly.

There's a YouTube series called Smarter Every Day and in a couple of the episodes he gets to ride aboard a Navy sub. At one point before they dive to depth the crew demonstrates hull compression by stretching a string between the sub walls. Once they dive there is a LOT of slack in the string. I don't think I could ever ride in a sub.
posted by bondcliff at 6:48 AM on June 20, 2023 [28 favorites]

A little Googling shows me that there quite a few other operators putting tourists into submarines - for example Scenic Submarines or Seabourn Submarines - these are taking people down to a comparatively paltry 300 metres max - but they are also doing it as part of an expensive overall experience. I suspect that will be watching this story nervously.
posted by rongorongo at 6:51 AM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

It seems amazingly lucky that a ship with ROVs that can reach that depth happens to be close enough to get there so fast. I wonder what the ROVs are capable of.

An ROV that can operate at that depth is mostly just a camera platform with, maybe, a couple of grasping arms/claws to pick-up small items. Its only real use would be to find the submersible (or parts of it) and possibly take a look inside through the window (again, if the sub is intact) and see if anyone is alive or not.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:52 AM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

One report said that communication with the sub ceased 1hr45m into the dive (when it should have been at or near the bottom). That suggests some form of failure as e.g. getting snagged wouldn't have prevented communication had it been previously possible.
posted by epo at 6:54 AM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Comment removed. Please don't do the "well what about this other tragedy" derail.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:05 AM on June 20, 2023 [18 favorites]

If they never find a billionaire what happens to his money? Is he dead if there is no body?

Simple. There will be a case opened to declare the parties dead. Then the same probate process as when you have a body. (or similar in whatever the proper venue is)

Just wait, there will be "the death was faked!" posts someplace on the internet. Kinda like here on the blue on 9/11/2001 claims were made the buildings fell due to alien spaceships.
posted by rough ashlar at 7:12 AM on June 20, 2023

I wonder if they informed customers that this sub had previously gotten lost for 5 hours and they hadn't added a locator beacon since then.
posted by Mavri at 7:19 AM on June 20, 2023 [11 favorites]

They will never find that sub.

Seems like it depends on the failure mode. If it's on the surface, the naval experts I've heard interviewed seem to think it will be found--sooner or later. But quite possibly not soon enough. (I haven't heard anyone say with confidence whether it has an ELT beacon for surface use.)

Likewise if it's snagged on something in the vicinity of the wreck.

The fusible links on the ballast bags make me a little more hopeful that it is on top somewhere than I was before.

Some commercial oil & gas ROV operators have been interviewed and have suggested that even if you got a craft with a manipulator claw next to the Titan, it might be difficult to secure a lift line to it, or to grasp it securely enough to lift it with the ROV. But I didn't hear any of them address whether the ROV would likely be able to pull off any stuck ballast and then follow its free ascent.

I wonder if they informed customers that this sub had previously gotten lost for 5 hours

Pogue has since clarified that it wasn't truly lost in the sense that the tender lost contact with it, rather in the sense of losing its bearings. The crew on the surface misinterpreted the telemetry and was wrong about where the sub was, and so was misdirecting it away from the wreck. And the sub doesn't have its own onboard navigation, in that sense at least.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:24 AM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm gonna guess that if the pressure vessel was breached & flooded that it's on the ocean floor? I suspect the air cavity within is the primary provider of buoyancy?
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:27 AM on June 20, 2023

If the pressure vessel was breached at depth then it imploded, everyone died very quickly, and we just don't know it yet.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:29 AM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

It feels like such a ghoulish enterprise to go down to a shipwreck that is essentially a mass grave.

There are a lot larger mass graves that millions of people visit. A very sparse sampling of Europe provides the fields of Verdun (160,000 bodies never found), the Sedlec Ossuary (the bones of 40,000 people), and of course the Paris Catacombs (6,000,000 bodies)

We go because very few people can get the feeling of a place from a picture. Most people have to stand in Carthage or visit an English plague pit, or for that matter visit Pompeii to understand the sheer scale of what took place. Pictures and drone footage just won’t do it. Being present makes it real.

In any case that’s why people visit mass graves despite, or in some cases because of the number of bodies there. It’s not ghoulish. It can bring them closer to understanding the tragedy they represent.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:32 AM on June 20, 2023 [67 favorites]

I can imagine that an emergency beacon for the surface might not be able to transmit effectively from within the sub because of the thick walls, but would probably be crushed at depth if it was mounted on the outside.
posted by snofoam at 7:40 AM on June 20, 2023

Yeah, the value of the science the Titan has been doing - documenting the bacteria devouring the iron at that depth - is debateable, I suppose, but the "don't visit mass graves" thing seems really off-base to me. Visiting is *exactly* what humans should be doing to mass graves. The company has said it doesn't disturb or remove anything.

Also, pointing again to the extensive transcripts of the 2 podcast episodes ryansr linked above, from the CBS journalist who joined the sub expedition last year. They're full of details not available in the short clips from his TV report that have been shared by (and outraging) folks online.
posted by mediareport at 7:44 AM on June 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

The communication was lost at 1.45 hrs into a 2 hour dive so around 11,000 feet, so a catastrophic implosion seems more likely than getting snagged on the wreck.
posted by Lanark at 7:45 AM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

an emergency beacon for the surface might not be able to transmit effectively from within the sub because of the thick walls

From an Australian sub rescue specialist quoted at the BBC live updates page, talking about the tech available if/when the sub reaches the surface:

"There will be radio transmitters, GPS signals," he says. "There'll be strobe lights and radar reflectors to help the searching forces find them."
posted by mediareport at 7:48 AM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

For me it's less 'don't visit mass graves' and more about the intent and manner. I'm not excitedly making special playlists for a visit to the graveyard, or to Verdun, an ossuary, etc, etc.

The company has said it doesn't disturb or remove anything.

The company also said they figured they could do this safely.
posted by Dysk at 7:51 AM on June 20, 2023 [23 favorites]

Fair points.
posted by mediareport at 7:52 AM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

(though I'd kinda want to see the playlists if i were going to judge the respect with which they treated the hours-long journey with very little to see along the way)
posted by mediareport at 7:55 AM on June 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

Emergency beacons are an off the shelf part they can buy- every one of those expensive ROVs will have one. The military ones from L3Harris are good for 300 days and designed to be attached to the outside of the subs, I would expect civilian ones to be the similar, but shorter range.

The support ship is the “Polar Prince” an ice breaker built for the Canadian Coast Guard. In terms of operating in the North Atlantic Ocean it would be difficult to find a more suitable ship. It’s has had a relatively uncontroversial history, although it did make the news when it was put up for sale on eBay.
posted by zenon at 7:59 AM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

A little Googling shows me that there quite a few other operators putting tourists into submarines

I've been on a "leisure submarine" before. It seated about 10 people, and (double-checking their website) that trip is advertised as going down about 35 meters, much less than even the Seaborn ones you're listing. (It was much less expensive, too, in US money the dive was about 99 dollars.) But hey, I've been on a submarine!

Takeaways: everything is blue in that shallow water. There's not a ton to see, although that could vary by location. I'd expect that deeper dives would be darker, need more lighting, and probably a trained guide to know where the fish and/or shipwrecks are. Otherwise.....the vessel itself was kind of fun and an attraction on its own, but there's not a lot to see down there.
posted by gimonca at 8:00 AM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'd kinda want to see the playlists if i were going to judge

Sure, but everything about the way the CEO and company conducted themselves, and the tenor of their PR, all suggests that it wasn't exactly a sombre respectful mood. They give off an impression of being more about the big cool ship than the human tragedy.
posted by Dysk at 8:01 AM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

A little Googling shows me that there quite a few other operators putting tourists into submarines

There are tons. You can go a few feet below the ocean surface in a submarine for like $50 as a tourist.

Also no need to worry about search and rescue costs, as least as far as the US Coast Guard is concerned. They would be doing basically the same thing, except with fake scenarios, expending the same amount of money.

Also I know a few people who worked in US Navy submarines. All described it as 'incredibly boring' and one got a dishonorable discharge to get away (though he did enjoy being stationed in Hawaii).
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:02 AM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

everything about the way the CEO and company conducted themselves, and the tenor of their PR, all suggests that it wasn't exactly a sombre respectful mood.

That's why I keep pointing folks to those podcast transcripts instead of the brief video clips showing a few seconds of glib-sounding responses from the happy CEO being interviewed for CBS TV (which added its own levell of glibness as well). The company is at least slightly more serious than those clips make it out to be.

That's about as far as I'll defend them at this point, since I'm sure questions about the design decisions they made will continue after the rescue search is over.
posted by mediareport at 8:07 AM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

From the podcast transcript :

I also worried about getting back to the surface. Exactly what kind of ballast did this thing have? According to Kyle Bingham, a LOT.

First, there are three enormous, heavy, black, beat-up lead construction pipes on each side of the sub.

KYLE: These triple weights, we call ‘em, are hydraulically driven. So we operate ‘em inside, doesn’t take any electricity, can be done manually, and those drop away and gain us a lot of buoyancy.

Dropping that much weight onto the sea floor means the sub starts rising.

But what if the hydraulic system breaks? Well, then they have roll weights.

KYLE: Ah, so, we’ve got these weights here on the side, these are roll weights, we can actually roll the sub and those come off, and that gains us some buoyancy to come back to the surface.

These are pipes that sit on a shelf that juts out from either side of the sub, held in place only by gravity. If everyone inside the sub shifts their weight to one side, the sub tips enough to let these pipes roll off.

If that doesn’t work, there are ballast bags, full of metal shot, hanging below the sub.

KYLE: These bags down below, we drop those off using motors and electric fingers.

OK. But what if the electronics go out, and the hydraulics fail, and everyone inside has passed out unconscious?

KYLE: There’s fusible links within these that actually can dissolve and come back in time if it’s drop off.

Fusible links are self-dissolving bonds. After 16 hours in seawater, those bonds disintegrate, the weight bags drop off automatically, and you go back to the surface.

And even those four systems aren’t the end of it. The sub’s thrusters can also push it up; the pilot can jettison the sub’s legs as dead weight; and there’s even an airbag they can inflate to provide buoyancy.

All told, that’s seven different ways to get the sub back up to the surface.

posted by kirkaracha at 8:13 AM on June 20, 2023 [12 favorites]

Apparently this isn't the first submersible accident at the Titanic site. In 2019 a remote submersible may have hit the Titanic (it certainly hit something). In 2000, a manned submersible become wedged in the Titanic's propellers for at least 30 minutes after experiencing a strong undersea current and was at significant risk.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 8:21 AM on June 20, 2023 [6 favorites]

I keep thinking about the use of carbon-fiber composites for the tube section of the pressure hull (the ends are titanium alloy, I believe.) Is carbon-fiber a common material now for deep-ocean submersibles? Or is this company unique?

My admittedly limited experience with CF is in its use in things like open-wheel racecars, where it’s expected to fail spectacularly in order to dissipate collision forces. So, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around using CF composites as a pressure hull at almost 4 kilometers down in the ocean.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:22 AM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

The carbon fiber tube is unique to this company.
posted by mediareport at 8:23 AM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Source for the carbon fiber uniqueness is Oceangate itself, in a 2019 blog post titled "Why Isn't Titan Classed?"

It claims the carbon-fiber section of the hull, along with the company's new real-time hull health monitoring system (which "can determine if the hull is compromised well before situations become life-threatening, and safely return to the surface"), are two of the "innovations" that prevented it from getting officially classed by regulatory agencies, which would have taken years.

The whole page is worth a read; for instance, they defend the decision like so:

No other submersible currently utilizes real-time monitoring to monitor hull health during a dive. We want to know why. Classed subs are only required to undergo depth validation every three years, whereas our RTM system validates the integrity of the hull on each and every dive.

But then they also include sketchy techbrospeak like this:

When OceanGate was founded the goal was to pursue the highest reasonable level of innovation in the design and operation of manned submersibles. By definition, innovation is outside of an already accepted system...

Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation. For example, Space X, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic all rely on experienced inside experts to oversee the daily operations, testing, and validation versus bringing in outsiders who need to first be educated before being qualified to ‘validate’ any innovations.

Yeah, there will be lots of discussion about those design decisions, particularly if, as folks have suggested above, the sudden loss of communications before reaching the wreck means a hull implosion killed everyone on board.
posted by mediareport at 8:39 AM on June 20, 2023 [18 favorites]

Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.

Dear, lord. That seems to imply that whatever testing they do will be done at-depth.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:47 AM on June 20, 2023 [11 favorites]

I would think that a hull explosion would have been detected by passive sonar. IIRC During WW2 we had pilots drop hollow metal spheres into the ocean in the event they ditched into the pacific as those could be picked up and triangulated from long range listening posts to direct search and reduce without alerting the Japanese by using a radio.
posted by interogative mood at 8:49 AM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

That's why I keep pointing folks to those podcast transcripts instead of the brief video clips showing a few seconds of glib-sounding responses from the happy CEO being interviewed for CBS TV (which added its own levell of glibness as well). The company is at least slightly more serious than those clips make it out to be.

I'm quite happy to judge how seriously the CEO takes it from his the CEO talks about it. Their PR doesn't happen by accident - it's how they choose to present themselves. Like, maybe the company lawyer is a super serious guy, but they are still selling their product as 'expedition/adventure to legendary ship' not as something akin to a visit to a cemetery or more typical mass grave.

(I was also looking at the company's website, not CBS or whoever.)
posted by Dysk at 8:49 AM on June 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

For example, Space X, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic all rely on experienced inside experts to oversee the daily operations,

…and notably, none of these companies has ever had a catastrophic equipment failure or anything
posted by showbiz_liz at 8:49 AM on June 20, 2023 [13 favorites]

Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.

Rapid innovation = rapid profit. I do not like this kind of talk, like it's so reasonable to go outside of known testing entities.
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:55 AM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

and notably, none of these companies has ever had a catastrophic equipment failure or anything

Homer Simpson Voice: none of these companies has ever had a catastrophic equipment failure or anything so far.
posted by bondcliff at 8:57 AM on June 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

…and notably, none of these companies has ever had a catastrophic equipment failure or anything

Which, once again, makes OceanGate an industry leader and innovator.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:59 AM on June 20, 2023 [11 favorites]

none of these companies has ever had a catastrophic equipment failure or anything so far.

showbiz_liz should have put the "/s" at the end, apparently. Sarcasm is so hard to do in the written word.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 9:15 AM on June 20, 2023 [21 favorites]

In twitch chat, we've standardized the :kappa: as the punctuation mark for sarcasm.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 9:18 AM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

I would think that a hull explosion would have been detected by passive sonar.

Maybe, but you someone would have needed to record it, analyze it, and then confirm what it is etc. When the Argentinian Naval Submarine (ARA San Juan) imploded in 2017, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty Organization Acoustic network recorded the implosion. But that was a much larger vessel (10 times longer), in far shallower water. And even then it still took over a week for the data anomaly to be found and analyzed (delayed a little as the submarine needed to become overdue first). And the wreck still took another year to find (again a much larger wreck at a depth less than a quarter of the Titanic) and the wreck was 12 miles or so from the detection point.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 9:18 AM on June 20, 2023 [14 favorites]

The "Why Isn't Titan Classed?" page is kind of shocking in how it completely de-emphasizes the risk of actual submersible failure and puts all of the weight on operational error. And I'm sure that, in classed submersibles, operational error is the leading cause of failure, because the actual submersible meets or exceeds well-established safety standards.

But when your actual submarine is 100% not meeting or exceeding standards, and you hand-wave away problems as primarily operational in nature, there's a strong "this ship can't sink" vibe.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:20 AM on June 20, 2023 [20 favorites]

Carbon fiber may also fail in an "innovative" way that wouldn't be comparable to a conventional submarine or submersible and may not be detected.

Since the company is based in Everett, WA which is the home of Boeing, their page about safety is suspect. They should definitely be the people who know how much simulator time and safety controls that pilots and airlines are required to get by law, and how many "controlled flights into terrain" still happen.
posted by meowzilla at 9:25 AM on June 20, 2023 [7 favorites]

I would expect the North Atlantic approaches to New York /Boston to have more submarine acoustic sensors than pretty much anywhere else in the world.

I do wonder if the sound of a collapsing carbon fibre tube is as loud or as distinctive as what these sensors would likely be tuned to - mostly propellors I realize but if this is the only deep sea carbon fibre hull (five inches thick!) then it might have a novel acoustic signature upon implosion.

On non-preview: what meowzilla said
posted by Rumple at 9:29 AM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

On a CNN interview a friend/explorer said there were 7 different systems to cause an ascent. The only thing to prevent it would be if it was trapped by the ship or something like a fishing net.

With the systems described (like the automatic ballast drop at 16hr), entrapment or hull collapse would be the most likely culprits if they're not found. Since they haven't communicated with their support ship about being trapped... really that leaves hull collapse? Otherwise you need communication failure to occur before anything else and it seems without com, they'd never find the Titanic, so that would be an abort.

I did find the transcript useful, it goes into a lot of details and paints a broader view. Reading this reminded me of a lot of things you see in technical/cave diving communities. You're doing things done in industry but with much more limited means but also at lower expectations. Which leads to some innovative thinking sometimes, but also you operate at a more personal risk and at a lower chance of accomplishing the goal.

For example, their deployment of the sub, it actually sounds "not crazy", instead of a crane on a ship to lift/drop the sub, slide a submersible barge from a ramp and lower that barge in the quiet zone (it is much quieter at 10m/30ft) than on the surface and have divers finish the launching operations in relative calm. Probably saves a ton of money by not requiring one of the big ships equipped to do this, but puts slightly more risk on the support divers (30ft is a typical easy open circuit dive when not done in the Northern Atlantic Ocean).

And if that was just this guys dream and how he made it possible for himself to go see the Titanic that would be fine, but I don't know if their clients truly understand the particular nature of this operation.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 9:31 AM on June 20, 2023 [13 favorites]

For non-billionaires, here's recent composite 3D imaging of the wreck based on 700,000 deep sea scans by Magellan (their article page is offline, not sure if that's related to current events).

It is fascinating.
posted by mazola at 9:39 AM on June 20, 2023 [11 favorites]

Uhh yeah I assumed literally everyone would take “or anything” as “this is sarcasm.” SpaceX is scattering exploded rocket debris over protected wetlands constantly.
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:42 AM on June 20, 2023 [23 favorites]

All the derails aside - I hope they're found and if they're going to die, I hope that it was quick because the rest of this is endless nightmare fuel.
posted by drewbage1847 at 9:43 AM on June 20, 2023 [7 favorites]

OceanGate uploaded a video that covers some of the basic how’s and whys of the manned submersibles and another on their launch sled which gets described as the ‘most difficult and expensive aspect of submersible operations is the launch and recovery’.
posted by zenon at 9:46 AM on June 20, 2023

Also boats at the bottom of the ocean really make people do crazy things, just read up about the number of people who died just to go get fucking plates from the Andrea Doria.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 9:50 AM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

So...that controller that they use to pilot it: It's a Logitech USB wireless controller. I has two. I sold them because they chewed though batteries incredibly fast. Please tell me that this potential tragedy wasn't caused by a lack of backup AAs...
posted by UltraMorgnus at 9:58 AM on June 20, 2023 [12 favorites]

Does anyone know how Hamish Harding made his billions? I was looking him up and there is a lot about his adventurous lifestyle, and he owns an international aircraft brokerage company in the UAE, but what did he do to get enough money to own an aircraft brokerage company? And is that a fancy way to say he sells private jets?
posted by thecjm at 10:00 AM on June 20, 2023

Well he sells them in Dubai so it can be assumed he mainly sells them to terrible people with too much money, but I too found the balance of that page odd.
posted by Artw at 10:05 AM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.

well, I'd suggest humanity adopt the precautionary principle. and rapid innovation be damned. let's not foster a lot more ocean dead zones, microplastics, asbestos, leaded gasoline, pcbs, self-driving murder robots, fen-phen, mortgage backed securities, ddt, thalidomide...
posted by j_curiouser at 10:06 AM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Does anyone know how Hamish Harding made his billions?

BBC: In summer 2022, [Harding] told Business Aviation Magazine that he grew up in Hong Kong, qualified as a pilot in the mid-1980s while studying at Cambridge, and set up his aircraft firm after making money in banking software
posted by Dysk at 10:07 AM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Making the aviation company probably also a hobby.
posted by Artw at 10:09 AM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

For example, Space X...[relies] on experienced inside experts to oversee the daily operations

SpaceX also tested the Falcon 9 and the Crew Dragon capsule multiple times, frequently to destruction, until the system was deemed safe enough to put live humans on board.

Did OceanGate used a similarly rigorous testing methodology for this sub?

You know, there’s a limit. You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste...

Ah, I see. Thanks.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 10:15 AM on June 20, 2023 [7 favorites]

WaterAndPixels mentioned the Andrea Doria made me go read the wiki page and if this isn't just a touch spooky

A 2016 expedition to the wreck by OceanGate revealed that Andrea Doria was decaying rapidly. "When you look at the shape of the hull, it appears a lot has come off," Stockon Rush, OceanGate's CEO, said. One of the pieces now broken off the wreck is the ship's bow.

posted by drewbage1847 at 10:16 AM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Carbon fiber may also fail in an "innovative" way that wouldn't be comparable to a conventional submarine or submersible and may not be detected.

That's my thought as well. In other words, while an instantaneous implosion might have created sound waves that the mother ship (listening for regular text messages from below) would have picked up, the carbon fiber design might have folded up slightly more slowly and therefore made no detectible sound.
posted by beagle at 10:21 AM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

the carbon fiber design might have folded up slightly more slowly

most of what I know about carbon fiber comes from motor racing. Unless the tech has changed, I'm pretty sure there would be no folding. Carbon fiber tends to be very, very strong ... and then it shatters into a million tiny pieces.
posted by philip-random at 10:29 AM on June 20, 2023 [9 favorites]

"Move Fast and Break Things" has a lot to answer for
posted by Lanark at 10:29 AM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

he grew up in Hong Kong, qualified as a pilot in the mid-1980s while studying at Cambridge, and set up his aircraft firm after making money in banking software

So, generational wealth?
posted by thecjm at 10:33 AM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

SpaceX also tested the Falcon 9 and the Crew Dragon capsule multiple times, frequently to destruction, until the system was deemed safe enough to put live humans on board.

Did OceanGate used a similarly rigorous testing methodology for this sub?

We're going to hit a point, sooner than later, where space flight is "cheap" enough that not rigorously tested capsules are going to go up. And they're going to fail. The rigorously tested ones too. And very, very rich people are going to die.
posted by thecjm at 10:36 AM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

>> For example, Space X, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic all rely on experienced inside experts to oversee the daily operations,

> …and notably, none of these companies has ever had a catastrophic equipment failure or anything

The VSS Enterprise crash occurred on October 31, 2014, when the VSS Enterprise, a SpaceShipTwo experimental spaceflight test vehicle operated by Virgin Galactic, suffered a catastrophic in-flight breakup during a test flight and crashed in the Mojave Desert. Co-pilot Michael Alsbury was killed and pilot Peter Siebold was seriously injured.

posted by lodev at 10:37 AM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yes, that's one of the ones showbiz_liz was not-referring to.
posted by tigrrrlily at 10:40 AM on June 20, 2023 [8 favorites]

…and formatting a sentence this way doesn’t imply sarcasm or anything
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:41 AM on June 20, 2023 [17 favorites]

Uhh yeah I assumed literally everyone would take “or anything” as “this is sarcasm.” SpaceX is scattering exploded rocket debris over protected wetlands constantly.

NASA has been scattering rocket debris all over the place for like 60 years now. As much as I hate Elon and those other chuckleheads, scattering debris is kind of part of testing rockets. My point was none of those private space companies have lost an entire crew.

Yet.

(Come to think of it didn't Virgin lose a test pilot a couple years ago?)

Edit: On preview: yes.
posted by bondcliff at 10:44 AM on June 20, 2023

So, generational wealth?

Qualifying as a pilot while studying at Cambridge? Most likely. It would be a hell of a thing to be studying, doing your pilot hours, and having to work a job to fund the flight time.
posted by Dysk at 10:44 AM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

As much as I hate Elon and those other chuckleheads, scattering debris is kind of part of testing rockets. My point was none of those private space companies have lost an entire crew.

Yet.

The reason they haven't lost an entire crew is that they've lost entire vehicles they didn't expect to, while testing them uncrewed just to be sure.

It does not appear that OceanGate have done enough uncrewed testing to reveal similar flaws. So they're revealing them now.
posted by Dysk at 10:46 AM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

When carbon fibre fails, it does so much less gradually than metal.
posted by flabdablet at 10:49 AM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Dysk, when I was in university I knew two people working there in the IT department who were training as pilots and one was still taking classes. It's an expensive hobby, but not that expensive. One was solo and passenger qualified and the three of us would take two hour lunches to go fly from one airport to another for lunch and come right back. Just to get more passenger carrying hours. Not saying it wasn't generational wealth, just that it wouldn't have to be.
posted by zengargoyle at 10:50 AM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

USCG update on the search, from about an hour ago. Audio is a little rough.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:51 AM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

From 2020: OceanGate and NASA are teaming up to build better carbon-fiber pressure vessels

Over the past couple of years, OceanGate spent millions of dollars building a carbon-hulled submersible known as Titan, which the company hoped would be capable of diving to the Titanic. However, validation tests conducted at the Deep Ocean Test Facility in Maryland found signs of fatigue in the hull, resulting in a depth rating that ruled out Titanic trips.

posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 10:53 AM on June 20, 2023 [6 favorites]

zengargoyle, it should be noted that you're on a different continent to Cambridge. I didn't rule it out, but the costs involved are somewhat different, especially fuel.
posted by Dysk at 10:54 AM on June 20, 2023

Cambridge University Air Squadron

posted by snuffleupagus at 10:58 AM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

validation tests conducted at the Deep Ocean Test Facility in Maryland found signs of fatigue in the hull, resulting in a depth rating that ruled out Titanic trips

Welp, that seems like it could be a problem.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:00 AM on June 20, 2023 [6 favorites]

Does anyone know how Hamish Harding made his billions?

I haven't seen anyone say why or exactly how he's a billionaire, and this Forbes article says "Harding’s exact net worth is unknown. Some British outlets, including the Telegraph, refer to Harding as a billionaire. However, Harding does not feature on Forbes’ list of billionaires."
posted by fabius at 11:03 AM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

He's an aircraft broker, operating out of the UAE; and has plowed the profits of that business into other successful investments.
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:10 AM on June 20, 2023

The post about Why isn't Titan classed? linked by mediareport is pretty terrifying. Their real-time acoustic monitoring system seems ridiculous. Does it tell you in "real time" when your hull has instantaneously imploded? I feel like we're in for some future revelations that the guy behind this company is either sadly misguided or actively misleading people or both.
posted by snofoam at 11:15 AM on June 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

...an aircraft brokerage company? And is that a fancy way to say he sells private jets?

I don't know about his business specifically but using the term 'brokerage' is probably a fancy way of saying he gets paid helping people who want to buy a jet get in touch with someone who wants to sell a private jet, so a middleman who makes a lot of money off selling planes without actually owning any planes.
posted by AzraelBrown at 11:17 AM on June 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

the guy behind this company is either sadly misguided

The guy is currently lost somewhere in the North Atlantic, so yes, he is 100% sadly misguided
posted by oulipian at 11:19 AM on June 20, 2023 [11 favorites]

Cambridge University Air Squadron

Yes, I was wondering if there was some kind of arrangement like the AFROTC.

A nineteen-year-old kid having an adventure with his dad. So sad.
posted by praemunire at 11:23 AM on June 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

The post about Why isn't Titan classed? linked by mediareport is pretty terrifying.

If you really want to be terrified, their website makes the rather specious claim that the sub is a "cyclops class" submersible.

I'll leave it to you to decide whether a potential customer might read that claim and assume it's all been checked, tested, and approved by some organizational body or whatnot, as opposed to understanding that it's a self-classification that bears no actual authority.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:29 AM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

Cambridge University Air Squadron

Sure, it's possible. I'd've expected a different phrasing if that were the case. The "grew up in Hong Kong" bit on there in combination with the pilot training makes me stand by my assessment of "probably from a monied background".
posted by Dysk at 11:37 AM on June 20, 2023

BBC

Here's the top lines from [The USCG] update on the search and rescue operation for the missing submersible.

The US Coast Guard has said the missing Titanic submersible has about 40 hours of oxygen left
The coast guard has commenced a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) dive at the last known location of the sub
Capt Jamie Frederick said the coast guard's "heartfelt thoughts and prayers" were with the families of the five crew on board the Titan
He said crews, including the US Coast Guard, US Navy and Canada "are working around the clock"
The US Coast Guard says they have searched an area of 7,600 sq miles, which is bigger than the US state of Connecticut
"These search efforts have not yielded any results," Capt Frederick said

posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:43 AM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

I would imagine learning to fly in the volunteer Cambridge gentlemen's squadron is probably not exclusive of a monied background. (It doesn't require a military service commitment, though it's run by the RAF.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:44 AM on June 20, 2023

Hamish Harding seems to be getting a lot of the attention, but Shahzada Dawood (the Pakistani national on the vessel with his son Sulaiman) seems fairly interesting as well. From one of the richest families in Pakistan and on the Board of Trustees for SETI (has to be a story there!). The photos circulating of the pair are quite heartbreaking - make it seem like this probably was a real “father son adventure” trip. I’m getting flash backs to the Whakaari Volcanic eruption and the question of if the tourists involved on the trip really were briefed on dangers and the risks thoroughly (much different situation obviously but some similarities)
posted by inflatablekiwi at 11:46 AM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

From the New Republic:

Missing Titanic Sub Once Faced Massive Lawsuit Over Depths It Could Safely Travel To

Court documents reveal a former OceanGate employee had several safety complaints over the tourist submersible—and then he was fired. [archive]

According to a press release, Lochridge was director of marine operations at the time [2017-2018], “responsible for the safety of all crew and clients.”

Lochridge initially verbally expressed concerns about the safety and quality of the Titan submersible to OceanGate executive management, but those concerns were ignored. Lochridge "identified numerous issues that posed serious safety concerns, and offered corrective action and recommendations for each..."

After Lochridge issued his inspection report, OceanGate officials convened a meeting on January 19, 2018...At the meeting Lochridge discovered why he had been denied access to the viewport information from the Engineering department—the viewport at the forward of the submersible was only built to a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, although OceanGate intended to take passengers down to depths of 4,000 meters. Lochridge learned that the viewport manufacturer would only certify to a depth of 1,300 meters due to experimental design of the viewport supplied by OceanGate, which was out of the Pressure Vessels for Human Occupancy (“PVHO”) standards. OceanGate refused to pay for the manufacturer to build a viewport that would meet the required depth of 4,000 meters.

For reference, the Titanic is estimated to sit on the ocean floor at a depth of nearly 13,000 feet.

...But OceanGate didn’t address those concerns, and Lochridge was fired. The case between Lochridge and OceanGate didn’t advance much further, and a few months later the two parties settled.

Not sure if those concerns were being addressed in the NASA collaboration a couple years later that ChurchHatesTucker linked above, but that viewport stuff - wow.
posted by mediareport at 11:47 AM on June 20, 2023 [30 favorites]

More, possibly about that innovative "real time hull health monitoring" stuff:

Lochridge was particularly concerned about “non-destructive testing performed on the hull of the Titan” but he was “repeatedly told that no scan of the hull or Bond Line could be done to check for delaminations, porosity and voids of sufficient adhesion of the glue being used due to the thickness of the hull.” He was also told there was no such equipment that could conduct a test like that.
posted by mediareport at 11:53 AM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Seems to me the Lochridge case was removed to Federal court, and there may have been a bankruptcy stay (from the single page previews available on the Washington court's site, and the USDC case that turns up in a search).
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:02 PM on June 20, 2023

Can you explain what that means here, snuffleupagus?
posted by mediareport at 12:08 PM on June 20, 2023

That OceanGate were aware of serious structural (and, thus, safety) issues with Titan and elected not to address them?
posted by Thorzdad at 12:13 PM on June 20, 2023

OceanGate, uncomfortably, seems to be a hell of a choice of name.
posted by heyho at 12:17 PM on June 20, 2023 [16 favorites]

That podcast upthread answered my questions about this machine... they're trying carbon fiber because it has 3x the strength-to-bouyancy of titanium. But they limited the carbon fiber to a tube (the ends are titanium) so it must be pretty experimental. There's no hatch: they bolt the front on. It sounds like the only batteries inside it are for the off-the shelf cabin lights and controllers (everything else is external), so it's unlikely there was a catastrophic fire inside. There's a lot of systems to lose balast, so if it's not full of water it's going to be on the surface.

The experimenal stuff could have catastrophically failed, but my guess is something failed that wasn't being scrutinized as much. For example, they mentioned a manual hydraulic release for the main ballast. I'm guessing a lot of that system was off-the-shelf, and if it failed in an unexpected way that let water through the hull they could have been in a lot of trouble very quickly.
posted by netowl at 12:17 PM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

I meant about the bankruptcy stay, Thorzdad.
posted by mediareport at 12:19 PM on June 20, 2023

When you declare bankruptcy, almost all litigation against you is automatically stayed so that the bankruptcy court can sort out the competing claims without other entities trying to snipe off some of the assets available to satisfy all claims.
posted by praemunire at 12:31 PM on June 20, 2023

If you really want to be terrified, their website makes the rather specious claim that the sub is a "cyclops class" submersible.

They're referring to their own Cyclops-class submersibles.

The first of the Cyclops-class submersibles, Cyclops 1 is a fully functional prototype and platform for software, technology and equipment for Titan.

And apparently not the pre-dreadnought ironclad monitors.
posted by kirkaracha at 12:38 PM on June 20, 2023

Seems like the Lochridge household may have declared bankruptcy, after which it settled during the bankruptcy stay. The Washington case number is 18-2-05651-31, which you can pull up on the state's court document search site. The removal to Federal court is the last item in the docket. The Federal case is here, there may be more on PACER.
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:47 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

They're referring to their own Cyclops-class submersibles.

But it's still just as meaningless a self-classification, right?

Like, I might as well claim I'm the first Dysk-class user.
posted by Dysk at 12:49 PM on June 20, 2023 [15 favorites]

It’s like Star Trek!
posted by Artw at 12:52 PM on June 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

Thanks, snuffleupagus; that makes sense. I was confused since I hadn't read anything about OceanGate being in bankruptcy.
posted by mediareport at 12:52 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

I might as well claim I'm the first Dysk-class user.

A Dysk would never survive at those depths, you'd need at least a Sphyre...
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:54 PM on June 20, 2023 [7 favorites]

The Dysk would be fine, it's already flattened.
posted by Dysk at 12:58 PM on June 20, 2023 [22 favorites]

dydycahydryn. one named hynry or jynyfyr.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 12:59 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

(still hoping they somehow find everyone alive and nobody gets hurt looking for them)
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 1:00 PM on June 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

All told, that’s seven different ways to get the sub back up to the surface.

Thanks, that was really interesting. It seems pretty unlikely that all of those would fail and so a hull breach, either a catastrophic structural failure or a leak around one of the two seams must be more likely.

the way that carbon fibre fails is that the fibres break, this is how their acoustic hull monitoring system works, it listens for this process starting. The problem is that if you don't catch it very quickly, the early fibre breaks lead to stress increasing on the remaining fibres which will then start snapping in turn. Unlike metal, the fibres don't deform, they just snap. At a macro level, the carbon fibre material does have some early warning (the weaker strands snapping) but fundamentally there is no safe way of going to this depth and had this been a fully metal and classified vehicle it would still be incredibly dangerous.

I have been a rebreather and tri-mix diver, entered wrecks with overhead obstructions, and supported cave diving expeditions - had I not had a child, I might well have turned to cave diving myself but I've always felt that I should be either really into it or not at all, a bit like general aviation pilots "casual" cave divers are not so good. So I know the cave diving community a little, I also used to be involved in building and flying experimental aircraft when I was a student and have dived with equipment I built myself and with regulators that I modified and tested myself.

So I think I have a fairly well developed sense of what kind of hazards one might recreationally expose oneself to.

A friend of mine used to be involved in the old Dangerous Sports Club (invented modern bungee jumping among others) and he made the point that the old club was very much a lunatic group of tinkerers but were all very much involved in creating and testing these madly dangerous ideas and that was fine, but... at some point people started getting third parties involved. It was never a commercial gain thing as nobody was getting rich, but a few old members did have a person launching trebuchet (I have been fired out of it) that they would take to outdoor events and charged people to be launched from. Like I said, nobody was getting rich but money was changing hands.

More seriously than the money changing hands though was the inherent idea that you are letting uninformed outsiders take these risks. Whether or not you charge, whatever waivers you sign, our society is structured in such a way that people assume that if you can just walk up and have a go, it must be reasonably safe.

Well, it wasn't safe. Somebody was eventually killed and I always felt that the lad who died didn't really know the full depth of just how dangerously experimental this thing was.

I know that everyone on this sub will have signed paperwork, gone through training, etc. but it's still a hazardous activity that is effectively allowed in the same way that experimental aircraft are allowed which is to say: society broadly lets you take risks with your own creations and as soon as third parties get involved, it gets a bit dicy. I don't think (even if these guys turn up dead or not at all) that this should be automatically banned - people do dangerous things all the time, or even that the creators are guilty of some serious lapse, but I do think there's a big fuzzy grey line that sits between routine licensed travel on the one hand and self-build planes on the other.
posted by atrazine at 1:10 PM on June 20, 2023 [80 favorites]

I've been thinking a lot today about the media response to the refugee boat capsizing and pundits asking aloud if it really made sense to devote a bunch of resources to saving them, while these five rich people go missing touring the Titanic and we get worldwide 'round-the-clock coverage of the desperate international effort to rescue them.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:17 PM on June 20, 2023 [135 favorites]

I don't think (even if these guys turn up dead or not at all) that this should be automatically banned - people do dangerous things all the time, or even that the creators are guilty of some serious lapse, but I do think there's a big fuzzy grey line that sits between routine licensed travel on the one hand and self-build planes on the other.

Personally, I think when it becomes a commercial enterprise where you're taking money from members of the public to let them get involved, there is no longer a grey area. Sure, take risks for yourself. When you have the public as customers though, I'm of the opinion that you should have unavoidable personal liability.
posted by Dysk at 1:22 PM on June 20, 2023 [13 favorites]

Home-built aircraft are required to have a big sticker that says "EXPERIMENTAL" right in your line of sight as you get in. Sure, everyone knows there are risks involved, but as an embarking passenger you're made to read that word and perhaps think the whole thing through one more time.

Something just made me think of that.
posted by tigrrrlily at 1:32 PM on June 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

MetaTalk
posted by hippybear at 1:35 PM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

But it is true that even when they sign waivers, people don't really believe in the risk...deep down they think it's just something lawyers make companies do, because if it was that dangerous it wouldn't be allowed at all.

People are bad at assessing risk. We all are. Especially if we see other people do something and survive. If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you? Probably. Especially if they were hyping it up and wearing nifty wingsuits.
posted by emjaybee at 1:38 PM on June 20, 2023 [18 favorites]

This story is pretty irresistible to the media. There are stories that are much more worthy to time, but those won’t get the views or public interest that this a new Titanic tragedy brings.
posted by interogative mood at 1:39 PM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

these five rich people go missing touring the Titanic and we get worldwide 'round-the-clock coverage of the desperate international effort to rescue them.

aka The Spectacle
posted by philip-random at 1:40 PM on June 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

More seriously than the money changing hands though was the inherent idea that you are letting uninformed outsiders take these risks. Whether or not you charge, whatever waivers you sign, our society is structured in such a way that people assume that if you can just walk up and have a go, it must be reasonably safe.

Murphy v. Steeplechase (1929): Assumption of Risk and The Flopper.

The defendant, Steeplechase Amusement Company, maintains an amusement park at Coney Island, New York.

One of the supposed attractions is known as "The Flopper." It is a moving belt, running upward on an inclined plane, on which passengers sit or stand. Many of them are unable to keep their feet because of the movement of the belt, and are thrown backward or aside. The belt runs in a groove, with padded walls on either side to a height of four feet, and with padded flooring beyond the walls at the same angle as the belt. An electric motor, driven by current furnished by the Brooklyn Edison Company, supplies the needed power.

Plaintiff, a vigorous young man, visited the park with friends. One of them, a young woman, now his wife, stepped upon the moving belt. Plaintiff followed and stepped behind her. As he did so, he felt what he describes as a sudden jerk, and was thrown to the floor....

Volenti non fit injuria. One who takes part in such a sport accepts the dangers that inhere in it so far as they are obvious and necessary, just as a fencer accepts the risk of a thrust by his antagonist or a spectator at a ball game the chance of contact with the ball [Citations.] The antics of the clown are not the paces of the cloistered cleric. The rough and boisterous joke, the horseplay of the crowd, evokes its own guffaws, but they are not the pleasures of tranquillity. The plaintiff was not seeking a retreat for meditation. Visitors were tumbling about the belt to the merriment of onlookers when he made his choice to join them. He took the chance of a like fate, with whatever damage to his body might ensue from such a fall. The timorous may stay at home.

A different case would be here if the dangers inherent in the sport were obscure or unobserved....or so serious as to justify the belief that precautions of some kind must have been taken to avert them....

Personally, I think when it becomes a commercial enterprise where you're taking money from members of the public to let them get involved, there is no longer a grey area. Sure, take risks for yourself. When you have the public as customers though, I'm of the opinion that you should have unavoidable personal liability.

Strict liability would be the end of downhill skiing and regular SCUBA diving and a lot of other outdoor activities, not just the really over the top stuff.
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:47 PM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Sub Brief a YouTube Channel run by a retired US Navy Submariner has posted some thoughts on the vessel and concerns about the design.
posted by interogative mood at 1:53 PM on June 20, 2023 [12 favorites]

> All told, that’s seven different ways to get the sub back up to the surface.

This is my completely uninformed speculation, since (given the engineering specs provided above) breach / implosion seems to be, tragically, the most likely scenario, but the thoughts running through my head are something like the following:

We've determined that there's at least one, possibly several extremely wealthy people onboard. Who are, for legally suspect reasons, all rated as crew. Each of whom is very, very used to getting their way in the world above. Coupled with an owner who's expressed disdain for risk and safety measures.

If the vessel made it all the way down to the wreck, someone might have encouraged them further, deeper into the hull of Titanic. There's no-one to tell them no. Hovering inside, one of those buoyancy mechanisms gets triggered, slamming them into the hull above, trapping them like a bubble in an upside-down jar. They'd have no way of moving, and no possibility of getting out.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 2:14 PM on June 20, 2023 [8 favorites]

Well, it wasn't safe. Somebody was eventually killed and I always felt that the lad who died didn't really know the full depth of just how dangerously experimental this thing was.

You're reminding me of the Verrückt, atrazine -‌- a dumb design, its manslaughter sometimes characterized a "freak accident" (sure); the 'ride' should never have been built. But because somebody with capital had free reign to implement a notion to make more money, it happened.
posted by Rash at 2:15 PM on June 20, 2023 [11 favorites]

That Lochridge article—good Lord. If Lochridge is still with us, he must have had to sign an NDA, or otherwise he could be in the media charging handsomely to explain how he told that sonofabitch, he told him and he told him, he said …
posted by Countess Elena at 2:16 PM on June 20, 2023 [7 favorites]

If the vessel made it all the way down to the wreck, someone might have encouraged them further, deeper into the hull of Titanic.

I’m of the impression that Titan is far too large to get anywhere close to inside Titanic.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:19 PM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yeah, you're right Bora-- it's completely uninformed speculation.
posted by Static Vagabond at 2:19 PM on June 20, 2023 [6 favorites]

Strict liability would be the end of downhill skiing and regular SCUBA diving and a lot of other outdoor activities, not just the really over the top stuff.

While there have been SCUBA accidents, there's been millions of safe dives, same could be said for downhill skiing/snowboarding.

You're might be liable for taking people on activities with 'unquantified but clearly not small risks', especially if you didn't properly inform. But at some point, the activity has been done "enough" that we can estimate the risks and what proper diligence looks like from the operator.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 2:24 PM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

If the vessel made it all the way down to the wreck, someone might have encouraged them further, deeper into the hull of Titanic. There's no-one to tell them no. Hovering inside, one of those buoyancy mechanisms gets triggered, slamming them into the hull above, trapping them like a bubble in an upside-down jar. They'd have no way of moving, and no possibility of getting out.

For all the quotes from the owner about being daring and questioning the 'safety level' of the industry, it was one of the things he was adamant about in the transcript, you don't go in overhead situations, because then all their safety plans disappear.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 2:27 PM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

I’m of the impression that Titan is far too large to get anywhere close to inside Titanic.

Also communication was lost 1.45 hours into a 2-hour dive at around 11,000 feet, so it seems likely something happened on the way down.
posted by kirkaracha at 2:29 PM on June 20, 2023 [6 favorites]

A more mundane scenario for entanglement would be a change in ocean conditions (or a control issue) causing a drift into the wreckage, snagging something on the outside; that's happened before, as mentioned upthread (to a different craft, which got loose).

But at some point, the activity has been done "enough" that we can estimate the risks and what proper diligence looks like from the operator.

That's how we do negligence now; strict liability is what it sounds like. There is no duty, breach and causation analysis or any other question of fault, there's just liability for any accidents, period.
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:30 PM on June 20, 2023

But it is true that even when they sign waivers, people don't really believe in the risk...deep down they think it's just something lawyers make companies do, because if it was that dangerous it wouldn't be allowed at all.

100% this. I work for a park that has an ice rink in the winter, and we make everyone agree to waivers saying they know they could be injured or killed. And it’s true, they could! But it’s not LIKELY - and I can almost guarantee you nobody ever actually READS the thing, any more than you read the ToS of every app you download.

This experimental submarine should not have liability language that looks the same as an ice skating rink’s.
posted by showbiz_liz at 2:31 PM on June 20, 2023 [9 favorites]

They're far enough out at sea that International Marine Law applies.

There was a mention of communications options if the craft surfaces in an emergency, so if they are intact and able to surface, there's some possibility of being found.
posted by theora55 at 2:36 PM on June 20, 2023

I had a classmate die on a high school ski/hike trip (that I wasn't on) due to reckless choices on the part of the guides, one of whom was on the school faculty and known to be kind of a self-impressed asshole in both capacities.

The school refused to settle, and put a lot of other students through hell defending the case (depositions, etc). Ultimately, the parental releases were upheld and the family got nothing as far as I know. The outdoor education program continued and it remained a part of the core curriculum last I checked.

Most lift ticket and SCUBA waivers do have rather stark language about the risks. People still sign them breezily.
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:40 PM on June 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

the viewport at the forward of the submersible was only built to a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, although OceanGate intended to take passengers down to depths of 4,000 meters

The difference between just how much more pressure there is at 4,000 m than at 1,300 m - could do with some kind of analogy to illustrate it.Others here might do better but, as I understand it the pressure goes up by one atmosphere every 10 metres or so of depth. Which means, if this claim is true, the pressure at the vessel's design depth would have been about 270 times more than that of the viewport's tolerance.
posted by rongorongo at 2:51 PM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Strict liability would be the end of downhill skiing and regular SCUBA diving and a lot of other outdoor activities, not just the really over the top stuff.

Not necessarily. I'm imagining something like the H&S requirements here in the UK. You don't have to guarantee that nobody will ever get hurt, but you do have to show that you've taken reasonable precautions to mitigate risks identified by a thorough risk assessment, and industry standards and protocols exist for activities like SCUBA which can easily be referenced with regard to what constitutes reasonable precautions.

Maybe I'm not using "strict liability" in the way a lawyer would. I mean it goes to court or some kind of arbitration, no ifs, buts, or waivers, where the responsible party gets to argue that look, they took all of these precautions, here are the records of all the safety inspections, of all the parts being rated for the use they were put to (or the records of the testing you did to make sure it was safe in the event that no such rating exists), etc.

This is very similar to how HSE already operates in the UK. You should not be able to waive am employer or supplier's safety obligations.

A document that says that a part of your 3.8km deep submersible was only rated by the manufacturer to 1.3km for example should be a slam dunk for guilty.
posted by Dysk at 2:56 PM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

According to this calculator:

1300m = 1,892psi (or a little more than a consumer grade pressure washer)
4000m = 5,823psi

Either way, a low-end pressure washer can take off skin, so a pinhole leak at almost 6000psi is probably pretty deadly.
posted by AzraelBrown at 2:57 PM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

If the passengers could prove the OceanGate was liable, would that make any practical difference? The CEO is on board the submersible, they only have the one prototype submersible, the company's innovative technology is the thing that failed. Even if all the passengers would found safely right now, the immense bad press from the incident likely ends OceanGate as a functioning company. Would anyone even insure this company even before the incident?
posted by meowzilla at 3:00 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

I read about the Verrückt when it was an FPP and I think about if from time to time. That was a risk the participants had no idea they were taking.
posted by theora55 at 3:01 PM on June 20, 2023 [12 favorites]

Sub Brief a YouTube Channel run by a retired US Navy Submariner has posted some thoughts on the vessel and concerns about the design.

Includes an alarming list of things not apparently on board, such as any for of atmosphere monitoring, and the entirely reasonable point that there’s no real reason to believe the 96 hours of life support claimed.
posted by Artw at 3:04 PM on June 20, 2023 [13 favorites]

At 4000m compared to 1300m it's 270 (= 400 - 130) more atmospheres, but as a ratio it's only 400/130 = 3x the rated pressure. The 1300m rating also wasn't the point where the window was *expected* to fail, but rather the number the manufacturer was willing to commit to. It's not like they took a bunch of stuff down that was known to fail at that depth, rather (and this is perhaps not much better) they used a bunch of poorly-tested experimental and custom stuff where nobody could authoritatively say what the failure points and safety margins were.
posted by Pyry at 3:10 PM on June 20, 2023 [10 favorites]

I realize a lot of this discussion is purely hindsight-facing and all, but aren't all these questions the kinds of things you'd be asking yourself prior to handing over $250,000 and climbing into this tiny craft, to venture 4 kilometers into the ocean's depths?

I obviously cannot relate to these motivations.
posted by elkevelvet at 3:14 PM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

A document that says that a part of your 3.8km deep submersible was only rated by the manufacturer to 1.3km for example should be a slam dunk for guilty.

That document was from 2017/2018, to be clear. We don't know what design improvements, if any, were made, although there's a brief link from 2020 above that claims OceanGate had been working with NASA to improve the hull design:

The agreement calls for NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama to serve as the site for developing and manufacturing a new type of aerospace-grade hull. OceanGate said the joint design effort will be key to its plans for building a five-person submersible capable of going as deep as 6,000 meters (19,800 feet).

To me, if the sub did make it to the surface and the crew dies inside there, the bigger lawsuit issue will be the lack of a beacon (if that rumor that the sub didn't have an ELT or EPIRB* is true).

*I just learned these acronyms yesterday so be kind if I'm misunderstanding something.
posted by mediareport at 3:14 PM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

If the passengers could prove the OceanGate was liable, would that make any practical difference?

The families get whatever money the company has left, rather than the owners. Anyone else who signed off on taking a rated-for-1300m part to 4000m also goes to prison. (The guy that sued for unfair dismissal? He refused to sign off on that. Presumably he was replaced with someone else, who did.)

I guess it won't make a difference in the sense of bringing the people back, but it would make a difference in terms of providing consequences for the people gambling with the lives of others for money, and go some way to preventing them being able to do so again in future.
posted by Dysk at 3:17 PM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

... it is true that even when they sign waivers, people don't really believe in the risk...deep down they think it's just something lawyers make companies do, because if it was that dangerous it wouldn't be allowed at all.

People not only don't believe in the risk, they almost never even read the waivers, which is not helped by lawyers insisting that a waiver contains so much information that they are so long nobody bothers reading them. I'm involved in a sport that carries a lot of risk and one of the additional things we are required to do (by the liability insurance provider, of course) is read a short statement aloud at the pre-start briefing that says, in effect, 'this sport is dangerous and by participating you accept that you may be seriously injured or killed while participating'. Every participant is required to verbally acknowledge the risk before proceeding (this is recorded via video and audio). But, once they've heard it a few times, nobody actually listens and they just want to get on with things, so say 'I understand and accept the risk' without thinking.

Everyone has their own tolerance for risk and, even though they mostly don't really accept that the risk exists for them, are willing to do things that excite them despite the risk (or sometimes because of it). I would never criticise anyone for getting their kicks in a risky way, but I am acutely aware of the harm that things going wrong can do to people like their families that didn't accept that risk. I feel for the families and friends of the people in this sub and hope, for their sake, they get to hug their loved ones sometime soon.
posted by dg at 3:18 PM on June 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

Back country ski gates often have some of the bluntest language and imagery to help people understand the risk quickly. “You are leaving the ski resort YOU CAN DIE - THIS IS YOUR DECISION” in giant letters with skull and crossbones sort of deal and often a physical gate you have to open and go through. I think they do that not just for liability reasons - but because at altitude when visibility may be low due to snow you need to be super clear and concise. And this is after you have signed resort waivers etc.

Yet people still go through alone, totally unprepared (beacon? - what’s a beacon?) and die. Many people I guess see that sign and turn around, some make measured risk judgements and prepare so they reduce/mitigate risk, and a few see the danger as the adventure. I only know that 19 year old me (actually me at any age) would nope out if I saw a giant sign on this sub with a giant skull and cross bones saying that “This is an experimental submersible . IT IS NOT SAFETY RATED AT ANY DEPTH. YOU CAN DIE - THIS IS YOUR DECISION”. I’m good on topside comms duty - neat I get to play with the sonar thingee….
posted by inflatablekiwi at 3:21 PM on June 20, 2023 [14 favorites]

The New York Times has unearthed a 2018 letter sent by submersible experts to Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate.

The authors of the letter expressed "unanimous concern" over the approach taken by OceanGate when building the Titan and warned of potential "catastrophic" issues with its design.

They also said OceanGate was making "misleading" claims about its design exceeding established industry safety standards and urged Rush to institute a prototype testing program reviewed and witnessed by an accredited registrar.

"It is our unanimous view that this validation process by a third-party is a critical component in the safeguards that protect all submersible occupants," the letter read.

The NYT said a spokesperson for OceanGate declined to comment

[via the BBC]
posted by chavenet at 3:29 PM on June 20, 2023 [22 favorites]

THERE'S NOTHING IN THIS CAVE WORTH DYING FOR! DO NOT GO BEYOND THIS POINT.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:30 PM on June 20, 2023 [35 favorites]

Hah, snuffleupagus, I was just looking for that sign!
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 3:34 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

snuffleupagus: this whole situation put me in mind of a villanelle written with that as the refrain—

… Forget the cord that tugs you to explore,
The silver voice that whispers, Come and see
The darkling wave, the glowing secret shore.
There’s nothing in this cave worth dying for.
posted by Countess Elena at 3:40 PM on June 20, 2023 [28 favorites]

Sub Brief a YouTube Channel run by a retired US Navy Submariner has posted some thoughts on the vessel and concerns about the design.
His list of problem areas:

Risk of a carbon fibre pressure hull - it is brittle with a sudden failure mode
Hiring of young, inexperienced technicians.
Not hiring of SMEs in submarine operations and safety.
Not learning lessons from NASA (about the danger of sealing people in a vessel)
Possibility that the life support system was not tested.
Test dive of 4000m not tested first before a commercial dive,
No way to ventilate the pressure hull in the case of smoke,
No emergency breathing apparatus,
No voice comms,
Tolerance of loss of prolonged loss of comms during testing..

Given that list of risks , his conclusion is striking "I really feel terrible for all the families involved; because your family members are dead. It hurts me to say that but it is the truth"
posted by rongorongo at 3:42 PM on June 20, 2023 [52 favorites]

Snufflepagus, and yet so many people seem to get a kick of going behind those with the wrong equipment and training …
posted by WaterAndPixels at 3:45 PM on June 20, 2023

...and yet so many people seem to get a kick of going behind those with the wrong equipment and training...

Hence, there are some UW cave system entrances that have been (laboriously) fitted with locked gates as a result.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 4:16 PM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

When David Pogue took that trip, they lost communication, and, with it, navigation. What changed after that? Because that's a pretty major event for a thing that goes 4000m/ 2.5 miles underwater.
posted by theora55 at 4:17 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

You’d think, but I’m not sure there are any accounts of this thing taking a trip where it didn’t lose communication.

Which I would find worrying, yes.
posted by Artw at 4:19 PM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Over on ars technica, someone claimed (without citing a source) that internet on the support ship was intentionally disabled after Pogue's trip to prevent him from tweeting about the loss of communication they experienced.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 4:24 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

There's no reason to insist on analyzing this purely through the lens of tort liability, as if that were the only legal framework available.
posted by praemunire at 4:38 PM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm also curious how the extreme pressure at the bottom affects the volume inside the sub. I know that when Cameron did his ride, the materials of his craft (essentially a fancy diving bell?) compressed quite a bit and reduced the interior volume significantly. This shrink had to be accounted for when the craft was designed. It apparently got quite cramped at depth.

This sub is made from carbon composites. Perhaps they don't undergo compression the same way as metal (which I assume Cameron's craft was constructed out of).

cameron's bathyscape, deepsea challenger, does not appear to have been primarily made of steel, but a novel syntactic foam that housed much of the infrastructure (thrusters, battery array, lights). the sphere he sat in, though. that was steel.

i will say it's completely wild to me that it appears that the lithium battery array wasn't... more isolated from the water?
posted by i used to be someone else at 4:46 PM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Geekwire in Jan 2020:

Rush said tests that were conducted at the Deep Ocean Test Facility in Annapolis, Md., revealed that the Titan’s hull “showed signs of cyclic fatigue.” As a result, the hull’s depth rating was reduced to 3,000 meters.

“Not enough to get to the Titanic,” Rush said.

NBC 3 hours ago:

Titan's depth capabilities were downgraded short of the Titanic

The hull of the Titan vessel "showed signs of cyclic fatigue," according to a January 2020 interview with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who is aboard the missing vessel. Rush told GeekWire that due to that stress, the hull rating was downgraded to a depth of 3,000 meters, 800 meters short of the Titanic's depth.

In a December 2019 slideshow that appears to have been presented to the Deep Submergence Science Committee of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System, OceanGate listed the depth capability of the Titan as 3,000 meters.

At the time, the CEO was announcing a new round of funding for the company, which he said would go toward funding new vessels that could go deeper than the Titan. But in 2021, OceanGate announced that Titan, not another vessel, had completed a trip to the Titanic.

There had been no public update about Titan's depth rating since it was downgraded. On the company’s current webpage, it says the ship is designed for a 4,000-meter depth, despite previous statements made about the vessel's capabilities.

Wow. "What changed in the Titan's hull that allowed you to upgrade its depth rating from 3000 meters to Titanic depths between Dec 2019 and the 2021 trip, or last week?" will be an interesting question to ask OceanGate when the rescue has concluded.
posted by mediareport at 4:51 PM on June 20, 2023 [17 favorites]

The source for the “internet was shut off on the ship while the sub was lost” stories appears to be David Pogue. He went on a trip a year ago and it happened during that trip.

Here is one tweet (I believe there are others) where he mentions it.
posted by FallibleHuman at 4:52 PM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

So far as the bends are concerned, subs are typically kept at or near surface pressure, afaik. (way up there, just started reading)

It would normally be, but I'm assuming there's some method of adding oxygen as they breathe it up and then exhale less. So you see, now you've got a goes-in with no goes-out. Pressure will start to build inside.

It's actually one of the... well many difficulties with submarine rescue, as pressure starts to go up you accumulate bottom time like a diver. Even in a navy sub with active atmosphere control machinery, we did have to put gasses overboard and still occasionally surface or snorkel to equalize pressure. We usually equalized to get more air pressure into the boat, but that was because we often ran air compressors that took air from the internal atmosphere. A disabled sub would have no control of that whatsoever. Even if there were some kind of one-way vent that wouldn't immediately fail under pressure, no gas would go out against that sea pressure.

So you're building up toxic CO2, and I think even scattering KOH around to absorb it isn't going to help enough with the pressure buildup. (I don't think). If they thought of having any, which... uh. As a professional "think ahead to the next problem" guy, I'm not sure how they plan to unbolt that thing even if they find it and it's pressurized.
posted by ctmf at 5:40 PM on June 20, 2023 [20 favorites]

I would assume they are using some lime based CO2 scrubbing like they’re in a giant rebreather loop. I doubt there would be a significant pressure change over a normal trip duration. I was on a mini sub doing this for about 6 hours and there was no pressure increase.
posted by snofoam at 5:47 PM on June 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

Among the more horrifying scenarios is that they managed to surface the sub but with communications and power offline they have no way to contact the ship, or get back to the ship. Since they are bolted into the sub with no way to exit and no way to communicate with the support vessel they will just float on the surface until the air runs out.
posted by interogative mood at 6:07 PM on June 20, 2023

these five rich people go missing touring the Titanic and we get worldwide 'round-the-clock coverage of the desperate international effort to rescue them.

Just be thankful there wasn’t a young, attractive blond white woman with them.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:18 PM on June 20, 2023 [18 favorites]

I wonder if the "fix" for going to more than 3000m is their 'dynamic hull monitoring' system. Still I wouldn't go into one of those until they built & destroyed through testing quite a few of them just to be sure they got their analysis right.

That would be a good example case of 'goal fixation', 3000m is still quite an achievement, but there ain't no Titanics at that depth...
posted by WaterAndPixels at 6:21 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Do we know who the fifth person was yet? I don’t recall seeing that.
posted by eviemath at 6:24 PM on June 20, 2023

BBC: Who is on board Titanic sub?

I'm guessing about which four you know, but probably Paul-Henry Nargeolet?
posted by Dysk at 6:26 PM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Rush told GeekWire that due to that stress, the hull rating was downgraded to a depth of 3,000 meters...

On the company’s current webpage, it says the ship is designed for a 4,000-meter depth...

"It turns out that an aerospace engineering degree actually has helped me do things in the submersible world that people who don’t understand compressible fluid flows didn’t quite figure out..."

Engineer's Disease is a hell of a drug.
posted by heatherlogan at 6:28 PM on June 20, 2023 [31 favorites]

Also his big innovation is… a carbon fiber tube and being a corner cutter?
posted by Artw at 6:35 PM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Strict liability is probably totally un-needed for this, I'm sure regular negligence will do just fine, given all the stupid fate-tempting things this guy has said about safety and how everything except the pressure hull is not important.

It probably failed at the attachment point between the window and the hemisphere, just like it did in model testing. And they probably took the fact that it failed that one time at 3000-and-some-change meters to mean well, as long as we only go to 3000 then we're fine. Nope, that's not how that works. The other thing I'd worry about is, well it's not spherical, it's pill-shaped. I'd be worrying about the straight sides buckling and I'd like to think well, obviously they thought of that, but the model testing I saw a quick video of seemed to have the sides constrained and only be testing the ends.

What company insured this? I'd hate to be the PE-licensed person who signed it off.
posted by ctmf at 6:39 PM on June 20, 2023 [7 favorites]

I wonder if the "fix" for going to more than 3000m is their 'dynamic hull monitoring' system. Still I wouldn't go into one of those until they built & destroyed through testing quite a few of them just to be sure they got their analysis right.

At these pressures all subs come with a built-in hull monitoring system, it’s called the hull caving in.
posted by showbiz_liz at 6:43 PM on June 20, 2023 [13 favorites]

I wonder if the "fix" for going to more than 3000m is their 'dynamic hull monitoring' system

I meant to say, that's a stupid selling point too. The rapid sudden failure of carbon fiber would turn that into a "you have 3 ms to live" alarm. It could be useful in gathering long-term trend data on how much stress it was taking, I guess, but it would never tell you some jackass gouged the hull with a forklift by accident last night, or how fast fatigue was lowering the stress it could take before failure.
posted by ctmf at 6:44 PM on June 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

"It turns out that an aerospace engineering degree actually has helped me do things in the submersible world that people who don’t understand compressible fluid flows didn’t quite figure out..."

Gee - I'm NO kind of engineer, but I was taught that water is (...very nearly...) an INcompressible fluid.

See: Water is essentially incompressible - US Geological Survey
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 6:45 PM on June 20, 2023 [9 favorites]

I'm no engineer either, but a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation using the bulk modulus of water gives me a volume decrease of water of about 2% at a pressure of 400 atmospheres compared to the usual. Yeah, I'd call that pretty incompressible.
posted by heatherlogan at 6:57 PM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

It turns out that an aerospace engineering degree actually has helped me do things in the submersible world...

And yet, as mentioned in that Sub Brief video, he seems to have learned nothing from Apollo 1 where a hatch that was bolted from outside contributed to three deaths.

He may even have caused a similar oxygen rich environment, depending on how the atmosphere systems actually worked.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:01 PM on June 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

Assuming (and it’s a big assumption) that it’s not hull failure, I can’t imagine that CEO’s coming off well if the folks on board even started to consider ways to conserve oxygen…
posted by MarchHare at 7:04 PM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

I've got to think there's plenty of violations of all kinds of regulations here, experimental vessel or not. I mean just to take the one ChurchHatesTucker mentions, I couldn't put an employee in a restaurant freezer without a working crash bar on the door. Not even if I labeled it an "experimental" freezer.
posted by ctmf at 7:06 PM on June 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

If they got to the surface and it was possible to open the hatch from the inside, wouldn’t it just fill up with water and sink again as soon as they opened it?
posted by artychoke at 7:07 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

plenty of violations of all kinds of regulations here

Maybe that's the advantage of operating in international waters?
posted by heatherlogan at 7:08 PM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

If anyone lives in a BBC-friendly region, here's a one hour documentary about OceanGate and the Titan: Take Me To Titanic
posted by meowzilla at 7:10 PM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yeah then they would merely be in a "normal" abandon ship situation in the North Atlantic. Probably not near the tender vessel, with no communication method and no life preservers or exposure suits, and no locator beacon.
posted by ctmf at 7:10 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

To follow up on the aerospace engineering degree thing, Mr. Stockton Rush's LinkedIn page reports his education as a Bachelor's in Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from Princeton (1980-84) and an MBA from UC Berkeley (1987-89). No "experience" is listed other than his CEO-ship of OceanGate (founded in 2009).
posted by heatherlogan at 7:17 PM on June 20, 2023 [6 favorites]

Here's a longer biography on Equilar, listing experience as a flight test engineer, various board of director jobs, and completion of several plane and underwater vehicle kits.
posted by meowzilla at 7:24 PM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

"It turns out that an aerospace engineering degree actually has helped me do things in the submersible world that people who don’t understand compressible fluid flows didn’t quite figure out..."

Gee - I'm NO kind of engineer, but I was taught that water is (...very nearly...) an INcompressible fluid.

Indeed, space and water aren't the same.
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:32 PM on June 20, 2023 [11 favorites]

The proposed Triton 13000/2 Titanic Explorer - is specifically built for trips to the Titanic - it has a fully acrylic "optically perfect" see-though pressure capsule. It also has Gull Wings.

"With an exceptionally compact footprint, the Gull Wing arrangement allows the vehicle to be stored and maintained from a small garage....."
posted by inflatablekiwi at 7:32 PM on June 20, 2023

What would you even do if you were the rescue coordinator?
1. Double check there is nothing that could conceivably reach those depths in time, (let alone be able to effect a useful search, let alone effect a rescue.)
2. Have a plane search the area in case it surfaced without comms.
3. Inform nearby ships to be on the lookout.
4. Sit back and wait out their best-case oxygen so you can formally declare them lost at sea.

Am I missing anything? It seems ludicrous to imagine there is any hope for those people, or even much that can be done to pretend to be helping
posted by anonymisc at 7:35 PM on June 20, 2023 [10 favorites]

If they got to the surface and it was possible to open the hatch from the inside, wouldn’t it just fill up with water and sink again as soon as they opened it?

Guess it depends if they deployed the airbag it apparently has (one of the seven ways back to the surface mentioned in the thread above) and how the hatch sits relative to the waterline. But that scenario is essentially what happened with the Pisces III

"...with the submersible about to be lifted out of the water with a towline back onto the ship, a water alarm sounded in the aft sphere, a self-contained part of the submersible containing machinery and oil storage. The towline had apparently fouled on the aft sphere hatch and wrenched it open. The crew heard the sound of water entering the aft compartment as Pisces III became inverted and began to sink back to the seabed. The aft sphere was fully flooded with over a tonne of water."
posted by inflatablekiwi at 7:41 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

anonymisc, here's a gift WSJ link, How Search Teams Have Scrambled to Find the Titan Submersible Vessel, that goes into a bit more detail about the various strategies they're using, including multiple planes, sonar buoys, etc.
posted by mediareport at 7:43 PM on June 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

I'm not excitedly making special playlists for a visit to the graveyard, or to Verdun, an ossuary, etc, etc.

I've been pondering this all day, in particular how people choose the music for documentaries about those types of things.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:49 PM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

The NYT article from earlier today (archive link) summarizes a lot of what's above, with additional info about how OceanGate avoids regulation:

Submersibles, unlike boats and other vessels, are largely unregulated, particularly when they operate in international waters, said Salvatore Mercogliano, an associate professor of maritime history at Campbell University in North Carolina. Because the Titan is loaded onto a Canadian ship and then dropped into the North Atlantic near the Titanic, he said, it does not need to register with a country, fly a flag or follow rules that apply to many other vessels.

“It’s kind of like a boat on the back of a trailer,” Mr. Mercogliano said. “The police will ensure the trailer meets the requirements to be on the road, but they really won’t do a boat inspection.”

The Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993, which regulates submersibles that carry passengers and requires that they be registered with the Coast Guard, does not apply to the Titan because it does not fly an American flag or operate in American waters, he said.

It does include this, though, which confused me:

Still, Mr. Concannon wrote in the filing, 28 people were able to visit the Titanic wreckage on the Titan last year.

That's 6 trips at a minimum - a lot more trips than I thought the Titan had made. I was under the impression it was more like 2-3 trips before this one.
posted by mediareport at 7:53 PM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Right I get how he avoids having any sort of submarine safety certification, but I would think general workplace OSHA rules would still apply to him, being an employer. It shouldn't matter if it's a submarine, space capsule, water tower, or whatever, you're still putting people in an enclosed space with no fire protection, ventilation, etc.
posted by ctmf at 8:00 PM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

Maybe not "customers" or the general public, because he's avoiding the commercial stuff by calling all his passengers "crew". And hell, if you're crazy with your own life, knock yourself out. But as an employer, you're responsible for reasonable safety for your employees.
posted by ctmf at 8:02 PM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

I was under the impression it was more like 2-3 trips before this one.

That might be trips of the tender ship, with multiple dives from the Titan (with different "specialists") on each trip.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 8:05 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Would OSHA even apply, that far out to sea?
posted by mochapickle at 8:07 PM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

And more details on warnings from The NY Times.

A few quotes:
In the documents, Mr. Lochridge reported learning that the viewport that lets passengers see outside the craft was only certified to work in depths of up to 1,300 meters. That is far less than would be necessary for trips to the Titanic, which is nearly 4,000 meters below the ocean’s surface.

Mr. Rush called him after reading the letter and told him that industry standards were stifling innovation. In an unsigned 2019 blog post titled “Why Isn’t Titan Classed?,” the company made similar arguments. OceanGate said in the post that because its Titan craft was so innovative, it could take years to get it certified by the usual assessment agencies. “Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation,” the company wrote.

Mr. Rush has spoken publicly in the past about what he viewed as regulatory red tape in the industry.

This strikes me as the culmination of anti-regulation tech-culture of "breaking" things. And now people are dead.
posted by Toddles at 8:11 PM on June 20, 2023 [23 favorites]

Missing Titanic Sub: ‘Banging’ Sounds Heard During Search – Rolling Stone

A CANADIAN AIRCRAFT searching for the missing Titan submersible, which failed to return Sunday from an expedition to the wreckage of the Titanic, detected “banging” in 30-minute intervals coming from the area the divers disappeared, according to internal e-mail updates sent to Department of Homeland Security leadership and obtained by Rolling Stone.

“RCC Halifax launched a P8, Poseidon, which has underwater detection capabilities from the air,” the DHS e-mails read. “The P8 deployed sonobuoys, which reported a contact in a position close to the distress position. The P8 heard banging sounds in the area every 30 minutes. Four hours later additional sonar was deployed and banging was still heard.” The announcement did not state what time the banging was heard, or what was thought to have caused it.

posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 8:22 PM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

Banging sounds heard during Titan search, according to internal government memo.

:(
posted by mazola at 8:24 PM on June 20, 2023

>“Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation,”

I work with one foot in the Corporate World, god help me, and people are always talking about 'the pace of innovation'. But I don't make submarines. This guy tried to do agile development on a submarine. FFS.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 8:25 PM on June 20, 2023 [18 favorites]

apologies if linked above, but there's a Smithsonian article from June 2019 about Stockton Rush and OceansGate and Titan that reads pretty ominous in hindsight, naming him a "daredevil inventor" in the subtitle.

[Following his first dive in a kit-built submarine] Rush was hooked—and his entrepreneurial instincts were piqued. "I had come across this business anomaly I couldn’t explain: If three-quarters of the planet is water, how come you can’t access it?"

[...]

[The Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993] was well-meaning, Rush says, but he believes it needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation. [...] "There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown—because they have all these regulations."

posted by glonous keming at 8:26 PM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

Navy Rushing Deep Sea Salvage System To Aid In Titan Submersible Search [the drive]

It's a rapidly deployable winch on a mounting that compensates for motion on the surface to stabilize the line and keep it from snapping.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:33 PM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

The Wikipedia pages about OceanGate and the current incident seem to provide a pretty comprehensive summary, including some new tidbits that I haven't seen in this thread (like that one time in 2022 when "one of the thrusters on the Titan was accidentally installed backwards and the submersible started spinning in circles when trying to move forward near the sea floor").

There's also OceanGate's own webpage which includes a rather disconcerting description of the "validation" of the Titan via a single, manned, dive to 4000 m in 2018:

Not only did this dive completely validate OceanGate's innovative engineering and the construction of Titan’s carbon fiber and titanium hull, it also means that all systems are GO for the 2019 Titanic Survey Expedition – the world’s deepest adventure – scheduled for June to August 2019.

posted by heatherlogan at 8:48 PM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

their website makes the rather specious claim that the sub is a "cyclops class" submersible.

Like in Subnautica? Is there some legendary cyclops name connection to deep sea vessels or is just a reference to the single viewport?

I realize a lot of this discussion is purely hindsight-facing and all, but aren't all these questions the kinds of things you'd be asking yourself prior to handing over $250,000 and climbing into this tiny craft, to venture 4 kilometers into the ocean's depths?

Being wealthy doesn't provide immunity to "Hold my beer" impulses.
posted by Mitheral at 8:49 PM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Everyone on that Odyssey of the Mind "submarine" was dead before this FPP was posted. That pointless little factoid about "96 hours of oxygen" must have just looked like pure gold to reporters, that's an amazing lifespan for a news story these days. Motion graphics teams making timers and shit . I bet everyone on that support ship knew this story was very very over well before they alerted the Coast Guard.
It must have been quite the scene when this half assed operation lost their malignant narcissist of a leader because of and during a crisis. There isn't yet even a spokesperson for the company responsible for this massive fucking tragedy.
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 9:07 PM on June 20, 2023 [23 favorites]

"one of the thrusters on the Titan was accidentally installed backwards and the submersible started spinning in circles when trying to move forward near the sea floor"

Ok, that's not even a safety issue (well it can become one if unlucky), that's just a "lets not waste a very expensive trip" issue. He boasts they have checklists, checking the sub trusters operate properly before descent, that should be on that list.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 9:09 PM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

Is there some legendary cyclops name connection to deep sea vessels

Polyphemus was the cyclops encountered by Odysseus on his return from Troy. Polyphemus was described by Homer as the son of Poseidon, god of the ocean.
posted by SPrintF at 9:12 PM on June 20, 2023 [9 favorites]

This strikes me as the culmination of anti-regulation tech-culture of "breaking" things.

Yep. You can really see it in that whole “Why Isn’t Titan Classed?" blog post, which was linked earlier today. It's worth a read if you want to see more of the company's techbro arrogance.
posted by mediareport at 9:26 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

A Canadian P3 aircraft also located a white rectangular object in the water, according to that update, but another ship set to investigate was diverted to help research the acoustic feedback instead, according to that update.

:(
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:27 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Would OSHA even apply, that far out to sea?

It depends on what country’s flag the main ship sails under.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:42 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

From the Smithsonian article linked by glonous keming:

"It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations."

"Obscenely safe" is not a phrase I would ever want to hear from the CEO of any company. Or indeed a phrase I would want to hear from anyone, about anything.
posted by andraste at 10:09 PM on June 20, 2023 [25 favorites]

And also, the fact that there hasn't been an injury in the commercial sub industry in 35 years seems to be proof that they've been doing it right. It's not a case of "if nobody gets hurt, you're not really innovating".
posted by andraste at 10:12 PM on June 20, 2023 [16 favorites]

I'm in a safety-related job and it's a constant tension. The better you do the more people think you're unnecessary. Luckily for me, the people who designed this org took us out from under the general ESH department and put us as our own department, one of the "Big 3". Production, Engineering, and us. With stop work authority that goes directly to the top. And we still get push-back all the time for being "obstructive" to "getting work done".

Unfortunately that wouldn't have helped this company, because the person who doesn't care about safety IS the top guy.
posted by ctmf at 10:19 PM on June 20, 2023 [44 favorites]

It's worth a read if you want to see more of the company's techbro arrogance.
It's hard to tell whether it's actually arrogance or just a complete and utter lack of understanding of any concept of safety. I only read it quickly, but a few things jumped out at me:

1. The statement that spacecraft manufacturers use internal experts to 'oversee the daily operations, testing, and validation', which I expected to be followed by a claim that OceanGate does the same, but [crickets]

2. On their risk assessment - 'In this assessment, the actual operational risks are almost always concentrated on the surface operations not the subsea performance'. While there are probably plenty of things that can go wrong in the launch preparation, the highest risks on the basis of likelihood vs consequence must surely be while the sub is exposed to enough pressure to crush its occupants like a bug in an instant?

3. They close with 'classing does not ... ensure that the operator follows procedures or processes that are the key to conducting safe dive operations', completely ignoring the fact that all the procedures in the world won't help if your people-containing tube can't do its job.
posted by dg at 10:21 PM on June 20, 2023 [8 favorites]

It's worth a read if you want to see more of the company's techbro arrogance.

... classing agencies only focus on validating the physical vessel. They do not ensure that operators adhere to proper operating procedures and decision-making processes – two areas that are much more important for mitigating risks at sea. The vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure. As a result, simply focusing on classing the vessel does not address the operational risks.

Gee, I wonder why mechanical failure is not a major cause of marine accidents? I bet the guy who wrote that sentence wishes he had talked to the guy who wrote two sentences earlier that all marine vessels are validated.
posted by Superilla at 11:12 PM on June 20, 2023 [11 favorites]

inflatablekiwi: If they got to the surface and it was possible to open the hatch from the inside, wouldn’t it just fill up with water and sink again as soon as they opened it?

Yes, simply because 'the hatch' is the titanium dome forming one end of the cylinder, which would still for the largest part be under water.
The best that could probably have been done was to build a tapered* plug into the dome** which could be unbolted and pushed out from the inside once at the surface, at least letting fresh air in, but that would incur the risk of water ingress after which they'd be down on the ocean floor again.

* would be thoroughly pushed down into its seating even at a few meters under water.
** probably better than putting one in the CF part of the hull.
posted by Stoneshop at 1:05 AM on June 21, 2023

It's probably worth noting that in a typical marketing maneuver, they're selling their "real-time hull health monitoring system" as a feature when in fact it's only necessary in the first place to compensate for carbon fiber composite's propensity to just suddenly and unpredictably fracture with little or no warning. I don't even know if it would work, the first warning could very well be the last. The concept of a composite hull isn't inherently unsound with enough testing and monitoring - the materials are used in aerospace, after all, where safety is critical and fatigue is also a possible issue - but I'd never board a prototype and certainly not to the limit-testing depths they did. It says a lot that they fired the guy who filed a complaint about safety, as if ignoring the issue would make it go away.

The best thing that can be said about the CEO is he believed in his own product and put his money where his mouth was.
posted by ndr at 1:29 AM on June 21, 2023 [10 favorites]

Anyone else notice this from the Rolling Stone article about the leaked email from the Explorer Society discussing the banging sounds?

The mass email said that two Society members were onboard the Titan, and urged the group to contact their representatives about using remote-operated vehicles made by a private UK-based company. “A team out of the UK named Magellan has an ROV rated for 6,000 meters which is loaded on a plane and ready and waiting to help,” the email stated. “BUT THE US GOV and USCG have not yet given them permits to participate!” The Boston Coast Guard has not responded to questions about the depth grading of the ROVs currently in use in the search efforts or the proposal to use the UK company’s products.

It's too easy to 2nd-guess strategy from afar, and the Magellan ROV could be another Musk-like "ME, A GENIUS, CAN HELP" thing, but I hope turf battles aren't in play.
posted by mediareport at 3:17 AM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

A lot of people were wondering about the use case for the Apple Vision goggles. Using ROVs to capture high quality footage of the titanic for a super immersive experience could be one of those things. Have a live expert leading your “expedition” and charge a couple thousand. It might be a better experience in many ways. And obviously safer.
posted by snofoam at 3:47 AM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

"Obscenely safe" is not a phrase I would ever want to hear from the CEO of any company. Or indeed a phrase I would want to hear from anyone, about anything.

I frequent a forum dedicated to Indycar racing, and there are commenters there who very often bemoan how safe today’s Indycars are, and how none of today’s drivers have the sort of nerves-of-iron that drivers of yore did. That they don’t have any sense that they are tempting fate when they take the wheel, the way the commenters’ heroes did. And that the racing today sucks because no-one has any fear of paying the ultimate price. Sick fucks.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:14 AM on June 21, 2023 [10 favorites]

Given the 16 hour dissolving ballast thing (and the other six ways of dropping ballast), if the crew is making the banging sound they have to be entangled in the wreck, right?
posted by Slackermagee at 4:55 AM on June 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

At the time of writing this, the submarine entered the water just over 3 days, or 72 hours, ago. It had probably been sealed up for a few hours prior to descent.

There were claims of an air supply for up to 96 hours, I'd imagine that is the best possible with all 5 people in a meditative state. Rescue agencies were suggesting that 70 hours might be their estimate for the air supply. This is looking more and more like a recovery operation. Time to crack open the hatch is running out, 7:30am EST on Thursday is 96 hours.
posted by epo at 4:57 AM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

I frequent a forum dedicated to Indycar racing, and there are commenters there who very often bemoan how safe today’s Indycars are, and how none of today’s drivers have the sort of nerves-of-iron that drivers of yore did. That they don’t have any sense that they are tempting fate when they take the wheel, the way the commenters’ heroes did. And that the racing today sucks because no-one has any fear of paying the ultimate price. Sick fucks.

I dunno. This may be a statement of fact. I'm not really in a place to make a judgment. This kind of argument can be applied to all kinds of endeavors, though. Replace indycar racing with flying across the country, or hell, driving across the country 100 years ago, and it's more or less true for me. Furthermore, the only remotely exciting thing about indycar to me is the possibility of a crash where one otherwise watches a bunch of cars go around and around for hours so... *shrugs*.

I will say that "obscenely safe" is a bizarre turn of phrase, and hits a kind of pet peeve of mine in contemporary dude-speak, where words like "obscene" and "insane" are utilized as somewhat misplaced intensifiers. Perhaps paradoxically, I think it's far more possible for something to be "obscenely unsafe" than "obscenely safe". Maybe the original intention was to say something somewhat incongruous, but in light of the current events, it looks regrettable.
posted by 2N2222 at 5:02 AM on June 21, 2023

Oh! The pilot was 77. The pilot! You surely couldn't get any affordable insurance if the pilot was that old.
posted by epo at 5:32 AM on June 21, 2023

...I think it's far more possible for something to be "obscenely unsafe" than "obscenely safe".

Not if you’re a techbro. “Obscenely safe” fits quite well in their libertarian, break-things-and-move-fast world view, where rules and regulations of any sort are seen as unnecessary hinderances and roadblocks rather than social goods.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:52 AM on June 21, 2023 [10 favorites]

It's the way he quotes the "not one accident in 35 years!" thing as if it's self-evidently proof that the industry is somehow failing, not doing their job properly. Like the safety record is something to be ashamed rather than proud of.
posted by Dysk at 5:57 AM on June 21, 2023 [25 favorites]

It's the way he quotes the "not one accident in 35 years!"

I mean, that is the same melody as the brag about the Titanic
posted by glaucon at 5:59 AM on June 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Can't see a good outcome at this point.

Given the banging noises that were heard for a while, but then stopped, were from them, then it is more likely to be the worst outcome: For some reason they were trapped on the bottom, alive and fully aware of their situation, without communication to the surface, and time and heating and oxygen have run out.

If they are not dead already then they are in comas, and soon will be dead and frozen, long before any rescue arrives.

I seriously doubt that rescue was ever a realistic possibility to start with in the circumstances.
posted by Pouteria at 6:00 AM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

Oh! The pilot was 77. The pilot! You surely couldn't get any affordable insurance if the pilot was that old.

epo, do you mean the pilot for the Titan? He was 61. Nargeolet was 77, though, and he's an experienced sub pilot but I don't think he was at the helm/logitech controller.
posted by mochapickle at 6:08 AM on June 21, 2023

Ah, my mistake. Saw Nargeolet was a pilot, sorry. 61 is OK, mere child really.
posted by epo at 6:12 AM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Milkshake duck strikes again!
posted by Pyrogenesis at 6:14 AM on June 21, 2023 [9 favorites]

Also, piloting an underwater craft doesn't require the eyesight and reaction times at the level an aircraft pilot would need to have. Good eyesight, sure, but movement of a sub powered by a couple of small propellers is slow and getting out of a hairy situation relies much more on evaluating and thought-out action than on speed.
posted by Stoneshop at 6:18 AM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

I have done a lot of technical and overhead diving, recreationally. I used to be certified to GUE Technical 2 and Cave 2 (and have swum by those Grim Reaper signs lots of times) but have let those lapse. So I read the CEO comments about safety being useless after a point to be a slightly glib statement of fact - something like this has an inherent risk, and at some point you just can’t mitigate it, because your redundant systems end up increasing complexity and maybe actually increase the likelihood of an incident. In the case of an experimental submersible I’d think the hull itself is the thing where you end up having that residual risk, and those seven systems for surfacing are probably not increasing survivability in case of an emergency at the bottom, that isn’t exactly failure of the main propulsion system. That’s the sense I took that statement in.

So you either accept that risk, or avoid it (by not going). I was going to say though, that those waivers are probably worthless as a deterrent - people are just so bad at assessing low-probability, high consequence risks (and also, I think, desensitised by decades of waivers for more ordinary things where there’s some risk of injury).

But after reading the referenced articles? This guy seems to longing for the 19th century explorers thing, the whole “safe return doubtful” mindset. Which, if you’re only risking your own life, maybe? But taking paying “crew”? After all those findings? No sympathy for that. I do hope against the odds that they can be rescued.
posted by boogieboy at 6:22 AM on June 21, 2023 [10 favorites]

pyrogenesis: Jesus. One article of faith among your alt-right idiots is that discrimination is really the smart and logical thing to do and discriminatory white men built everything decent. I’d like to think they would learn something from this, but sadly, that is not how it works.

I actually thought you were going to link something about the Scottish billionaire’s stepson, who appears to be a hair-trigger incel. I don’t know if he is going to end up with a large chunk of the money resulting from this, but I cannot imagine it being good for women if he does.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:23 AM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

As well as the milkshake duck, it sounds like they're bad at making carbon fibre hulls and all. Almost like restricting your employee pool to straight cis white men only limits how picky you can be with hiring in other regards.
posted by Dysk at 6:31 AM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Comments and responses about whether the USA is a good nation or ever was have been removed. Please keep the focus on the thread topic, thank you.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:45 AM on June 21, 2023 [11 favorites]

“A team out of the UK named Magellan has an ROV rated for 6,000 meters which is loaded on a plane and ready and waiting to help,” the email stated. “BUT THE US GOV and USCG have not yet given them permits to participate!”

This is in international waters. I get that the USCG has nominal authority over the area for coordinating the search, but what are they going to do if the Magellan people just show up? (My guess is that Magellan needs a boat and stuff for support, and there's nothing readily available.)
posted by Spike Glee at 6:47 AM on June 21, 2023

A whistleblower who expressed safety concerns was fired in 2018. One of the issues was that the front viewport window was certified to 1,300 meters, although OceanGate intended to take passengers down to depths of 4,000 meters.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:49 AM on June 21, 2023

The best that could probably have been done was to build a tapered* plug into the dome**

Given the most of the hull is carbon fiber, I was wondering about whether providing some kind of destructive method to be applied from inside was considered. Like a drill, or even a small charge with a backplate. Or even a solvent capsule, like used in old detonator pens. Enough to open a hole for ventilation on top of the craft, and maybe dangle a wire antenna out of. Although maybe you can't get away with poking holes in a CF hull, even on the surface, if you intend to remain in the vessel.

The bolted hatch and lack of external antenna for internal systems and etc had me wondering if it's a true capsule with no connections to outside the hull, meaning the cameras and motors would all be connected and controlled wirelessly---but they said the hydraulic/mechanical ballast release was actuated inside the cabin, so unless they forgot to say that the actuator is just button that sends a signal then the hydraulic lines must pass through the pressure vessel, and I'm back to wondering why there are no external antennae connected to the inside (for the surface scenario, if nothing else).

A whistleblower who expressed safety concerns was fired in 2018

And sued by the company, prompting a countersuit and apparently the employee's bankruptcy before settlement (hard to know if that was tactical). See upthread.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:03 AM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

“BUT THE US GOV and USCG have not yet given them permits to participate!”

I mean, there's probably good reason; if you're using a lot of technology to listen for a submarine, and other methods to detect a submarine deep under the water, and probably already have your own submarines in the water, sending another submarine probably only complicates things, or forces you to stop one of your current detection methods to let them in.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:05 AM on June 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

And if things couldn't be any weirder, Harding's stepson, who has a history of stalking DJs and making death threats, decided this was the perfect time to go see Blink-182 and try to get the band's sympathy/attention.
posted by thecjm at 7:08 AM on June 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

The bolted hatch and lack of external antenna for internal systems and etc had me wondering if it's a true capsule with no connections to outside the hull, meaning the cameras and motors would all be connected and controlled wirelessly

From one of the animations explaining the construction it looked like there might be some ports on one of the end caps, and the positioning of the cable bundles seems to support this. My assumption would be drilling a hole in the cylinder would be a real bad idea.
posted by Artw at 7:10 AM on June 21, 2023

Just from an engineering perspective you don't use a tapered plug like that, a wedge is the exact opposite of how you want to make a seal on a brittle material.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:16 AM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

Artw: My assumption would be drilling a hole in the cylinder would be a real bad idea.

It definitely outweighs five people suffocating.

But you still have to deal with the possibility of water ingress, even if the hole is nominally through the top of the cylinder, as every wave breaking over the top will cause water coming in. To counter that you need extra equipment for which there's apparently not much room (and even less consideration).
posted by Stoneshop at 7:21 AM on June 21, 2023

they said the hydraulic/mechanical ballast release was actuated inside the cabin, so unless they forgot to say that the actuator is just button that sends a signal then the hydraulic lines must pass through the pressure vessel

I was wondering about that too, snuffleupagus. How did they pass a hydraulic line through a hull that is supposed to withstand 400 atmospheres? (And how does the hydraulic line itself withstand 400 atmospheres and still be manipulable by hand?)
posted by heatherlogan at 7:23 AM on June 21, 2023

There is a plie of equipment enroute using a Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic.
It includes a ROV capable of operating at 6000 meters. It's supplied by a Massachusetts company called Pelagic Research Services.

The US military had 3 massive C-17 cargo planes deliver equipment to St. John's airport.
posted by yyz at 7:25 AM on June 21, 2023

And how does the hydraulic line itself withstand 400 atmospheres and still be manipulable by hand

And if that is overcome (maybe by releasing a compressed spring?) does the fluid drain into the cabin? So it doesn't have to overcome sea pressure?

Not sure what pressure the fluid would be at. Maybe the tubing needs to be strong, but the fluid can operate at normal ranges.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:28 AM on June 21, 2023

How did they pass a hydraulic line through a hull that is supposed to withstand 400 atmospheres? (And how does the hydraulic line itself withstand 400 atmospheres and still be manipulable by hand?)

I don't have a specific answer, but I do know this. A thing I have finally learned by my age is that sometimes the answer to the question "how does that work if ... ?" is sometimes "it doesn't. Everybody either thinks it does or pretends it does." For a long time, I've assumed that grown-up serious people somewhere have a handle on processes that I don't understand, and in regulated industries, that's usually true. However.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:28 AM on June 21, 2023 [32 favorites]

Hydraulic lines running at 400 atm are not unheard of. And you don't manipulate the line, you manipulate a plunger. Which doesn't need to work against those 400 atm anyway, it needs to be able to apply the pressure required to operate the latches holding the ballast.
posted by Stoneshop at 7:33 AM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

Hydraulic hose and fittings are readily available with ratings to 6000psi working pressure or about the same as the external pressure at Titanic depths. Pressure in is of course different than pressure out but as long as you maintained a positive pressure differential within the hose even off the shelf hose should be fine at those depths in theory.
posted by Mitheral at 7:35 AM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

So you're not evacuating the system to release the ballast, then, you're using it normally. That makes more sense, I don't think you want hydraulic fluid polluting the air in a sealed environment.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:35 AM on June 21, 2023

And of course, this release system was rigorously tested under a variety of simulated failure modes to ensure it's reliability.

(I'm reminded of a catchphrase that was so popular in the Burning Man community about a decade or so ago: "Safety third.")
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 7:39 AM on June 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

(I'm reminded of a catchphrase that was so popular in the Burning Man community about a decade or so ago: "Safety third.")

I didn't know that was popular at Burning Man. I might be mistaken, but I think it was coined by Mike Rowe on his show DIRTY JOBS back around 2010 or a bit earlier. I used to enjoy his show, but the "Safety Third" episode was the moment when I went "...wait...is this guy actually terrible...?"
posted by UltraMorgnus at 8:04 AM on June 21, 2023 [10 favorites]

And if they've jettisoned ballast and gotten back to the surface, apart from the oxygen/CO2 levels there will now be five extremely unhappy bunnies inside the sub.

Updated weather on scene: winds at 23mph with gusts up to 30mph. Sea state is 6-7ft swells with an air temp of 50°f. #Titanic
— USCGNortheast (@USCGNortheast) June 21, 2023

posted by Stoneshop at 8:05 AM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

(I heard "Safety third" in the BM community closer to 2000, so it's been around a long while. I'm sure it's far older than that, though.)
posted by phooky at 8:23 AM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

Safety Third is also the final segment on the Well There's Your Problem podcast, on engineering disasters. (with slides. Yay, Liam.) It features workplace safety horror stories from viewers. The lead-in theme is Shake Hands With Danger.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:25 AM on June 21, 2023 [20 favorites]

It's worth a read if you want to see more of the company's techbro arrogance.

"... classing agencies only focus on validating the physical vessel. They do not ensure that operators adhere to proper operating procedures and decision-making processes – two areas that are much more important for mitigating risks at sea. The vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure. As a result, simply focusing on classing the vessel does not address the operational risks."

Yeah but ... aren't mechanical safety and operator competence two separate things? I would have thought there would be submarine pilot certification or licensing regulations, or at least "recommended" training, or ... something? The quoted line sounds to me like the equivalent of saying "we don't need to crash test our 'innovative' car because most car crashes are due to driver error. Simply focusing on having a crumple zone (or working brakes, or seat belts, etc.) does not address operational risks."
posted by DingoMutt at 8:25 AM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

When I was learning to fly for my GA license my instructor was a 77 year old WW2 vet still giving lessons in 2001.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 8:26 AM on June 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

Pressure in is of course different than pressure out but as long as you maintained a positive pressure differential within the hose even off the shelf hose should be fine at those depths in theory.

That's what I was thinking of when I was suggesting they might be too complacent about off-the-shelf things. Buy a standard 10k psi hand pump and fittings, and the ballast drops if it's below 1k psi, so it maintains positive pressure all the time. If something goes wrong, the feedthrough has a shutoff valve. But then the inside hose bursts, and the emergency shutoff valve doesn't work so well with the outside hose remnants running through it.

But after reading about the viewport being rated at a fraction of the depth and a previous tube delaminating unexpectedly with no means of inspection, I'm back in the tech-bro failure camp. Hopefully they find it and everyone's OK, but it's possible what happened will just be a mystery.
posted by netowl at 8:29 AM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

“BUT THE US GOV and USCG have not yet given [the Magellan team] permits to participate!”

According to this CNN article, the issue seems to be less about permits and more about logistics:

"However, they need an aircraft with the ability to transport their deep-sea diving equipment from the UK to Canada to launch their operation. Specifically, he said, they would require the use of a C-17 Globemaster III military jet."

(as a possibly-interesting side note, Magellan is the group that did those amazing 3-D scans of the Titanic recently. I would think they really would be a useful group to have on-hand)
posted by DingoMutt at 8:32 AM on June 21, 2023

One of the infuriating things about our current system for maritime law is that when shit goes wrong like this it is often the US Navy and Coast Guard coming to the rescue. Panama and Liberia are the choice for the flag of convenience but I’ve yet to see their Navies involved in Search and Rescue or protecting freedom of navigation.
posted by interogative mood at 8:34 AM on June 21, 2023 [11 favorites]

I’m curious if anyone from / familiar with Pakistan is in this thread. I was looking at some of the e-editions of Pakistani newspapers as I was curious about the Pakistani father / son pair onboard. It barely seems to be in the news there at all (more so in the online editions then print editions), but even then “under the fold” so to speak. Could be because they now lived in the UK - but it’s just so different from the wall to wall coverage in some other countries, so was curious if that was just reflective of Pakistan news media taking a different approach then UK/US etc, there simply being bigger stories in Pakistan at the moment and this not really registering, or the Pakistani family not being that well known locally? Not placing any judgement on the merits of this story or its reporting - just a noticeably different approach in media reporting that I thought was interesting.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 8:34 AM on June 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

“Why Isn’t Titan Classed?"

"Why? For the same reason our reactors do not have containment buildings around them, like those in the West. For the same reason we don't use properly enriched fuel in our cores. For the same reason we are the only nation that builds water-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors with a positive void coefficient." [pause] "It's cheaper."

Legasov, Chernobyl (2019)
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 8:46 AM on June 21, 2023 [15 favorites]

Wires and hydraulics and so forth passing from inside to outside would undoubtedly pass through an engineered through hull fitting / penetrator. Basically it is attached firmly to the hull and has couplings on the inside and on the outside but the fitting itself is highly engineered. It's not like putting a hose through a barrel with some caulking. It's also a solved problem for this kind of craft.

I read somewhere that the banging must be coming from above a major thermocline in the ocean which sound could not pass through from below, indicating the craft (if the noise came from the craft) was high-ish in the water column or on the surface. I don't have a source for that though.
posted by Rumple at 8:49 AM on June 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

One of the infuriating things about our current system for maritime law is that when shit goes wrong like this it is often the US Navy and Coast Guard coming to the rescue.

The chartered tender is flagged in Canada, and the location is off of Cape Cod.

And, yes, the USN has more or less been the de facto keeper of the sea lanes since WWII. The USA has benefitted rather enormously from that arrangement.

Maybe we can wait for this to officially turn into a recovery effort before we go back to the bake sale/bomber discourse.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:56 AM on June 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

From the BBC:

More ships join search - US Coast Guard

We've been getting more updates about the different vessels that have been joining the search efforts.

The US Coast Guard has said this afternoon that at least eight more ships have started arriving at the search site.

Some of the new vessels include:

The Canadian CGS John Cabot, which has sonar capabilities
The Canadian CGS Ann Harvey, which carries a large trove of communication and navigational equipment
French research vessel, the Atalante, that can reach the depths of the Titanic’s shipwreck
His Majesty’s Canadian Ship Glace Bay, which can perform search and rescue duties
The new ships will also join the Polar Prince, which is still there after deploying the Titan submersible on Sunday, as well as Deep Energy, a pipe-laying vessel flagged in the Bahamas, and three other Canadian vessels.

"It's a good combination," Matthew Heaslip, a senior lecturer in naval history at the University of Portsmouth, told the New York Times.

"A mix of vessels that would be very much intended for this kind of rescue."
posted by chavenet at 9:03 AM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Should the CEO actually be found alive I hope they get billed.
posted by Artw at 9:08 AM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Should the CEO be found dead or not at all, I hope they get billed.
posted by snwod at 9:21 AM on June 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

A media spectacle to rival the OJ trial. A taxpayer commitment to rival the GWOT.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 9:22 AM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

I read somewhere that the banging must be coming from above a major thermocline in the ocean which sound could not pass through from below, indicating the craft (if the noise came from the craft) was high-ish in the water column or on the surface.

Rumple, this article [WSJ gift] says the sonic buoys can find sounds going down to 13,000 feet. I'm assuming that accounts for thermoclines?
posted by mediareport at 9:26 AM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

US Coast Guard Denies Hearing 'Banging Noises' or 'Implosion' as Search for 'Titan' Continues
posted by Artw at 9:30 AM on June 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

It's curious that the noises are described as "banging," and not, say, Morse code or an SOS. It could be both, but I would expect if it was the latter they would lead with that.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:32 AM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

A media spectacle to rival the OJ trial.

I think this is more like Baby Jessica down the well. And I hope it can still have as good an outcome.
posted by Mchelly at 9:43 AM on June 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

I was hoping for a balloon-boy scenario here, but alas, it does not look like it'll shape up that way.
posted by heyho at 9:48 AM on June 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

As more details about the company and CEO come to light, I keep thinking of the line from 99 Luftballoons : Everyone's a superhero, everyone's a Captain Kirk.

Fans of Star Trek:TOS may recall that Kirk was notorious for, among other things, barking at Scotty that he had at most half the time* his Chief Engineer had estimated to accomplish some critical task, like bringing the phasers back on line.

I feel like Great Men like Stockton Rush are prone to this kind of Kirkism. Having read a lot about him in the past few days, it's easy for me to imagine a scenario like this (with slightly different numbers):

Rush: I want you to build me a submersible that can take myself and paying passengers -- whom I will designate as crew -- to the wreck of the Titanic.

Various experts that Rush hired for their, you know, expertise: Sure! We can do that, give us about 3 years and two dozen trial runs. That's going to include about 10 million dollars spent on prototypes that we expect to fail so that we can correctly identify the safety parameters and ensure that --

Rush: You'll get one year and one prototype.

Experts: But, sir, that's insane! We'll --

Rush: One year. One prototype.

I often wonder whether Great Man-ism or Yeah But Both Sides-ism is going to be the thing that does us all in. Feels like the score's tied at this point, but either shitshow is capable of pulling into a commanding lead at any time.

* Note: I've seen some tongue-in-cheek explanations argue that Scotty was well aware of his captain's tendencies and took them into account when giving his estimates, in order to make Kirk feel good and the engineering team look good.
posted by lord_wolf at 9:49 AM on June 21, 2023 [26 favorites]

As an engineer and a human this is really saddening and maddening. I can't comment on the design of this specific submersible but I can say a little something about engineering ethics, which is a conversation orthogonal to the concept of engineering liability.

I totally understand what the CEO is talking about when he says that regulations and standards stifle innovation, this is totally a true statement. If he wanted to build innovative submersibles for his personal use or for research then he is totally right.

However he set up his company specifically to offer rides to tourists, and when it comes to selling essentially our engineering expertise and telling customers "trust me, I'm an engineer," then you can have your customer sign all the *liability* waivers you want, that doesn't abrogate your ethical responsibility. Part of that responsibility is working with your peers to come to an agreement on standards and safety. That means, in part, joining the working group which decides on testing and maintenance standards and advocating for a set of standards that covers your work.

Risk is really hard even for engineers to evaluate, risk management and risk mitigation is not a one-time process but has to evolve over time. It is unethical to expect paying customers, even adrenaline junkies, to evaluate risk and give informed consent to those risks. Selling rides on this "innovative submersible" was never an ethical decision in the first place.
posted by muddgirl at 9:52 AM on June 21, 2023 [61 favorites]

That People article Artw posted just leaves me ?? The USCG didn't hear it in the first place, it was the Canadians. Also the article seems to be based only on the statements of a U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer 3rd Class named Carter who is quoted as saying

those sounds have been “characterized as underwater noise.”

but also

Carter says the U.S. Coast Guard does not have sonar capabilities, and “are relying on capabilities of partner agencies, such as the Canadian Coast Guard and the commercial vessels in that area, such as the Skandi Vinland.”

“We are not experts on sonar,” Carter tells PEOPLE.

I'm going to guess that the USCG, not being experts on sonar, were not the ones that characterized the sounds the Canadians heard as underwater noise. I'm curious who made that determination and if there is original reporting on that. And I can't figure out what position PO3 Carter has that they are making publishable statements to People.
posted by achrise at 9:56 AM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

Scotty was well aware of his captain's tendencies and took them into account when giving his estimates, in order to make Kirk feel good and the engineering team look good.

Anyone in support roles knows to under promise and over deliver. And doing the former allows you to do the latter.

Course if some jack ass switches his wish fulfillment for your expert opinion bad things usually happen for varied expressions of bad ranging from embarrassment through injury to death.
posted by Mitheral at 9:59 AM on June 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

The more info we get on the CEO the more I'm reminded of a particularly ridiculous book duo I enjoyed. If anyone wants a somewhat thematically related techno-thriller rec (very entertaining, not high literature) featuring ill-fated, high risk water operations and innovator CEOs with more money than sense, check out The Ice Limit and its decade and a half years later sequel, Beyond the Ice Limit.
posted by phunniemee at 10:02 AM on June 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

I've seen some tongue-in-cheek explanations argue that Scotty was well aware of his captain's tendencies and took them into account when giving his estimates, in order to make Kirk feel good and the engineering team look good.

Scotty absolutely did this and told Geordi LaForge so in TNG: "Relics".

LaForge: "I told the captain I would have this diagnostic done in an hour."
Scotty: "And how long will it really take you?"
LaForge: "An hour!"
Scotty: "Oh, you didn't tell him how long it would really take, did you?"
LaForge: "Of course I did."
Scotty: "Oh, laddie, you have a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker."

posted by Servo5678 at 10:07 AM on June 21, 2023 [37 favorites]

Risk is really hard even for engineers to evaluate, risk management and risk mitigation is not a one-time process but has to evolve over time.

Charles Perrow, interviewed on his 1984 book Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:14 AM on June 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

"how does that work if ... ?" is sometimes "it doesn't. Everybody either thinks it does or pretends it does."

Indeed, the submarine escape and rescue thing has always seemed to me to be one of these things. Not just the Avalon and Mystic, but even the way the subs are built with mating hatch rings, external salvage connections for pumping air and fluids from the outside, the double-hatch lock-out trunks, submerged escape procedures, the SEIE suits... none of that shit would work except in extremely extremely lucky circumstances under the best conditions.

But just like training for a steam line rupture casualty, or even to some extent a nuclear blast, there's a continuum. On the one end, there's certain death, nothing you can do about it. On the other, there's "you would have lived anyway, you worry wart." But in the middle, there's "your actions could make a difference" where training and equipment are important.

But I feel like the submarine rescue continuum line there has like, 99% of it marked as "certain death".
posted by ctmf at 10:14 AM on June 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

So when you're in a situation with most of your line marked "certain death", you focus on PREVENTION. Which is also what this guy did not do.
posted by ctmf at 10:16 AM on June 21, 2023 [12 favorites]

When I was a kid, we took a school field trip to Charleston, SC to tour one of the anchored ships there, as well as a submarine (I honestly can't remember what it was called and so far, Google isn't handing me anything recognizable*). They took us school kids in small groups to tour the inside of that submarine. You could probably mark that day as my first panic attack in hindsight. So tiny, so cramped, and so not for me. This is why this news story is equal parts eye-opening and wiggins-inducing for me.

*it would have been 1988 or 1989
posted by Kitteh at 10:19 AM on June 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Briefly touring the Growler tied up next to the Intrepid and a WWII sub (in SF, I think) was definitely enough for me.

I'm OK with diving down to the decompression limits, but I won't do anything that requires mandatory deco (vs a safety stop) and I won't go in any fully overhead environments beyond peering into a recess in a reef, with a full dive team around. Not even the lava tubes dive companies will take you through without cave training. Mostly open arches and half-caverns make me nervous if they're expansive enough to block the view of the surface while swimming through them.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:26 AM on June 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

I heard "Safety third" in the BM community closer to 2000,

Someone seriously tried to pitch "safety third" as a new model here some time ago. I remember hearing them out and it wasn't crazy crazy the way they explained it. (which may not be the same theory as the BM idea). Essentially, there are cases where we might do something we know is dangerous. Those would be the cases where the importance of the mission outweighs the safety. Hard to imagine, but in this business, it could conceivably come up. Like say, when they raised ships from the bottom of Pearl Harbor and got them back into the war, do you think they had safety monitors insisting on pre-job briefs and preventing people from going on ladders more than 5 feet without a spotter? No (goes the story), they got 'er done, to prevent losing the war with it's thousands more lives lost. (again, so the story goes.)

I think we can have both though in 99.9999[repeating] percent of the cases, and the exceptions will be very obvious. We don't need to go around sabotaging people's faith that the company cares about them going home with all their fingers with stupid slogans.

[Also I forget what #2 was supposed to be, after "mission")
posted by ctmf at 10:26 AM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Side note: The submarine Kitteh visited in Charleston was the USS Clamagore.
posted by miguelcervantes at 10:28 AM on June 21, 2023 [17 favorites]

THANK YOU!!!!!
posted by Kitteh at 10:29 AM on June 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

Side note: The submarine Kitteh visited in Charleston was the USS Clamagore.

More seaworthy than the USS Codfish.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 10:30 AM on June 21, 2023

I honestly can't remember what it was called
USS Clagmore , at the Patriots Point Naval Museum

Snap missed it by that much.
Should have previewd lol
posted by yyz at 10:33 AM on June 21, 2023

Kitteh, I too have been in that submarine at Patriot's Point. I am trying to remember the name; it was a WWII sub when I was there probably in 81 or thereabouts. I think they swap them out. It also left me with a case of the horrors; I have never made it through Das Boot or any other submarine related movie. The Hunley is even worse but fortunately they don't let people inside.

I can't stop watching this thread and checking the news. I think that elemental common fear of being underwater, essentially buried alive only worse, is the reason why this story, which really shouldn't be more than a blip in the collective consciousness is instead so gripping for so many people.

Edited to add, apparently it was the Clamagore for both of us and they don't swap them out!
posted by mygothlaundry at 10:35 AM on June 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

A media spectacle to rival the OJ trial. A taxpayer commitment to rival the GWOT.

Yes but. What is the alternative? Are you suggesting the response should have been smaller in scope? Who, among the searchers and the searching nations and organizations, is in a position, at least during these 96 hours, to do that?

Keep in mind that, as I mentioned upstream, in the seafaring trade the obligation to render assistance and save lives is sacred, inviolable, and ensconced in various national and international laws. In the original Titanic disaster, this is why the Carpathia showed up, and why the captain of the Californian came under severe criticism for not responding immediately.
posted by beagle at 10:37 AM on June 21, 2023 [23 favorites]

The father of a friend of my dad was an engineer on a WWII German U-boat. The stories he told about his wartime experiences was enough to convince me never to board a submarine.
posted by fimbulvetr at 10:40 AM on June 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Buy a standard 10k psi hand pump and fittings, and the ballast drops if it's below 1k psi,

Then if your hose is being squeezed by more than 1k psi, it doesn't matter what your hand pump does, your ballast will never drop?
posted by ctmf at 10:43 AM on June 21, 2023

The search and rescue isn't really that expensive compared to what we would be normally spending, it's not like all these assets and personnel just sit around unused and unpaid. If they weren't searching for Captain Crunch they'd be doing patrols or training missions. So while the intensity of the action is certainly higher, it's pretty much what they are doing anyways, and of course it is also better for honing the effectiveness of these forces than any made up training exercise.
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 10:49 AM on June 21, 2023 [12 favorites]

That's true of the Coast Guard resources, yes. It is not true of all the commercial vessels being involved in this. I'm guessing most of them weren't in the area just for a joyride.
posted by Dysk at 10:51 AM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

I made the mistake of watching that video making the rounds of the reporter "touring" that submersible and I was like, FUCKING ABSOLUTELY NOT.

Regardless of the feels about the socio-economic status of the people involved, the idea of being trapped in that damn thing in some of the deepest waters shakes me to my core. The kindest thing if fatalities are involved is that I hope it was quick.
posted by Kitteh at 10:51 AM on June 21, 2023 [17 favorites]

ctmf: Then if your hose is being squeezed by more than 1k psi

To prevent hoses being squeezed you use tubes instead, and of sufficient wall thickness wherever they're subjected to the outside pressure at depth. Plus the obvious safety margin.
posted by Stoneshop at 10:52 AM on June 21, 2023

Yeah of course, I'm just saying, fail-safe design isn't as obvious as it looks. You get a crack or leak in that hydraulic line and instead of preemptively dropping ballast, it prevents you from ever dropping ballast.
posted by ctmf at 10:56 AM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

I would like to add that to all of the MeFites who are dropping their knowledge in this area, you are educating me but also terrifying me.
posted by Kitteh at 10:57 AM on June 21, 2023 [35 favorites]

Also I guarantee you by now a US Navy sub is in the vicinity even if they're not saying so. Whether someone's banging or not banging is a known thing and it isn't all on some Canadian airplane sonobuoy PO3's opinion of what he might have heard.
posted by ctmf at 10:58 AM on June 21, 2023 [9 favorites]

The 1k psi was over the outside pressure, so like 6-7k psi inside. No idea how the system actually works though.
posted by netowl at 11:01 AM on June 21, 2023

I'm pretty sure (but can't provide a link) the PO3 quoted in that article is the designated media relations contact for the coast guard operation. They work for DVIDS which is the DOD media relations office. I'm not sure why they quoted her name and not her position.
posted by muddgirl at 11:03 AM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don't think it'll take long (a few months, perhaps) for deep-dive Titanic visits to become even more popular, and especially if they find the wreckage of the Titan sub. I'm comparing this to the story of Christopher McCandless of "Into the Wild" fame who died in an abandoned bus deep in the Alaskan wilderness. In the years following the publication of John Krakauer's book, the bus became a huge attraction as people flocked to see the place where McCandless died, scared and alone.

To quote from the Wikipedia article,

On June 18, 2020, various government agencies coordinated with an Alaska Army National Guard training mission to finally remove the bus, deemed a public safety issue after at least fifteen people had to be rescued and at least two people died while attempting to cross the Teklanika River to reach the bus.

People being people, I think the same will happen here.

One does wonder: how many more lives has Titanic yet to claim?
posted by fuzzy.little.sock at 11:09 AM on June 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

I do wonder what the true capabilities for deep heavy left the US Navy has and if they will ever disclose that. Seems like they would want to be able to lift things covertly and quickly that may fall very deep - say a North Korean ballistic rocket fired into the Sea of Japan, or a stealth aircraft (friend or foe) that crashes in deep water, without having to do a full Project Azorian type operation. And not disclosing that capability would be helpful to plausible deniability. Anyway - hope such a capability exists for rescue/recovery here when the submersible is found, even if they end up fudging how that happens.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 11:11 AM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don't know, after a spectacular accident like this, I would conversely expect rational people to think twice about even the word submarine and avoid even the fake "submarine" ride at Disneyland. On the other hand, the world is running out of things people can say they did that nobody else ever did. Everest? Yawn, lots of people have done that. Even going to the bottom of the Marianas trench has been done. So there will always be someone looking for the bragging rights.
posted by ctmf at 11:14 AM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also, while I'm enjoying all the discussions about hydraulic lines and carbon-fiber hulls, I just can't imagine anyone stepping into a padded tube and seeing that the "control" system was one laptop and one crappy game controller and not just noping the fuck out of there.

Seriously, a child could design a better sub.
posted by fuzzy.little.sock at 11:15 AM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

Previous story about hearing noises near a downed submarine, attributed to people still alive, turns out to be false (scroll to the bottom):

“This YouTube video is false, the Seawolf report the presenter is reading from is correct, but the final report certified it was false readings. Seawolf was confused by the active sonar and noise created by the destroyers and the diesel submarine Sea Owl searching for Thresher on 11 April 1963, the day after she was lost. She mistook all sounds from the searching ships as banging on the hull and sonar pings from Thresher. It was a mistake.”

There are all kinds of things making sounds in the ocean: some mechanical, some organic; some known, some classified.
posted by meowzilla at 11:15 AM on June 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

I feel like in my comment on ethics, I didn't make it clear that there is a (maybe obvious) financial conflict of interest for an engineer/CEO to independently declare their own product is safe for consumers/customers.
posted by muddgirl at 11:15 AM on June 21, 2023 [16 favorites]

You get a crack or leak in that hydraulic line and instead of preemptively dropping ballast, it prevents you from ever dropping ballast.

This is why I was imaging clamps that would fail open, held closed under normal conditions by the hydraulic system. If it fails, oops, you aren't going to Titanic today.

But then I don't know what pressure the hydraulics would need to be at, to hold closed springs that would open at depth, and whether the risk of having lines at that pressure in the cabin would be acceptable, or how dumping it would work. Google says you can't breathe hydraulic fluid vapors for too long before things go very wrong. Maybe you'd have a second system at lower pressure to control a valve in the first?

(and do those penetrators work at this depth, vs naval sub depths? can you put one in a CF hull, or would there be enough room for one bulky enough for the depth in the endcap to fit all the stuff the Titan apparently doesn't have?)

The problems with this thing would all be more reasonable if they didn't insist on using it for the Titanic, and stuck to more reasonable sites. "Off the shelf" and "most extreme environment accessible to us on Earth currently" don't really go well together.
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:18 AM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

I do wonder what the true capabilities for deep heavy left the US Navy has

I can't say anything classified, so just the fact that I'm saying anything at all kind of indicates that I don't know for sure. But my understanding is we have deep capability, and we have lift capability, but deep lift just doesn't come up that often. There's the thumbrule of "2 and 20" - you design your sea-floor equipment for 2000 feet (or thereabouts) and you can reach most of what you want. If you want more than that, you're pretty much committed to designing for 20,000, because it drops off so fast after 2,000 that shooting for anything in the middle is a waste for not much benefit.
posted by ctmf at 11:18 AM on June 21, 2023 [22 favorites]

Ya I wasn't suggesting you rock down to princess auto to equip your 4000 m sub with hydraulic components just that the hydraulics aren't impossible or even exotic in this environment.

Possibly a good way to do this would be with the secondary cylinder port mated directly to the the outside of the hull at the thru fitting. No need to worry about connections at all. A bit of clever engineering and you could get it down to three moving parts on the business end - the plunger with attached latch bar, a seal of some sort, and the ball in the check valve. Plus basically the same on the pump side.
posted by Mitheral at 11:19 AM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Here's a little more info from the CBC on the source of the noises that were heard.
posted by peppermind at 11:20 AM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Scotty absolutely did this and told Geordi LaForge so in TNG: "Relics".

See also the Lower Decks episode “The Boomler Effect”.
posted by Artw at 11:23 AM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ah, crap. They've already scrapped the Glomar Explorer.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 11:36 AM on June 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

Scotty absolutely did this and told Geordi LaForge

Well the problem is "how long something usually takes" isn't a fixed number, it's more of a bell curve. Most people will give me the 90%-sure estimate so they don't disappoint me later. But that's way in the tail of the curve. What I actually want is the center of that curve, the most likely estimate, and I have to just know that half the time it will be more than that. Hopefully only a little more, but sometimes a lot. You have to work together a lot over time to build the trust and get on the same page about time estimate expectations. (Like Kirk and Scott)
posted by ctmf at 11:38 AM on June 21, 2023

10 subs in the world can dive to Titanic depths. Titan is the only one not certified.
posted by fimbulvetr at 11:40 AM on June 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

The recent alien whistleblower story seems centered on the fact that the US has a lot of secret recovery programs. The whistleblower wanted access to those programs because of he thought they might have found aliens.

Our adversaries and allies launch a lot of rockets over the ocean and most satellites de-orbit into the ocean. So a big part of any program to recover space craft is going to require ocean recovery capabilities.

The original Titanic search expedition was one such program. Iirc they were looking for some Soviet subs.
posted by interogative mood at 11:45 AM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

You have to work together a lot over time to build the trust and get on the same page about time estimate expectations. (Like Kirk and Scott)

And when Scott tells me it's going to take an hour, he means to do it correctly. And when I say "you have 15 minutes", I'm implicitly authorizing him to break all the rules. Safety, etc.
posted by ctmf at 12:05 PM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

The original Titanic search expedition was one such program. Iirc they were looking for some Soviet subs.

Manganese modules are in the news again
posted by Artw at 12:06 PM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Kitteh: but also terrifying me.

And I'm not even wearing my Evil Mad Scientist T-shirt.
posted by Stoneshop at 12:07 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'd just like to join in the appreciation of the current tone and content of this thread - I'm learning a lot and most of all that yep, in a lot of fields regulations are written in blood and people should remember that the sea has been considered merciless for all of human history. "To those who are at sea" is a toast to the dead and lost in my culture.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 12:17 PM on June 21, 2023 [47 favorites]

Okay, legit question: if the clock runs out on the submersible's life support systems (this is assuming the 96 hours is valid), does Search and Rescue continue? If so, is it indefinitely? When do all the parties involved say, "We're very sorry about this tragedy, but we are unable to continue to expend resources for recovery"?
posted by Kitteh at 12:49 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Kitteh, the journalist in those brief videos also did a much longer 2-part podcast that was linked way above and has much more detail about the sub's capabilities; you can see the transcripts here: part 1, part 2. Obviously, with all that's come out over the last few days, particularly about the hull and viewport and the cost-cutting around them, it's not much of a defense, but the kind-of-glib "they're using video game controllers!" stuff in those brief video clips was, well, kind of glib.
posted by mediareport at 12:50 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

I assume after 96 hours they will start to shift to a recovery mode but the search will continue for a few more days before they wrap it up if nothing is found. Having spent all the money to get the equipment there you might as well use it and be thorough.
posted by interogative mood at 12:58 PM on June 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Okay, legit question: if the clock runs out on the submersible's life support systems (this is assuming the 96 hours is valid), does Search and Rescue continue?

I think at this point the only folks who don't believe the 5 crew members are dead are the journalists hoping this story goes on for many more days, and maybe the family and friends of the crew, including the CEO's wife Wendy, who reportedly handles comms from the surface ship. I'm trying to hold onto hope but it's difficult. So, at some relatively respectable point after the official 96 hours - 2 days? 3? - if the sub or its wreckage hasn't been found we'll see a Coast Guard press conference that says there's no chance they're still alive, but salvage operations will continue.
posted by mediareport at 1:00 PM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Not to prolong the Trek tangent, but an earlier reference that Relics was calling back to is this:

Kirk: How much refit time till we can take [the Enterprise] out again?
Scotty: Eight weeks, sir. (as Kirk opens his mouth) But you don't have eight weeks, so I'll do it for ya in two.
Kirk: (considers) Mr. Scott. Have you always multiplied your repair estimates by a factor of four?
Scotty: Certainly, sir. How else can I keep my reputation as a miracle worker?

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
posted by Pryde at 1:06 PM on June 21, 2023 [20 favorites]

... that is in fact prolonging the Trek tangent.
posted by Too-Ticky at 1:09 PM on June 21, 2023 [10 favorites]

Okay, legit question: if the clock runs out on the submersible's life support systems (this is assuming the 96 hours is valid), does Search and Rescue continue?

There are probably some arguments for continuing the search for a few more days past Thursday, since the best equipment is onsite, if there is a general wish to determine what happened. It would obviously not be conducted with the same urgency or risks as the current rescue endeavours.
posted by Artful Codger at 1:14 PM on June 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think one of the hardest things to face in situations like this is that we may never know. this is particularly brutal for families and loved ones. just like Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, it may be a mystery that is never solved.
posted by supermedusa at 1:17 PM on June 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

I think the 96 hour figure came from OceanGate and so can probably be regarded as an optimistic fiction. However that 96 hours is up in about 15 hours so unless the sub is found to be on the surface and opened in that time the passengers are almost certainly deceased. Even if still intact, that sub is not coming up off the bottom in 15 hours.
posted by epo at 1:18 PM on June 21, 2023 [10 favorites]

Grim. I think at least the family would want to know it was sudden and catastrophic and not the scenario where they all knew and had to slowly live it out, unable to do anything about it.
posted by ctmf at 1:24 PM on June 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Once it switches to officially being a recovery mission, I imagine that the families of the missing can or will hire independent/private crews to keep searching even after the official search is called off.
posted by TwoStride at 1:34 PM on June 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Coast Guard just finished daily news conference on the sub.
Highlights;
- They detected underwater noises yesterday but they haven't found anything there. The Navy is analyzing the data from the noises that were detected.
- The surface search area is larger than the state of Connecticut and expanding rapidly.
- Additional ROVS are going to be in place tomorrow morning along with French ROV experts (after the 96 hour window has passed though).
posted by interogative mood at 2:30 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

And if things couldn't be any weirder, Harding's stepson, who has a history of stalking DJs and making death threats, decided this was the perfect time to go see Blink-182 and try to get the band's sympathy/attention.

As she does so often, Cardi B had the best, realest take on this:

People is like, “Well, what is he supposed to do? Be sad at the house? Is he supposed to go look for it himself” Yes. You supposed to be at the house, sad. You supposed to be crying for me. You supposed to be right next to the phone, waiting to hear any updates about me. You supposed comforting your mom and shit. Isn’t it sad that you a whole fucking billionaire and nobody gives a fuck about you? Like, you missing, and motherfuckers is ready to shake dicks at a concert? That’s crazy. I’d rather be broke. I’d rather be broke and, like, am poor but knowing that I’m loved.

posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:32 PM on June 21, 2023 [87 favorites]

However he set up his company specifically to offer rides to tourists, and when it comes to selling essentially our engineering expertise and telling customers "trust me, I'm an engineer," then you can have your customer sign all the *liability* waivers you want, that doesn't abrogate your ethical responsibility. Part of that responsibility is working with your peers to come to an agreement on standards and safety. That means, in part, joining the working group which decides on testing and maintenance standards and advocating for a set of standards that covers your work.

Risk is really hard even for engineers to evaluate, risk management and risk mitigation is not a one-time process but has to evolve over time. It is unethical to expect paying customers, even adrenaline junkies, to evaluate risk and give informed consent to those risks. Selling rides on this "innovative submersible" was never an ethical decision in the first place.

My education is also in engineering, so I'm curious - would this whole venture come across to a reasonably educated layperson as obviously risky?

Part of me feels that billionaires like these passengers (with the possible exception of the poor kid who was probably doing some Father's Day bonding) are functionally more akin to institutions - they have full time staff working for them, doing due diligence, exploiting every tax loophole, getting inside information, putting their finger on public discourse, etc. They de facto don't play by the same set of rules that most people do, so when they take these unforced risks that go pear-shaped, the sympathy I can muster is going to be a little less than, say, the average airline passenger.
posted by ndr at 3:01 PM on June 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Which leads to a pretty grim thought of the chance that the air supply may last longer if less than five occupants are still alive (deaths occurring though an initial event - say electric shock or medical emergency - or otherwise).

I gather the Titanic subreddit has had to contend with a lot of thoughtless threads about the CEO's oxygen needs being summarily eliminated, the father for the son, etc. Gross.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:02 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

From way above:
instead of a crane on a ship to lift/drop the sub, [they] slide a submersible barge from a ramp and lower that barge in the quiet zone (it is much quieter at 10m/30ft than on the surface) and have divers finish the launching operations in relative calm. Probably saves a ton of money by not requiring one of the big ships equipped to do this

It occurs to me that in a test at depth of any of the ballast-drop mechanisms, recovery of the sub could not be done using their submersible sled, and would require a crane (which the surface vessel does not have).

I wonder whether any of the emergency ballast-drop systems has ever been tested at depth.
posted by heatherlogan at 3:08 PM on June 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

As she does so often, Cardi B had the best, realest take on this:

Cardi B is a singular revelation to me, always.
posted by bluesky43 at 3:08 PM on June 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

Which leads to a pretty grim thought of the chance that the air supply may last longer if less than five occupants are still alive

Someone on Twitter said that decomposition could actually accelerate oxygen consumption.
posted by cheshyre at 3:18 PM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Which leads to a pretty grim thought of the chance that the air supply may last longer if less than five occupants are still alive (deaths occurring though an initial event - say electric shock or medical emergency - or otherwise).

Or rich people not wanting to share and killing each other.
posted by srboisvert at 3:27 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

We don't have to go there, though.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:32 PM on June 21, 2023 [20 favorites]

I've flagged for deletion my comment above on oxygen for less than five people - it didn't come across the way I wanted and don't want it to derail the way snuffleupagus rightfully called out it has in other places.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 3:33 PM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

My education is also in engineering, so I'm curious - would this whole venture come across to a reasonably educated layperson as obviously risky?

Getting bolted in with no alternative egress would have done it for me.
posted by malaprohibita at 3:44 PM on June 21, 2023 [30 favorites]

For me, if nothing else (which, yeah, there would have been else) the final straw would be no measures to account for surface rescue, assuming trust in the redundant ways to get there. No way to exchange the air after an emergency ascent, no way to send a distress signal to a satellite.

We're going to the Titanic with less ability to call for rescue than a backcountry hiker? Fuck all the way off.

I'm not mad at wanting to advance the science of this kind of craft, to the point of being able to 3D print them or whatever. But tour the Great Barrier Reef and content yourself with different strata of patrons.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:51 PM on June 21, 2023 [15 favorites]

Some may be aware I have a policy of always accepting any seat offered to me on spaceflight missions and deep sea submersible trips.

However, as like my reasoning for the contingency where, should I someday change careers, or for any reason actually ever find myself attempting a "buried alive"-style coffin-under-the-dirt magician escape act, or any a buried-underground daredevil time endurance feat, it's hereby resolved 06/21/2023 I shall not be participating in any 20,000 leaguey shit unless I have sedative medication that I can overdose on in my back pocket.

(I continue to entertain timely requests for my company on bonafide civilian and military spaceflight missions without any such provision/caveat. I recall an article or an Interview with Jim Lovell years ago where he explained that there was no secret "suicide pill" during Apollo - and that such a measure would be unnecessary. If an astronaut finds themselves trapped in a hopeless orbit they can just open the hatch.)
posted by Sunflowers Beneath the Snow at 3:54 PM on June 21, 2023

We're going to the Titanic with less ability to call for rescue than a backcountry hiker?

We’re going to the Titanic with less ability to call for rescue than the Titanic had.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:05 PM on June 21, 2023 [69 favorites]

Getting bolted in with no alternative egress would have done it for me.

"I'm running things like a business."
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 4:06 PM on June 21, 2023 [11 favorites]

For me it was the complete apparent lack of "what if" thinking. No locator beacon? Even after they did in fact get lost once, they're still relying on one means of communication with no independent navigation or escape capability? What if someone's iPhone battery catches on fire inside the tank?

The whole game plan seemed to be "we'll figure that out when the time comes" and even if I can't think of any hypothetical problems (which I easily can), that attitude is a deal-breaker.
posted by ctmf at 4:09 PM on June 21, 2023 [12 favorites]

One thing with spaceflight is that they have spent decades gaming out every single situation that can kill they crew that they can ever think of, and finding ways to mitigate that risk to the greatest extent possible. Some of the safety measures, as they often are, are written in blood, but NASA engineers have done everything they can to make spaceflight safe. It appears they were not so thoughtful with this craft, and the ocean will kill you as quick (or quicker) as space can.
posted by azpenguin at 4:16 PM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

The Russian operation carrying the journalist that got stuck in the Titanic's props previously always sent down two vehicles. And even so, during the hour it was stuck there wasn't much the second one could do the free the first. [CW: Piers Morgan]

But at least everyone involved knew WTF was going on and where they were.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:16 PM on June 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

No locator beacon?

Yeah, this. Why not some sort of always-on, always-transmitting locator beacon with an operational lifespan of months? That goes into overdrive near the end of the planned duration, or after some other measurable occurrence, like loss of communications, or triggered by some sort of deadman switch?
posted by Artful Codger at 4:18 PM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Briefly, you can have a 'pinger' that will let a nearby vehicle (or probe lowered within range,as sonobuoys do) find you; but it won't reach the surface. Or you can have something attached to the hull that you release, and floats up to signal from the surface. The Titan has neither. It has a low-bandwidth modem of some sort that lets it exchange very minimal messages with the tender using sound waves, reliant on the orientation of the vehicle among other things, and that hasn't been working since the beginning of the emergency.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:21 PM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

Recall, radio waves do not propagate water for more than a inch or so. The biggest subs need to surface, or close enough to extend an antenna above the surface. Thus no GPS (radio waves). Sound is not extremely directional so triangulation of the possible beacon (knocking sounds) is also problematic at more than a few hundred feet.
posted by sammyo at 4:22 PM on June 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

Seems like worst case scenario is the ballast release worked partially. So they could have floated half way to the surface then currents swept the mini-sub miles away. It may turn up on an Irish beach in a few years/decades like a bottle with a message. Only much more gruesome.
posted by sammyo at 4:25 PM on June 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

If the sub imploded, which seems the likeliest scenario, what would even left to be recovered once the 96 hour "window" ends? The hull will have shattered, the bodies destroyed, and only pieces and fragments left to be dispersed by the ocean currents. I doubt that anything will be found, though I would as a human being be gratified if they were found and rescued. But I think it's a fantasy at this point.
posted by jokeefe at 4:28 PM on June 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Eh, if you can make yourself at all positively buoyant, you'll eventually go all the way to the surface, not half way. But the current thing is spot on, and that's when the locator would be... required. Getting tossed around in a can on the surface of the North Atlantic out of visual range of anyone with no comms and no way of even opening the can, well you might as well be on the bottom. At least it would be more comfortable.
posted by ctmf at 4:30 PM on June 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

I appreciate that conventional radio is a nonstarter. But they do/did have a means of communicating with the surface.

So a periodic beacon using the same principles would be quite possible. Might not always reach the surface, but should be detectable by any submersible or pickup that can get closer to that fucking cursed wreck.
posted by Artful Codger at 4:33 PM on June 21, 2023

Any release of ballast should have made them positively bouyant and brought them to the surface, sooner or later, barring some amount flooding of the vessel which also complicates relative pressures .... It's not math I know how to do, but you'd expect that the point of the fusible links, let alone the pipes, would be that the release of that much weight alone would be enough.

There are a lot of potentially horrible ways they could have ultimately died. There could have been a battery fire, whether of the mains or something in the cabin, and even if put out, there's no way to exchange the air....the comms could be in working order, with no one alive to use them. I don't really feel the need to game it all out.

For whatever reason, thinking through the shortfalls of the design feels lees ghoulish.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:33 PM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm running things like a business.

Specifically like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. These motherfuckers.
posted by emjaybee at 4:43 PM on June 21, 2023 [42 favorites]

In the end, this is all so upsetting because it didn't have to happen. Five souls are almost certainly lost, due a long series of bad decisions and it's all just so stunningly senseless.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:47 PM on June 21, 2023 [28 favorites]

What if someone's iPhone battery catches on fire inside the tank?

Guardian: Best and worst case scenarios to explain Titan’s loss of contact with surface

One grim possibility is a fire in the cabin. The air in a submersible tends to be enriched with oxygen, making fires more risky. For this reason, petroleum-based skin creams and makeup are typically banned in deep dives, but fires can still take hold and swiftly produce smoke that intoxicates those on board. An emergency ascent should still be possible, however.

There are probably hundreds of weird safety rules like this one not followed or maybe not even known by OceanGate.
posted by meowzilla at 5:09 PM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

Eh, if you can make yourself at all positively buoyant, you'll eventually go all the way to the surface

Which is not 100% true. Salinity has been known to vary with depth, and salinity has an effect on buoyancy. So in a big salinity gradient, decreasing toward the surface, you could stop rising. I think miscalculating that with the ballast though would give them the opposite problem - they wouldn't have enough ballast to get down.

In a hypothetical gradient the other way, where the ocean got less saline the deeper you dove, you could(?) reach a depth where dropping your ballast would not get the job done any more.

I mean normally I would think everyone involved had thought of all these obvious submersible-theory things, but I'm afraid I wouldn't put it past this guy's obvious case of engineer's disease not to have.
posted by ctmf at 5:12 PM on June 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

I didn't see this addressed earlier in the thread, and I'm so curious about why Titan is white (and therefore harder to see among whitecaps and the reflected sun, etc. etc.). Is there any good reason why they didn't paint it day-glo orange or yellow??
posted by knotty knots at 5:15 PM on June 21, 2023 [12 favorites]

There are probably hundreds of weird safety rules like this one not followed or maybe not even known by OceanGate.

All those codified rules proceed from more basic understandings of the domain operated in that OceanGate was charged with having under any reasonable rubric, whether lab science, applied engineering, legal etc. At least as far as small electronics battery fires are concerned. Especially relying on a laptop for your control systems interface...

Mentour Pilot: UPS Flight 6 [cargo compartment fire on a 747 freight liner in 2010].
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:18 PM on June 21, 2023

One expert on CNN said the knocks were occuring at 30 min intervals, on the hour and half past. That's the best indicator so far of a man made sound.
posted by sammyo at 5:24 PM on June 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

would this whole venture come across to a reasonably educated layperson as obviously risky?

These expeditions leave from my hometown, so I've seen the sub and the Polar Prince docked in the harbour once or twice. The ship inspired confidence but I got claustrophobia just looking at the sub. That said, a very slight acquaintance of mine, who was studying marine navigation, went on a trip to the wreck site with Ocean Gate last summer.
posted by peppermind at 5:26 PM on June 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Some have suggested that 30m is too long of an interval; surely you'd be banging every 5m. But given oxygen concerns, who knows; whether by decision or due to hypoxia. The better question is whether there's any pattern to the sound, itself, rather than the interval. You'd expect SOS, or something otherwise clearly artificial.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:26 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

The knocking seems like it should be encouraging, but instead it's horrifying.
posted by ctmf at 5:28 PM on June 21, 2023 [25 favorites]

I didn't see this addressed earlier in the thread, and I'm so curious about why Titan is white (and therefore harder to see among whitecaps and the reflected sun, etc. etc.). Is there any good reason why they didn't paint it day-glo orange or yellow??

White is sexier?

More to the point, orange makes you think of life-rafts, and life-rafts make you think of things that could possibly go wrong, and I suspect it was absolutely vital to the viability of this enterprise that none of the ~~paying passengers~~ Mission Specialists ever think about anything that could possibly go wrong.
posted by heatherlogan at 5:30 PM on June 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

Chilling Tales of Past Dives to Titanic Wreckage Keep Piling Up

Scores of former passengers who have ridden on board the Titan, the submersible that disappeared Sunday with five on board while en route to the wreckage site of the Titanic, have described in detail the chilling flaws they encountered during their trips—with one passenger calling the voyage a “suicide mission.”

Nearly all former passengers spoke of electrical and communication failures—jarring issues that ex-passenger Mike Reiss described as a common occurrence on dives by OceanGate, the company who operates the missing submersible.

posted by kirkaracha at 5:32 PM on June 21, 2023 [16 favorites]

Much like the original Titanic. (<-- The emphasis on not thinking about the possibility of anything going wrong.)
posted by heatherlogan at 5:32 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

@ndr - IMO no, I don't think the fact that the company's clients were wealthy affects the professional ethics. That'a kind of like saying it's OK for a doctor to provide propofol to wealthy rock stars with insomnia, after all they are wealthy enough to get a second opinion.

We all have biases, blind spots, and prejudices; for doctors and engineers, these can directly risk people's lives. Professionals get together in boards and committees to agree on standards and practices to follow. Risk of any endeavor can't be completely eliminated but before someone makes money off their product there should be third-party assurance that the best attempt is being made.

Heck it may turn out that whatever's gone wrong wouldn't have been caught by any review or inspection or classification or testing, but the CEO's attitude toward regulation of a consumer product is wrong and dangerous.
posted by muddgirl at 5:32 PM on June 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

The first space shuttle's fuel tank was this brown/orange color. The rest were white. White paint was lighter and shaved a bunch of weight off the whole deal.
posted by zengargoyle at 5:35 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

We all have biases, blind spots, and prejudices; for doctors and engineers, these can directly risk people's lives.

The V-tail Bonanza is known as the 'Doctor-killer' because for much of its existence it was largely doctors who could afford to buy them, and so they did -- irrespective of whether or not they got sufficient transition training from simpler types, or stayed current afterwards.

The same thing is again replaying itself in GA right now, with the young cashed-out techbros buying 'complex' (retractable gear, constant speed prop, turbocharged) GA planes from retired Boomers with medical issues.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:38 PM on June 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

jarring issues that ex-passenger Mike Reiss described as a common occurrence on dives by OceanGate,

If anyone’s wondering like I did, yes, it’s the Simpsons show runner Mike Reiss.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:38 PM on June 21, 2023 [9 favorites]

The first space shuttle's fuel tank was this brown/orange color. The rest were white.
You've got that the wrong way round.
posted by miguelcervantes at 5:45 PM on June 21, 2023 [16 favorites]

William Pietri (@williampietri@sfba.social)

In 2017 some editor described the CEO of the missing submarine company as "more Musk than Cousteau" and I hope they're enjoying their gift of prophecy.

White paint was lighter and shaved a bunch of weight off the whole deal.

It's the other way 'round. The orange-brown color was the unpainted (thus lighter) insulation.

On preview, cheers miguelcervantes.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:55 PM on June 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

lol, quite possible. I was a kid and just remembered that the tank color changed from the plastic model I built. Or I'm just getting old....
posted by zengargoyle at 5:56 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

what would even left to be recovered once the 96 hour "window" ends?

The endcaps and the sled, at least.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:00 PM on June 21, 2023

They stopped paining the tank on the space shuttle to save weight after the first few missions. edit: Doh. I see everyone has answered this.
posted by interogative mood at 6:02 PM on June 21, 2023

My education is also in engineering, so I'm curious - would this whole venture come across to a reasonably educated layperson as obviously risky?

I don't have a lot of experience with the mega wealthy, but one thing that's always struck me is that any rule that can be broken, bent or subverted with money will be.

So you get people used to going "just fix it", and having towed cars returned, assault charges dismissed, time limits extended, that kind of thing. Even the mildly wealthy can do it.

So it can be tricky for them to assess risk well. Like, they are used to regulations being bypassed or ignored with cash. And for expensive contingents to cover their asses when things go south.

Can't do that with the deep ocean though. 4k of water doesn't give a shit.

There's also the thing where, as mentioned above, most risk is linear. Like you get on the train, there's a suite of high likelihood, low danger risks (I will be late, I might have to stand, I could get jostled), some lower likelihood but higher danger ones (I could be assaulted by another passenger, I could contract a disease from them, I might be more severely jostled while standing and injure myself) and a few very unlikely but high risk ones (I could be in a crash).

Subs though seem to have no middle. It's either all low likelihood low risk (bang your head, claustrophobia, have to watch a 77 year old man take a shit and then bask in the smell for 15 hours) or low likelihood but very lethal ones (hull go pop, fire inside, asphyxiation, freeze to death). No middle ground.

I would suspect the people inside are still using a risk assessment framework with a fat middle of horrible things that could happen that are survivable. Like they get the liability paperwork and assume the risk of death is the same as other high risk sports like mountaineering. They just don't realize how fucked they will be if something bad happens.
posted by Jilder at 6:17 PM on June 21, 2023 [30 favorites]

Yeah, I'd assume that whatever final coating thing went on the vessel was white and they just didn't feel the need to paint on it more. I'm not really sure of paint vs salt water. Maybe if that last coating was sea blue, they would have painted it for visibility. Probably a why waste the time/effort/money to change colors.
posted by zengargoyle at 6:19 PM on June 21, 2023

Also the designers of the Titanic put a lot of thought into passenger safety and it exceeded the standard for passenger ships of the day. They didn’t have enough lifeboats but they assumed with wireless/radio communications and other ships nearby in a busy shipping lane the lifeboats would only be used to ferry passengers to another ship because in the event of an accident it would be hours for her to sink (engineers didn’t think she was unsinkable, despite what the White Star Line PR said). The bulkhead design was innovative and did work in that the ship took hours to go down, even if they couldn’t save the ship.

Had the emergency flares from Titanic been interpreted correctly by nearby ships or had those ships had “wireless” aka radio to pickup the alarm the accident wouldn’t have been nearly as deadly. Its sister ship with the identical design, Olympic sailed for 24 years without major incident and only had minor retrofits post Titanic.

I doubt any sister sub of Titan will have a future carrying passengers. Various experts have described the design as a death trap.
posted by interogative mood at 6:21 PM on June 21, 2023 [16 favorites]

If anyone’s wondering like I did, yes, it’s the Simpsons show runner Mike Reiss.

There was an interview with him earlier on tv when I was at my friend's house, and it caught our attention when he said that he'd done a dive in NYC, I think in the Hudson, with the same guy and didn't realize ahead of time that he was essentially taking part in a test dive. Was he pissed? Of course not! He was all "wow that's cool" or whatever and seemed supportive of the whole enterprise, later taking a trip to the Titanic.

It is absolutely goddamn shocking what people will do just because someone else is like, "Hey, wanna do an adventure?"
posted by heyho at 6:22 PM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

It is not surprising to me that billionaires are not necessarily that smart or well-informed. There’s no reason why those things would be correlated. But a billionaire could easily pay an advisory committee of subject matter experts to help them with decisions like this. Like, they probably have a chef and a trainer and a captain on their yacht, etc, right?
posted by snofoam at 6:23 PM on June 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

If the sub imploded, which seems the likeliest scenario, what would even left to be recovered once the 96 hour "window" ends? The hull will have shattered, the bodies destroyed, and only pieces and fragments left to be dispersed by the ocean currents.

Novel failures are often informative even if that information is confirmation that "ya, we shouldn't do it that way". If the composite failed how it did so would be useful to know. We won't know if there is anything to be learned until we look.

It occurs to me that in a test at depth of any of the ballast-drop mechanisms, recovery of the sub could not be done using their submersible sled, and would require a crane (which the surface vessel does not have).

Several of the systems are well known ballast drop systems that have been used thousands of times for unmanned instrument packages. One is literally just mass sitting on a shelf. So testing could have been pretty minimal but still have a high confidence in successful operation.

If I'm following your train of though they could still use the sled to recover the craft even if all the redundant systems were used. If the sub needs to be below the surface they would just have to have divers swim out and attach ballast. Probably could be done semi automatically with a cable and a winch.
posted by Mitheral at 6:30 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

have to watch a 77 year old man take a shit

Well, there is a privacy curtain, and they turn up the music really loud.
posted by kirkaracha at 6:31 PM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

Probably a why waste the time/effort/money to change colors.

A big equivalent of a kid's bike flag would be better than nothing.
posted by ctmf at 6:39 PM on June 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Given they made it to the bottom alive, the question in my mind is: was that full descent by choice?

The scenario I am picturing is that there were two separate unrelated incidents in creating the disaster.

First, they lost comms most of the way down, but were lulled into a false sense of security because it had happened a number of times before with no adverse outcomes, all other systems were working, and they were so close to their goal. A typical and critical mistake in safety calculations, and doubly so in a craft with insufficient redundancy in systems, operating in a remote extreme environment with no margin for error. So they failed to abort, drop ballast, and return to the surface.

Second, they then got entangled somehow at the bottom thus losing the option to drop ballast and surface, and had no means to communicate their predicament to the surface crew, which introduced a critical delay of several hours before the surface crew triggered the alarm.

(TBH, I don't know if it would have made any difference how quickly they alerted the surface crew. Not clear to me that rescue was ever a realistic option.)

The real tragedy here for me is the 19 yo. The other four were much older adults who should have known better. If they wish to risk their necks, that is their business. Their inexcusable crime is taking the kid down with them.
posted by Pouteria at 6:40 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah. The 19 year old is where my heart absolutely breaks.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 6:59 PM on June 21, 2023 [9 favorites]

If they lost comms I think they would have tried to abort. Whatever you think of the operation, that's what their track record shows. They were comfortable taking people's money for scrubbed attempts. That was most of their business.

Also, Paul-Henri Nargeolet was more or less The Titanic Guy -- he's been down there 35 plus times, he headed the concern with the Titanic salvage rights; out of everyone involved, it's his presence that makes me wonder if the thing was safer somehow than we all think. Maybe he was ultimately as fixated as everyone else -- but I think he'd still observe basic safety in terms of aborting due to fundamental equipment failure. After nearly 40 trips, at least some of the novelty must be gone.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:06 PM on June 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

it's his presence that makes me wonder if the thing was safer somehow than we all think. Maybe he was ultimately as fixated as everyone else

Huh. I was figuring he was there paid by the tour operator, as part of the attraction for the paying customers. Like, a chance for a private tour with the most experienced tour guide in the world, that sounds like exactly the attraction for some billionaires.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:11 PM on June 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

That's exactly when complacency sets in, when you've done it many times before and it's always been fine, right? I mean, not to argue with you, just saying. "Done it many times" is what I hear at nearly every near-miss critique around here.

I also just had a thought that 96 hours of air might not be the limiting factor if they don't have fresh water. Estimates vary how long you can go with no water.
posted by ctmf at 7:15 PM on June 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

the USCG has an updated graphic on the search patterns they've used and also a list of additional resources on the way:

Canadian CGS Ann Harvey
Canadian CGS Terry Fox
Motor Vessel Horizon Arctic (ROV)
French Research Vessel L’Atalante (ROV)
His Majesty's Canadian Ship Glace Bay (mobile decompression chamber and medical personnel)
Air National Guard C-130
ROV from Magellan

posted by glonous keming at 7:15 PM on June 21, 2023

That's exactly when complacency sets in, when you've done it many times before and it's always been fine, right?

It probably depends on what's going wrong. You wouldn't expect a lot of cowboy shit from a septugenarian who's been there before, and been involved with other more sophisticated projects like the Nautile operations; but depending on how involved he was with the Titan he might have developed an unhealthy tolerance for its typical malfunctions.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:19 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

The term of art is normalization of deviance
posted by tigrrrlily at 7:19 PM on June 21, 2023 [24 favorites]

which introduced a critical delay of several hours before the surface crew triggered the alarm

It was more than "several" hours. Here's the timeline:

7am EST: descent begins

8:45am: contact lost

2pm: Titan's scheduled return time, it fails to appear

4:40pm: surface ship contacts Coast Guard

So, almost 10 hours after the ship started its descent before the call went out for help. "Critical delay," indeed.
posted by mediareport at 7:26 PM on June 21, 2023 [10 favorites]

They didn't necessarily know they lost comms with the surface. It was just a data link to the surface. There was no voice link to the surface or ability for the surface to send a message down apparently. Rush found the constant requests for status updates from the surface so he had them take that out.
posted by interogative mood at 7:27 PM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

Yeah, that the CEO didn't like the constant questions from the surface is something that the Sub Brief video you linked claimed was the main reason there was no voice link, but the part where he explains the lack of voice comms may be a bit unfair; he claims the only reason for no voice comms was Rush claiming in this interview that the surface wants to chat too much, but you can watch the exchange starting at 19:00 at that link, which is in the context of the general difficulty in communicating between the surface and a sub, with water density shifts, data range issues, etc, with the data modem system they developed a decent way to deal with that. Still, if questions from the surface ship interfering with his preferred vibe was a factor, and reliable voice comms at that depth are actually possible (I have no idea), that would be pretty crappy.
posted by mediareport at 7:31 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

There was no voice link to the surface or ability for the surface to send a message down apparently.

I think the data link worked both ways; that's how the surface ship could give instructions about where to maneuver the sub to get closer to the wreck.
posted by mediareport at 7:36 PM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

That's exactly when complacency sets in, when you've done it many times before and it's always been fine, right? I mean, not to argue with you, just saying. "Done it many times" is what I hear at nearly every near-miss critique around here.

I rode a motorcycle for ten years. There’s two periods where motorcyclists have a tendency to crash. One is the first six months of riding. The next is after five years. It’s exactly that reason - complacency. It’s a normal human tendency and unfortunately it can extend to “if you fuck up multiple people will die” disciplines.
posted by azpenguin at 8:10 PM on June 21, 2023 [19 favorites]

I think the data link worked both ways...

The thought just occurred to me: what if the noises being heard are the sonic modem from the mothership making periodic attempts to hail Titan? Would a sonar operator be familiar with the sound?
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 8:15 PM on June 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oh my:

REVEALED: Wife of Titan pilot and OceanGate CEO is great-great-granddaughter of Macy's founder and his spouse made famous in James Cameron's smash movie as the elderly couple embracing on bed as Titanic went down

That scene really tore me up as a child watching the movie. It's so upsetting.
posted by knotty knots at 8:53 PM on June 21, 2023 [14 favorites]

Growing up watching my father (ex-Air Force radio operator) listening to world-band radio and transcribing out Morse Code.... That's what I think sound wave deep sea communication is like. That's also why everybody it thinking of banging as "why isn't is SOS". ...---...

They may have something better now, but do none of them know Morse Code? Not even SOS. That would really put the natural vs human made banging into the human created category.
posted by zengargoyle at 9:01 PM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

They may have something better now, but do none of them know Morse Code? Not even SOS.

Paul-Henry Nargeolet (The French diver) almost certainly knows Morse code. I would think most of them at least know SOS (maybe not the youngest one.)
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:29 PM on June 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

REVEALED: Wife of Titan pilot and OceanGate CEO is great-great-granddaughter of Macy's founder and his spouse made famous in James Cameron's smash movie as the elderly couple embracing on bed as Titanic went down

I'd already guessed as much far above, but this settles it: this is without a doubt a time travel story. They should be looking through early 20th century photos for the missing crew.
posted by nobody at 10:42 PM on June 21, 2023 [21 favorites]

METAFILTER: this is without a doubt a time travel story.
posted by philip-random at 11:06 PM on June 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

heatherlogan: It occurs to me that in a test at depth of any of the ballast-drop mechanisms, recovery of the sub could not be done using their submersible sled,

In a case of 'get this craft out of the water NOW' because of the oxygen situation, the quickest way I see would be to get a net over the sub, position the platform underneath it, use the net to keep the sub over the platform, then raise it.

Once the viewport is fully above the surface, cut off the dome using a big-ass angle grinder or sawzall. After that time will be somewhat less of a factor.
posted by Stoneshop at 11:27 PM on June 21, 2023

snuffleupagus: Also, Paul-Henri Nargeolet was more or less The Titanic Guy -- he's been down there 35 plus times,

With different subs. How many of the trips he made were on the Titan? In other words, is there a possibility that he'd gotten familiar with its quirks, and worse? I doubt he would allow himself to become complacent being the professional he is.
posted by Stoneshop at 11:48 PM on June 21, 2023

I'm as prone to valorising distinguished 77 year olds as anyone, but judgement and risk assessment in particular can be affected by age. Maybe he would be rigorous and maybe he woudn't. I watched my Dad around that age go from someone who was particular and rational on all fronts, an investor and a food scientist, into a person who speculated on mining stocks "because it's going up" and ate soup that had been on the counter for days.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:05 AM on June 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

Scores of former passengers who have ridden on board the Titan, the submersible that disappeared Sunday with five on board while en route to the wreckage site of the Titanic, have described in detail the chilling flaws they encountered during their trips—with one passenger calling the voyage a “suicide mission.”

The modern press... "Scores" of people? There were less than dozen names in that article. It doesn't just mean "lots"!
posted by Dysk at 12:50 AM on June 22, 2023 [27 favorites]

The ROV from the UK company Magellan that was mentioned as ready to go in the leaked email from the Explorers Society (the one that first mentioned the banging sounds) has now been loaded on a plane. From the BBC:

A remotely operated vehicle (ROV) from UK company Magellan is currently being loaded onto a C17 plane at Jersey Airport. Their sub – called Juliet – recently scanned the Titanic wreck, producing a 3D view of the entire ship.

Once it leaves, it will take about 48 hours to get to the site – which is beyond the timeline given for air for the passengers.

It will be able to dive the full depth of the site, and the team has a detailed knowledge of the deep sea area having been there recently. The sub has been ready to leave since earlier in the week but has been held up by permissions.
posted by mediareport at 1:36 AM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

There's a new BBC live updates page.
posted by mediareport at 1:42 AM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

But after reading the referenced articles? This guy seems to longing for the 19th century explorers thing, the whole “safe return doubtful” mindset. Which, if you’re only risking your own life, maybe? But taking paying “crew”? After all those findings? No sympathy for that. I do hope against the odds that they can be rescued.

Especially dumb because:

1) That ad is not actually attested in the historical record and may be a later recreation...

2) Most of those early polar explorers were extremely careful people who took exceptional and very well informed care to do everything they could to protect their crew!

It was still dangerous but people who think that Mawson or Shackleton or Scott or Amundsen were crazy risk takers simply haven't read any of the voluminous biographical or expedition literature about them. If Shackleton was alive today he'd be the dad that insisted on visually checking that all the kids in the back had in fact buckled their seat belts before the vehicle started moving.

I feel like Great Men like Stockton Rush are prone to this kind of Kirkism. Having read a lot about him in the past few days, it's easy for me to imagine a scenario like this (with slightly different numbers):

Of course apart from being a fictional character, it was also the case that Kirk was frequently essentially stating his view of the external constraints. There might only be 12 hours to fix it, and conveying the fact that 12-hour and below temporary fixes were preferable to 18-hour permanent fixes is actually important information for Scotty. He didn't halve the time available because he wanted to play a round of golf.
posted by atrazine at 1:49 AM on June 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

Something I don't understand about the listening buoys: how, in 2023, are these things not synchronized well enough to triangulate any sound that multiple buoys detect?
posted by flabdablet at 2:47 AM on June 22, 2023

Might be more of an issue with the various distortions in the acoustic signals after travelling through a lot of water, including thermo- and halo-clines, and different currents.

Just doesn't allow the resolution required.
posted by Pouteria at 3:17 AM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Speed of sound through 4km or more of water of varying temperature and salinity.
posted by Stoneshop at 3:27 AM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Also the designers of the Titanic put a lot of thought into passenger safety and it exceeded the standard for passenger ships of the day. They didn’t have enough lifeboats but they assumed with wireless/radio communications and other ships nearby in a busy shipping lane the lifeboats would only be used to ferry passengers to another ship because in the event of an accident it would be hours for her to sink

This. It’s been decades since my Titanic era, but my recollection is that it is an example of technology outracing regulatory requirements. ISTR that the requirements for passenger vessels’ lifeboat allotment was last revised prior to the wreck in 1898, fourteen years earlier, when the largest passenger ship afloat was approaching 10,000 tons displacement. Titanic and her sisters were ~45,000 tons.

And it wasn’t merely slick advertising to declare the ship unsinkable. E.J. Smith, later captain of Titanic, said in an interview a year or two before the wreck something to the effect that, “I cannot conceive of a situation that would cause a modern ship to founder. Shipbuilding has progressed beyond that.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:59 AM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

I just watched the video of the interior from one of the first few posts. I would not spend money to be trapped in an enclosed space with that Rush character.

I feel all hope is lost and feel so sad about the kid, I can't imagine he gave informed consent for this trip.
posted by epo at 4:17 AM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

NatGeo has an article up [needs free email registration] about the Magellan being caught up in red tape, and why it would have been a better option than the U.S. Navy's Deep Ocean Salvage System:

But unlike a warplane, the hull of Titan is made of carbon-fiber composite. Garriott is concerned that the Navy system’s recovery “scoop” may damage Titan and kill any surviving crew members during the recovery process...

“The concern is that the big scooper will crush the hull, because it would be almost impossible to get down under it in the mud without applying pressure to the hull itself,” says Garriott. “Instead, a 6,000-meter working-class [ROV] has the ability to attach directly to the [haul cable] point on the top of the sub. It’s a traditional method and people like Magellan have done it over and over again. It's the way it's designed to happen.”
posted by mediareport at 4:28 AM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

You tell your kid it's safe and he believes you, then you both die because it wasn't. But then also the sub operator told you it was safe, and you believed him and told your kid, and all three of you die, plus two other people.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:31 AM on June 22, 2023 [15 favorites]

But unlike a warplane, the hull of Titan is made of carbon-fiber composite. Garriott is concerned that the Navy system’s recovery “scoop” may damage Titan and kill any surviving crew members during the recovery process...

On the other hand, the Navy’s scoop will be far more effective in salvaging the various bits and pieces left of Titan following a violent compression event. At this point, damaging the carbon-fiber hull and/or killing any survivors is becoming more and more moot.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:13 AM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Risk is really hard even for engineers to evaluate, risk management and risk mitigation is not a one-time process but has to evolve over time. It is unethical to expect paying customers, even adrenaline junkies, to evaluate risk and give informed consent to those risks. Selling rides on this "innovative submersible" was never an ethical decision in the first place.

My education is also in engineering, so I'm curious - would this whole venture come across to a reasonably educated layperson as obviously risky?

I am a reasonably educated layperson with no background in engineering, law, or math beyond biostatistics. But I do know risk management and mitigation. My decades long personal experience with bluetooth, and what history tells us are the risks of being bolted into a device, would be the primary risks causing me to nope out of such a proposition.

From what I've learned this week, (at least) these two risks were entirely unmitigated.
posted by ImproviseOrDie at 5:27 AM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Thorzdad: On the other hand, the Navy’s scoop will be far more effective in salvaging the various bits and pieces left of Titan following a violent compression event.

Looking at how CF composites behave in destructive tests and real-world accidents, if the Titan has gone kablooie there will be a gazillion CF-and-epoxy flakes spread over several tens of acres of seafloor at least. The titanium end caps and some of the other metal fittings may still be more or less intact, but exactly the most relevant parts for determining the way the failure started won't be, and will not be retrievable unless one of the parties manages to scrape the relevant area of the sea floor and runs it through a strainer.
posted by Stoneshop at 5:35 AM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Eh, Scott was a incurious, egotistical doofus who wouldn’t deign to do things according to the practices of polar environment natives. He courted heroic doom and killed people and ruined lives.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 5:50 AM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

My education is also in engineering, so I'm curious - would this whole venture come across to a reasonably educated layperson as obviously risky?

Surely too late to ask that question now because we know that something has gone badly wrong.

I do think that people have been focusing (not so much here but on twitter and other cesspits) on some of the wrong things in terms of what makes this design risky.

The xbox controller - doesn't matter, not part of the safety case
Scaffold poles - doesn't matter, perfectly robust solution

Externally bolted hatch - well ok, you can see why that would be a problem but on the other hand, let's say that you do surface in the middle of the Atlantic, it's not exactly easy to get everyone out of this thing. Also consider that any complexity here is a big tradeoff. It's much easier to ensure the safety of a big bolted hatch that gets put on with torque wrenches and probably has a one-time metal-on-metal seal than a complicated mechanical hatch.

Losing contact with the surface - that is not ideal but there just isn't very much robust technology that lets you get around that, the redundancy you want is in getting up to the surface and communicating from there since in case of emergency there is little the surface vessel can do and you should ascend anyway.

Basically, the safety concept seems to have been: make absolutely sure that no matter what, you can ascend. Anything that is not required to ensure that is secondary. That includes absolutely avoiding entanglement and overhead hazards.

That's fine but it leaves them with the potentially under-tested carbon-fibre hull, the window which the manufacturer wouldn't certify to test depth (n.b. this doesn't mean it wasn't designed for that depth, just that the particular set of tests to certify it to that depth weren't done / weren't possible), the seals between the titanium endcaps and the carbon fibre (hard to do since many metal to metal pressure seal concepts put one of the metal pieces under tension and carbon fibre doesn't really like that) and the seal between the titanium endcap and the window. Technically also the bulk titanium end cap could fail but I feel that this is by far the least likely pressure-bearing component to fail.

So they've heavily optimised for the avoidance of a class of hazards that prevent ascent but maybe not that well for a hull breach.
posted by atrazine at 5:59 AM on June 22, 2023 [16 favorites]

As I have often noted, EVERYONE knows how to save the Titanic AFTER it sinks.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 6:01 AM on June 22, 2023 [17 favorites]

Eh, Scott was a incurious, egotistical doofus who wouldn’t deign to do things according to the practices of polar environment natives. He courted heroic doom and killed people and ruined lives.

That's somewhere between a complete falsehood and a massive simplification. Scott was probably the most scientifically interested and the most innovative of the well known polar explorers after Nansen who was unparalleled in that regard.

He was certainly the most committed to the scientific objectives of the South Polar expeditions. Often criticised for carrying "rocks" on the return journey, when of course we know that he and the others died on that journey and would almost certainly have lived had they not carried them, this completely ignores the fact that unlike other explorers he actually took the geological sampling seriously and to his mind the mission would be almost pointless without the samples and the fact that it was an outrageously cold and harsh season and that in almost any other year he and his men would have made it back easily.

It is strange that we valourise scientists who sacrifice for pure knowledge, gently mock the Victorian explorers who just wanted to be the first everywhere and simultaneously our attitude towards the Antarctic explorer who actually came closest to that scientific ideal is "lol, rocks, mate".

He was fascinated by novelty and technology, entering torpedo training school when that was not something a gentleman officer in the RN was expected to do, experimented on expeditions with snow-machines (didn't work as the technology was too new). This is not the behaviour of someone who can be described as incurious.

It is also worth noting that there are no natives of the Antarctic which is very different from the Arctic, that the people that Amundsen learned from (the Netsilik) lived at less extreme latitudes than the pole (nobody lives at the poles, of course) and lived in a radically different environment of sea ice and seasonally open water that is actually quite different from the Antarctic interior. Had he failed, there would no doubt have been writers who took the view that Amundsen was a fool for thinking that all cold regions were the same - they would have been wrong about that as many writers are about Scott but it is pretty easy to write about the failures of someone who ultimately failed. Also, Scott was not dismissive of the practices of polar environment natives and took a substantial amount of knowledge on clothing and equipment from Arctic circle practices.

Again, we now know that had he followed Amundsen's practice of sacrificing his dogs along the way to feed to the rest and killed weaker ponies early to store up meat, he would probably have survived the return journey but:

a) It is vaguely obscene to claim that Amundsen's calculated decision to feed the majority of his 100 odd dogs to the rest along the journey represented the practices of polar environment natives. That is an emergency technique which they use with regret in order to survive, I know an Inuit hunter who still hunts with dogs (including the fluffy animals that we Southerners find difficult to take) and who has no sentimentality about either his own dogs or other animals and the idea of setting out and *planning* such a thing on such a scale was horrifying to him.

b) Again, it is strange that we simultaneously are expected to treat with a certain critical distance and raised eyebrow the Victorian gentlemen who were so cavalier about life of animals (the unsaid bit of course is that they were part of a culture that was also often pretty cavalier about the lives of the working class, "natives", and other social inferiors) and when Scott hesitates to kill weaker ponies saying that "he has had enough of cruelty to animals" we say, not "maybe he wasn't quite what we think of when we imagine a Victorian of the officer class" but "what a fucking chump, doesn't he know that animals don't feel pain and exist to serve humankind?"

c) We're pretty sure that in almost any other season, he and all the men would have made it safely back so it isn't the case that bungling Scott tried to do something that simply couldn't be done.
posted by atrazine at 6:39 AM on June 22, 2023 [41 favorites]

I would think most of them at least know SOS (maybe not the youngest one.)

Doesn't matter anyways. Any recognizable patter would do. Shave and a haircut for example. Or tapping out 1-10. Or the first six digits of pi. Morse code might even be sub optimal because it depends on differentiation between long and short. But just three signals grouped in threes whether taps or gunshots or signal fires is also a recognized help me signal which of course SOS is. A single thump every 30 minutes, even if synchronized with the time is pretty poor as things go. Makes it hard to home in compared to a more regular or long lasting signal. Also likely to be some spurious noise created by some mechanical system as people are rarely that regular.
posted by Mitheral at 6:39 AM on June 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

I was originally skeptical of the tapping being possible here, but the more I read about comms and navigation going down on so many prior trips I think it really is possible. The idea there could be a rescue, however, always seemed like fantasy. There is simply no easy way to get the correct rescue vessel there on time, especially in light of the fact the mother ship waited far too long to call for assistance. Distances in the ocean are hard to comprehend.

Craig Finn said it almost perfectly: The ocean is violent and vast
posted by glaucon at 6:56 AM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

atrazine: yeah, I have never been able to look Amundsen in the eye, figuratively speaking, after finding out what he did to get to the South Pole. I treasure science and exploration, but it wasn't worth it. The South Pole wasn't going anywhere. It could have waited for another plan. I could not get very far in The Worst Journey in the World because of all the animal slaughter, but the title did not lie.

The banging noises never made sense to me as a possible signal because I read that they were 30 minutes apart. That's way too long for anybody except maybe aliens who live hundreds of years and are just starting out with SETI broadcasts.

seanmpuckett: I feel so bad for this boy, particularly because I have been thinking a lot about my dad and me at 19. I was a nervous young person and he was always pushing my boundaries for my own good; we even learned SCUBA together. We obviously didn't have $250K to throw around, but if he'd told me he'd bought us tickets on a submersible for a special trip, I don't think I could have told him no. I mean, I could have tried, but he wouldn't have listened and I'd have felt awful and ungrateful and gone along anyway. (Who would have listened? My mom. She would not let her child in this thing if she had to stuff herself in the entrance.)
posted by Countess Elena at 6:56 AM on June 22, 2023 [9 favorites]

The banging noises never made sense to me as a possible signal because I read that they were 30 minutes apart.

It’s protocol for emergency situations in the French navy. Bang for 3min on the hour then every 30min. Paul-Henri Nargeolet who was on board is ex-French navy.
posted by Lanark at 7:35 AM on June 22, 2023 [47 favorites]

I apologize! I didn't realize that. But what a long delay --
posted by Countess Elena at 7:41 AM on June 22, 2023

A really surreal bit in all this is that Richard Garriott - the creator of the Ultima video game franchise - is being quoted in the NYT as president of the Explorers Club about the Magellan unmanned vehicle being sent down. He's one of several who I've heard being optimistic about the time the crew have, although I wonder if that's just people being dishonest with themselves.
posted by graymouser at 7:44 AM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

oops:

Efforts to send deepwater survey craft from Jersey hits snag

In the past few hours two ROVs, remote operated vehicles, have descended to help in the search for the Titan.

However, efforts to fly out another ROV - called Juliet - belonging to the Guernsey-based deep-sea survey firm Magellan have hit a snag.

It was initially loaded late this morning onto a US military aircraft at Jersey Airport but they struggled to fully get it on, according to Magellan's chief executive Richard Parkinson. That means they now have to take if off and wait for another aircraft to arrive.

Here is what things looked like in Jersey as they prepared to transport the submersible.

[BBC]
posted by chavenet at 7:58 AM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Murky Regulations Governing Submersibles

Submersibles are different because they don’t sail in and out of ports. They’re carried, so most submersible rules are local rules. For example, in the U.S. there are specific rules for operating submersibles in and out of U.S. ports and in U.S. waters. The catch with OceanGate and the Titan was they were basically operating outside territorial waters — they’re past the 12-mile limit, and they’re launching off a Canadian vessel. There didn’t appear to really be any sort of jurisdictions applying to this vessel. They’re not breaking the laws, but they’re operating in a very gray area.
...
This is that weird gray zone. Some have called the deep ocean “the outlaw sea” for a reason; there’s not a lot of enforcement out there. You’re in international waters there, so there’s no one out there to pull you over and check your papers. What really surprises me about this whole thing is that usually a third-party entity, this classification society, is a requirement for insurance, so I’m not exactly sure how the company obtained insurance to operate.

posted by kirkaracha at 8:11 AM on June 22, 2023

Agree to disagree on Scott and Amundsen. I think you’re taking a lot of liberties with my comment, but that’s fine. I guess I can’t get over the fact that Scott brought ponies to Antartica. And he didn’t even bother to procure them himself! Sloppy novelty.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 8:25 AM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

' “That should be possible,” he told me. “But [if it’s Titan] they’re banging on a carbon fibre hull, not a steel hull.

“That’s like banging a log, instead of banging a bell - it’s less loud and more muffled, so it’s not a crisp, clear noise. That may not propagate through the water anywhere near as well.” ' --BBC

Oof.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 8:33 AM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

The titanium end caps should be able to ring like a bell. Banging on carbon fibre with anything but a rubber mallet is not recommended because a sharp impact can cause delaminations that weaken the material and deaden the noise they would be trying to make. I’d prefer a hard rubber mallet for the titanium too, but it would be less of a factor.
posted by cardboard at 8:44 AM on June 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

BBC is reporting "A debris field has been discovered within the search area by an ROV near the Titanic, the US Coast Guard has just announced."
posted by oulipian at 8:55 AM on June 22, 2023 [12 favorites]

Another cruel twist of the knife of fate for this incident: Wendy Rush, wife of CEO Stockton Rush, is a descendant of a couple who died when the Titanic sank.

Wendy Rush, who is the director of communications and an expedition team member for OceanGate, according to her LinkedIn, is related to Ida and Isidor Straus, the latter of whom was a co-owner of Macy's....

The Strauses were among first-class passengers aboard the Titanic on its maiden voyage.

According to the U.K. government's National Archives, Ida and Isidor had been directed to a lifeboat after the ship hit the iceberg, but Isidor refused to take a seat, saying he wanted younger men to be able to do so. And when he refused, so did Ida, reportedly saying, "Where you go, I go." Instead, Ida helped their maid Ellen Bird onto a boat and gave her her fur coat, saying she would no longer need it. Bird survived.

The last time the couple was seen, the National Archives says, they were "on deck holding hands before a wave swept them both into the sea."

Jesus Christ.
posted by lord_wolf at 8:59 AM on June 22, 2023 [17 favorites]

I'd already guessed as much far above, but this settles it: this is without a doubt a time travel story. They should be looking through early 20th century photos for the missing crew.

@nobody, in particular

i don't know about early 20th century, maybe two years ago?
fig. 1: stockton rush (img)
fig. 2: captain hank murphy (img)
posted by i used to be someone else at 9:03 AM on June 22, 2023

I’m not exactly sure how the company obtained insurance to operate

Any reasonable actuary would charge so much that it would just be something like a pre-payment plan for the imminent settlement negating the whole point of insurance.
posted by srboisvert at 9:08 AM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Banging for three minutes at a time makes more sense; no idea where I got the single bang notion from.
posted by Mitheral at 9:14 AM on June 22, 2023

If they did just find a debris field then it suggests the banging wasn’t really anything.
posted by Artw at 9:17 AM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Nice comparison of the Titan with an actually safe deep submersible.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 9:19 AM on June 22, 2023 [21 favorites]

BBC is reporting there will be a press conference about the debris field at 3pm local time. Doesn't sound good.
posted by DingoMutt at 9:19 AM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

One of the Coast Guard officials noted in the press conference yesterday that the ocean is noisy.
posted by interogative mood at 9:24 AM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

That’s 3 pm EDT, in Boston.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 9:27 AM on June 22, 2023

If they did just find a debris field then it suggests the banging wasn’t really anything.

or theres another OceanGate sub down there which everyone forgot about 💀
posted by Lanark at 9:31 AM on June 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

It would be extremely fucking grim if the banging was from the sub and now there's debris. Let's hope not.
posted by cmyk at 9:36 AM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

The fact they could even find a debris field is mind boggling to me.
posted by glaucon at 9:40 AM on June 22, 2023 [10 favorites]

The fact they could even find a debris field is mind boggling to me.

If it's fresh debris that's not covered with silt, and the sub did implode, the carbon fiber probably shattered into a lot of small pieces. There have been recent visits to the Titanic wreck and they've got a pretty good idea of what it's supposed to look like.
posted by azpenguin at 9:45 AM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Nice comparison of the Titan with an actually safe deep submersible.

Of course, the Deepsea Challenger is rated for like 3x deeper than the Titan. What's even more impressive is that the Limiting Factor is only 6 years newer. It's about the same total weight and also rated for unlimited 11km dives, but seems to fit 2 more-or-less comfortably because it's a 1.5m titanium sphere instead of a 1.1m steel sphere. There must be a lot more changes than that though... the batteries look much smaller, and I'm guessing the buoyancy foam technology changed a lot as well.
posted by netowl at 9:45 AM on June 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

Nice comparison of the Titan with an actually safe deep submersible.

Wow. The more I learn about how they built Titan the more staggeringly slack it sounds.

And "non-inspirational" "50-year-old white guy" Ron Allum invented a syntactic foam used in Deepsea Challenger.
posted by kirkaracha at 9:51 AM on June 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

If the debris field is the remains of this sub, its diameter will at least tell us something about how far from the sea floor the sub was when it imploded.
posted by heatherlogan at 9:53 AM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Nice comparison of the Titan with an actually safe deep submersible.

Semi-important quibble with this tweet about pressure testing. The testing that the ex-employee & OceanGate were disputing about wasn't pressure testing or even cyclical testing of the cylinder. That's relatively easy to do and god I hope it was done. They were talking about something much more complicated - ongoing monitoring of the hull for defects caused by manufacturing or fatigue.

In an ideal world you would do a destructive pressure test of each hull and then magically put it back together and know exactly how many dives that hull could take before it would fail. Because you can do all the calculations and analysis and subsequent testing on a hull that you want, but in the real world there will likely be material and manufacturing defects that affect the life of each hull.

In a second-best world you would fabricated say 1000 vessels and test 100 of them to make a statistical lifetime profile. And also account for aging and changing material suppliers and the glue on this round of fabrication was a day older so the lifetime is 1 day shorter and and and...

But in the real world it isn't possible to account for ever single factor, so you try to have a preventative maintenance and inspection schedule. I am not an aeronautics expert but I know this is a big deal for aviation as well and there has been a lot of time and research put into how to inspect aluminum airframes before cracks are externally visible.

Apparently OceanGate was claiming this kind of inspection wasn't possible for carbon fiber hulls, which is maybe why they aren't a good idea for a submersible going to 4000m. Or at the very least they should stop and come up with an inspection technique before selling tickets.
posted by muddgirl at 9:55 AM on June 22, 2023 [14 favorites]

Or at the very least they should stop and come up with an inspection technique before selling tickets.

OceanGate is a company that was literally saying that safety measures like this get in the way of innovation, though. It’s an attitude that is, unfortunately, literally deadly.
posted by graymouser at 10:00 AM on June 22, 2023 [14 favorites]

The debris field could also be the ballast material.
posted by dirigibleman at 10:14 AM on June 22, 2023

Sky News says the debris field *is* part of the submersible.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 10:28 AM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Landing frame and a rear cover from the submersible' among the debris. - from the BBC
posted by inflatablekiwi at 10:28 AM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Given how hard the Coast Guard initially pushed back on the reports of the banging sounds, and the fact they're announcing a debris field and calling a press conference on it, I have to think that yes, this is it. Of course I could be wrong but this would be the right way to handle crisis communications - only give specifics if they're important.
posted by azpenguin at 10:32 AM on June 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

I'm planning an underwater research project for later this summer and I was just on a zoom call with a maritime archaeologist so of course we talked about the Titan - this guy was offered a job by OceanGate about 5 years ago - to be their marine archaeologist and visit the Titanic as a researcher (read, "tour guide"?) - and his account of the story was he responded "visit it in what?" and they sent the specs for the Titan and his response was an immediate "nope."

He has worked with Paul-Henri Nargeolet numerous times and so he is pretty shook up as well as being unsurprised.
posted by Rumple at 10:33 AM on June 22, 2023 [55 favorites]

I look forward to the dry but scathing NTSB or similar report on this. But it would be anticlimactic if it boiled down to "thing that wasn't certified to go down this deep failed after going down that deep after ten times."
posted by meowzilla at 10:38 AM on June 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

The Sky News post:

In the last few moments, we heard from a rescue expert that the debris found in the search for Titan was "a landing frame and a rear cover from the submersible".

David Mearns told Sky News that the rear cover is the "pointy end of it" called the "fairing" and that the landing frame is what the sub "sits on".

He added: "If the faring is off and the frame is off - then something really bad has happened to the entire structure."
posted by Ansible at 10:51 AM on June 22, 2023 [9 favorites]

well, if it imploded at least it was quick. at that pressure, with a delamination/failure, i think their deaths would have occurred faster than nerve conduction.

it also still puzzles me that they touted aerospace-grade carbon fiber; the b787 flies at 43k feet, but the difference in external/internal pressure is dramatically less: sea level is ~101kPa; at 43k feet, ~16kPa. at the oceanic depths they were at, pressure is at least 38MPa.

aerospace grade don't mean shit in that case.
posted by i used to be someone else at 10:55 AM on June 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

This time when the anchors all start calling it a tragedy, they'll be right. Hubris, defiance, nemesis. And in all the watching and commentary, catharsis.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:57 AM on June 22, 2023 [11 favorites]

The craft has two parts. The passengers are in a carbon fiber tube with titanium ends. This is encased in what appears to be a fiberglass fairing and that has the thrusters and frame parts they've found. I'm not certain if this was expected to detach as part of their redundant systems to ensure the capsule would resurface or if the only way the faring could be separated is due to a implosion of the passenger compartment.
posted by interogative mood at 10:57 AM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

aerospace grade don't mean shit in that case.

It makes for good marketing copy.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 10:58 AM on June 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

In an ideal world you would do a destructive pressure test of each hull and then magically put it back together and know exactly how many dives that hull could take before it would fail.

Just like how they build bridges!
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:59 AM on June 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

even if the tube surfaced, they're out of oxygen. it's been 96 hours.
posted by i used to be someone else at 11:00 AM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm in no way an engineer, so please correct me if I'm wrong; but if they found the rear cover, does that mean it was likely the porthole that failed? Would the porthole failing fire all of that high-pressure water through the hull like a cannon?
posted by UltraMorgnus at 11:01 AM on June 22, 2023

The answer is that we don't know and everyone is guessing. The source for what debris was found is a text message. It's really easy to start jumping to answers but the recovery effort has just started.
posted by muddgirl at 11:05 AM on June 22, 2023 [11 favorites]

Apparently OceanGate was claiming this kind of inspection wasn't possible for carbon fiber hulls, which is maybe why they aren't a good idea for a submersible going to 4000m

Exactly, the "there's just no way for us to monitor for degradation, our first warning will be failure" shouldn't be "let's cross our fingers" it should be "well, then that material is ruled out." At least without a long long history of empirical data showing that operating in this box of parameters is safe (as far as we know). He was doing a new thing with a new not-well-understood-under-those-conditions material, as he himself admitted in the videos.

Also, the ex-employee didn't even seem to be asking him to scrap the plan, only to do some kind of NDT technique that does already exist, like radiography or ultrasonic or something.
posted by ctmf at 11:06 AM on June 22, 2023 [15 favorites]

The rear cover is the opposite of the porthole and they probably found that because it is intact, unlike the carbon fiber tube, which was probably imploded into bits.
posted by snofoam at 11:06 AM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

not an engineer, but:

carbon fiber has a lot of tensile strength but not so much compressive strength, and when it fails (usually due to delamination, which is when the layers come apart and it essentially "shatters"), the whole thing probably went at once; the fairing could have come off that way, too, since it wouldn't really be attached to anything at that point.

alternatively, yes, the porthole could have failed; at that depth water would be coming in faster than the speed of sound, and its entrance would create basically a water hammer that pulverized anyone inside and probably blew out the rear titanium cap. if it wasn't the whole porthole, but a small pinprick, it would have worked more like a water jet cutter. for reference, many high pressure water cutters emit pressures between 4-11 MPa, which, note, is less than water pressure at a depth of 3.8km.
posted by i used to be someone else at 11:07 AM on June 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

→ Just like how they build bridges!

Every materials engineering academic I ever worked with had this taped or pinned to the wall. It was like a membership badge.
posted by scruss at 11:08 AM on June 22, 2023 [14 favorites]

if it wasn't the whole porthole, but a small pinprick, it would have worked more like a water jet cutter. for reference, many high pressure water cutters emit pressures between 4-11 MPa, which, note, is less than water pressure at a depth of 3.8km.

Well this is a horrifying new image for my brain.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 11:10 AM on June 22, 2023 [10 favorites]

UltraMorgnus: does that mean it was likely the porthole that failed?

Not necessarily. If the carbon fiber cylindrical part of the sub cracked, it would disintegrate into small shards. The front and rear titanium domes would then just find themselves without something in between, and be free to go where the forces invoked by the implosion would take them.
posted by Stoneshop at 11:12 AM on June 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

Well this is a horrifying new image for my brain.

yeah, uh. one does not fuck with water if one can help it. or fluids, really. physics is an uncaring, callous thing.
posted by i used to be someone else at 11:15 AM on June 22, 2023 [11 favorites]

"Cover" implies that it is not structural in any way. I don't believe that it is referring to the titanium domes. It is probably not expected to handle any pressure at all and may even be loosely attached to the submersible. In the event of a catastrophic event, it's likely to just fall off.
posted by meowzilla at 11:16 AM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also, the ex-employee didn't even seem to be asking him to scrap the plan, only to do some kind of NDT technique

But then even with the information that there was a flaw, then that becomes a human go/no-go decision in a regulation-free environment. Would he actually scrub a mission if the NDT found a flaw? He sure didn't knowing his communication system was glitchy. Sadly, "don't ask a question you don't really want the answer to" is a thing.
posted by ctmf at 11:17 AM on June 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

Also see the account of the Bathysphere testing from 1932 (uncrewed, fortunately). And that test was only to a depth around 2500 feet, I think.
posted by foonly at 11:22 AM on June 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

I don't even know that there's enough data out there to reliably make go / no-go decisions from NDT data for carbon fibre pressure vessels where the pressure is on the outside, that's not a common use case. So you could do ultrasound but then what?

As I said, I'm actually sympathetic to building and operating your own dangerous experimental equipment. Obviously the Deepsea Challenger is better, it cost probably 50x as much, and as long as you're by yourself you should have the right to play with the big boys on a budget.

I don't feel comfortable inviting strangers to join me in that journey though (even if I weren't charging them the moral element would feel the same for me).
posted by atrazine at 11:26 AM on June 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

Well this is a horrifying new image for my brain.

If it helps, provided it happened suddenly it almost certainly would have been too quick for the crew to be horrified.

Better to be blotted out by some immense force than freeze in the dark with days to think until hypoxia puts you under. Or to burn, or drown.
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:41 AM on June 22, 2023 [21 favorites]

yeah, uh. one does not fuck with water if one can help it.

Yeah we used to say, water WILL get in, all you can do is delay it, limit it, and deal with it. And the ocean is very patient, it will wait for you to look the other way or forget to think of something.
posted by ctmf at 11:42 AM on June 22, 2023 [20 favorites]

Prediction: the people on the surface ship knew the instant the sub imploded, this happened long before anyone was called to the rescue, and this entire rescue has been a charade for liability reasons.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:47 AM on June 22, 2023 [41 favorites]

its entrance would create basically a water hammer that pulverized anyone inside and probably blew out the rear titanium cap

Like when you hit the side of a Pringles tube and it blows the lid off.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:48 AM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

OceanGate just announced the crew as lost.
posted by graymouser at 11:49 AM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

.
posted by Faintdreams at 11:49 AM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

I thought the guy on Twitter trying to shift some blame focus onto the US Coast Guard was super-gross.
posted by ctmf at 11:50 AM on June 22, 2023 [11 favorites]

They weren't all crew, two of them were paying passengers.
posted by epo at 11:57 AM on June 22, 2023

.....
posted by beagle at 11:57 AM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

From the small amount of information available, it sounds like it was a sudden catastrophic event. That's terrible, but honestly better than my personal nightmare scenario of sitting in a dark tube snagged at the bottom of the ocean while the oxygen slowly gets used up. I saw Das Boot in the theater as a child and it left an impression on me.
posted by Dip Flash at 11:57 AM on June 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

Or snagged vertically.
posted by mochapickle at 12:02 PM on June 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

“Debris is consistent with catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber,” US Coast Guard press conference
posted by showbiz_liz at 12:02 PM on June 22, 2023 [9 favorites]

USCG just said they found the tail cone 1600' from the nose of the Titanic. It was a catastrophic failure.
posted by exlotuseater at 12:03 PM on June 22, 2023

Not super sympathetic to these dudes but I’m glad they didn’t die in some nightmarish drawn out way, and probably wouldn’t even have been aware of anything happening.

Kind of sucks that determining that has dragged in so many other people and wasted their time and resources though.
posted by Artw at 12:05 PM on June 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

A reporter yelled out a question about what about recovering the bodies. Ummmm.
posted by azpenguin at 12:07 PM on June 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

Someone asking about recovery of bodies… Coast Guard representative says something like “so, this is an incredibly unforgiving environment”…
posted by showbiz_liz at 12:07 PM on June 22, 2023 [12 favorites]

“Implosion in the water column, consistent with location of last communication” though too early to say for sure
posted by showbiz_liz at 12:09 PM on June 22, 2023

A reporter yelled out a question about what about recovering the bodies. Ummmm.

That reporter already knows the answer to the question. They only ask this sort of thing because they need the official quote for the story.
posted by mochapickle at 12:10 PM on June 22, 2023 [20 favorites]

Implosion in the water column, so that means almost instantaneous death ? That's better than slowly suffocating I guess.
posted by Pendragon at 12:11 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

what does the water column refer to?
posted by bluesky43 at 12:12 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best case scenario, honestly. Instantaneous death beats the most horrid of agonies.

Now can we all agree that we shouldn’t cut safety corners in the name of “fast innovation”?
posted by lydhre at 12:13 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

what does the water column refer to?

Basically, it’s the water above the ocean floor. I think it’s a way of saying “the even occurred at some distance above the floor.”
posted by Thorzdad at 12:14 PM on June 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

The term water column is commonly used in scuba diving to describe the vertical space through which divers ascend and descend.
posted by Pendragon at 12:15 PM on June 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

what does the water column refer to?

The space between the surface and the bottom. Like, he's saying they were still on their way down.
posted by snofoam at 12:15 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

"In the water column" just means suspended in the water, as opposed to on the sea floor, on the surface, or attached to a solid object. (As per Thorzdad.)
posted by heatherlogan at 12:15 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

I have been trying to find an official source for the French Navy SOS signalling every 30 minutes thing and all I can find is other people on discussion boards so while it seems very plausible I'm starting to have doubts about it being true.

I remember reading a detailed account of a cold-war-era radio operator monitoring international naval communications, and noting that it was a world standard for everyone to respect a few minutes of silence on the top and bottom of every hour to listen for distress calls. Ever since then, while touring old Navy vessels in museums, I'll see a clock with a red sector marked out on part of its dial and be all "I know what that's for!"

So I've no idea if it's still a thing but it definitely used to be a thing, and wasn't specific to France but all sailors everywhere.
posted by traveler_ at 12:15 PM on June 22, 2023 [32 favorites]

This time when the anchors all start calling it a tragedy, they'll be right. Hubris, defiance, nemesis. And in all the watching and commentary, catharsis.

Excellent point, snuffleupagus, and as lord_wolf's wonderful cmment points out, this event has another keystone aspect which is essential to the arch of Classical tragedy:

Another cruel twist of the knife of fate for this incident: Wendy Rush, wife of CEO Stockton Rush, is a descendant of a couple who died when the Titanic sank.

Wendy Rush, who is the director of communications and an expedition team member for OceanGate, according to her LinkedIn, is related to Ida and Isidor Straus, the latter of whom was a co-owner of Macy's....

The Strauses were among first-class passengers aboard the Titanic on its maiden voyage.

According to the U.K. government's National Archives, Ida and Isidor had been directed to a lifeboat after the ship hit the iceberg, but Isidor refused to take a seat, saying he wanted younger men to be able to do so. And when he refused, so did Ida, reportedly saying, "Where you go, I go." Instead, Ida helped their maid Ellen Bird onto a boat and gave her her fur coat, saying she would no longer need it. Bird survived.

This tragedy was fated.

If I had known Wendy Rush's family history, there is no way in hell I would have set foot in the Titan. Even the ludicrously inappropriate name of 'Titan' for such a tiny vessel would have given me pause because it expresses identification with the wrecked ship, and of course its only possible resting place would be at that ship's side in the deep.
posted by jamjam at 12:15 PM on June 22, 2023 [32 favorites]

When you participate in a risky venture like that, the best you can hope for is a quick death if things go pear-shaped.
posted by Kitteh at 12:17 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm not inclined to ascribe such things to fate, but they named it TITAN(ic)
posted by supermedusa at 12:18 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah at least it was instant death. Probably spent their last few minutes excited and anticipating seeing the Titanic coming into view. Not enough time for brain to know anything was wrong.
posted by interogative mood at 12:19 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Sooo.... after several days of searching, they found it in the exact place where contact was lost and where one should look first.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 12:20 PM on June 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

It is unlikely, but perhaps they should now make the Titanic resting site off-limits to future would-be adventurers. They did it for the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, but I know marking a huge chunk of the Atlantic NO DIVEY OR EXPLOREY makes that impossible.
posted by Kitteh at 12:20 PM on June 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

Kind of sucks that determining that has dragged in so many other people and wasted their time and resources though.

That part doesn't bother me -- it's good training for everyone involved, from the people running various pieces of equipment to the people doing mission planning and all the problem-solving in that. If nobody got hurt looking for them, I'm good.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 12:21 PM on June 22, 2023 [29 favorites]

Coast Guard representative says something like “so, this is an incredibly unforgiving environment”…

Byford Dolphin [CW: grisly death & injury in a submersible just 150 meters down]
posted by chavenet at 12:21 PM on June 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

.

I’m glad the families will get some small measure of comfort and closure and can start to find a way to move on. I hope those who are building technology find a new measure of respect for risk and risk management.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 12:22 PM on June 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

Sooo.... after several days of searching, they found it in the exact place where contact was lost and where one should look first.

Which is to say, they did a great job. Searching, let alone finding and recovering, in that environment is incredibly challenging.
posted by Pantengliopoli at 12:22 PM on June 22, 2023 [38 favorites]

I'm not inclined to ascribe such things to fate, but they named it TITAN(ic)

I truly believe that was intentional. They probably thought they were being clever, and not tempting fate.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:22 PM on June 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

You know all that folklore about how the sites of shipwrecks are haunted by the spirits of the violently dead, who will pull the living down to join them, and how you should never ever go near the site of a shipwreck because the sirens will sing you to your doom? Yeah.
posted by heatherlogan at 12:22 PM on June 22, 2023 [44 favorites]

It is unlikely, but perhaps they should now make the Titanic resting site off-limits to future would-be adventurers.

And who is going to enforce that ? Isn't this in international waters ?
posted by Pendragon at 12:22 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm not inclined to ascribe such things to fate, but they named it TITAN(ic)

After losing their war with Zeus, the titans were also banished to the depths. From Hesoid:

"That is where the Titan gods are hidden under murky gloom by the plans of the cloud-gatherer Zeus, in a dank place, at the farthest part of huge earth. They cannot get out, for Poseidon has set bronze gates upon it, and a wall is extended on both sides."
posted by snofoam at 12:23 PM on June 22, 2023 [18 favorites]

.

Especially for the kid who SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN THERE.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 12:23 PM on June 22, 2023 [13 favorites]

Sooo.... after several days of searching, they found it in the exact place where contact was lost and where one should look first.

A reminder that this is the first day the ROV has been operating down there. So, yes, they looked where they obviously should have looked, and they found it.
posted by beagle at 12:24 PM on June 22, 2023 [47 favorites]

Eww that last question posed to the Coast Guard was straight out of Twitter:

"Was any help turned away during the search?"
posted by meowzilla at 12:25 PM on June 22, 2023

Kitteh: They did it for the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

That's in the Great Lakes, so within the territory/jurisdiction of the US. Titanic is in international waters, so somewhat different with respect to getting a protected zone set up.
posted by Stoneshop at 12:26 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Sooo.... after several days of searching, they found it in the exact place where contact was lost and where one should look first.

Except for the fact that most of the searchers couldn't look there earlier. Search and rescue planes can cover a lot of area, but don't work that well underwater.
posted by Spike Glee at 12:26 PM on June 22, 2023 [18 favorites]

Sooo.... after several days of searching, they found it in the exact place where contact was lost and where one should look first.

Keep in mind that they were probably using sonar to look for a recoverable object while there was a chance the people aboard were alive, not scanning the entire ocean floor for debris.
posted by graymouser at 12:26 PM on June 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

Most of the several days of searching so far was on the surface (where, it turns out, there was nothing to find).

Also, it's completely pitch dark at 4 km depth, so all the ROV search has been done "by flashlight".
posted by heatherlogan at 12:26 PM on June 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

"Was any help turned away during the search?"

As if that would have made any difference. :/
posted by heatherlogan at 12:28 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

That's in the Great Lakes, so within the territory/jurisdiction of the US.

Before someone threatens to high-stick us, some of the great lakes waters are US territory and others are Canadian. But all of it is either US or Canadian territory.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 12:29 PM on June 22, 2023 [11 favorites]

The US Congress could pass a law. Other countries might not recognize it, but good luck arguing with the US Coast Guard or Navy if they arrest you.
posted by interogative mood at 12:29 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

And who is going to enforce that ? Isn't this in international waters ?

Don’t enforce it, but classify the activity as one where “if we lose contact with you, we aren’t conducting rescue operations.” That would dissuade this bullshit.
posted by Room 101 at 12:29 PM on June 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

do not read about the Byford Dolphin if you are squeamish. its really bad.
posted by supermedusa at 12:30 PM on June 22, 2023 [9 favorites]

Eww that last question posed to the Coast Guard was straight out of Twitter:

"Was any help turned away during the search?"

Great. So we’re going to get a whole bunch of libertarian billionaire infallibility truthers out of this.

Gives them some variety from constantly defending Musk I guess.
posted by Artw at 12:31 PM on June 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

Sooo.... after several days of searching, they found it in the exact place where contact was lost and where one should look first.

They were not looking for a lost pair of car keys.
posted by bondcliff at 12:33 PM on June 22, 2023 [23 favorites]

Gotta keep the story going. An "investigation" into the response would double the fuel for the insatiable news cycle. To be fair, it happens here too - every incident critique also turns into a critique of the responders. And believe it, all the responding orgs routinely do their own after-action reports, to improve and learn. We welcome that. (What we don't welcome is trying to shift the spotlight from the accident itself)
posted by ctmf at 12:33 PM on June 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

If it had been intact underwater it would have meant that it was entangled. Otherwise it would have surfaced. Since it is probably really unlikely that they could have freed an entangled sub, especially without damaging it, the best possibility of helping them would be to hope they did surface and find them while they could still breathe.
posted by snofoam at 12:33 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Sooo.... after several days of searching, they found it in the exact place where contact was lost and where one should look first.

I seriously hope you aren’t trying to infer that the USCG and the other rescuers are somehow culpable in these deaths, or were in any way inept.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:33 PM on June 22, 2023 [12 favorites]

The International Seabed Authority could possibly be given expanded authority over these kinds of missions to the bottom past a certain depth if not carried out by some exempted organization. (For their current jurisdiction, that depth is 200m.)

Enforcement would still be a question; but on the other hand most law enforcement is about punishment after the fact, not prevention. For better or worse.

And they could do simple things, like requiring vessels carrying people like these to be classed.
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:35 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

And it doesn't matter that the place they finally found the debris was the last (possibly) known location of the vessel (or that 'help may have been turned away'). The vessel and its crew met their fates instantly...finding the debris sooner wouldn't have mattered, there was never anything to rescue.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 12:35 PM on June 22, 2023 [14 favorites]

"Was any help turned away during the search?"

Again, if it helps, that's just them asking for another quote they needed for the story. The reporters have been watching this unfold as we have and they have the general structure of the story already mapped out before the presser -- so in this case the reporter's story needed an official quote that spoke to the level of international effort, what resources were used, any limits due to the timing and coordination. That sort of thing.

Yes, reporters know they look stupid and sometimes ghoulish for asking.
posted by mochapickle at 12:36 PM on June 22, 2023 [13 favorites]

Enforcement would still be a question

Enh... you sue them for violating your rules, and use their own youtube videos as evidence. The point is to prevent it becoming a business, which necessarily can't be kept secret.
posted by fatbird at 12:37 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Byford Dolphin incident was also sort of an inverse to this incident, as it happened to saturation divers who were in a decompression chamber at the surface, that was pressurized to something like 9 atmospheres, which was the pressure at the depth to which they were diving.

But yes, gruesome, and also instantaneous.
posted by foonly at 12:37 PM on June 22, 2023

Sooo.... after several days of searching, they found it in the exact place where contact was lost and where one should look first.

If you talk to anyone that does Search & Rescue, they'll tell you that finding someone can be incredibly hard, even if you know where to look. Over 12,000 feet underwater in complete darkness? There isn't a fast way to search that at all, and they needed the ROV capable of getting down there. 1600 meters away from the wreck is a damn long distance if you're searching under those conditions.
posted by azpenguin at 12:38 PM on June 22, 2023 [20 favorites]

in the exact place where contact was lost

In addition to the other good points, the "exact place" might have been many square km of seafloor. Exact in terms of the North Atlantic as a whole, not so much under the circumstances.
posted by Rumple at 12:39 PM on June 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

→ [wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald] ... within the territory/jurisdiction of the US

(coughs politely in Canadian): within the territory/jurisdiction of Canada, please. It sank in our waters
posted by scruss at 12:42 PM on June 22, 2023 [27 favorites]

I feel for the people who were holding onto hope. This outcome felt to me, inevitable, if they found it at all. I curse the news for making it sound so plausible they were simply stuck and waiting for rescue.
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:43 PM on June 22, 2023 [9 favorites]

NBC is reporting that they found the nose cone and front hemisphere, so it really sounds like it was the carbon fiber cylinder that gave way.
posted by Spike Glee at 12:45 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's the best worst case scenario, I guess.
posted by Capt. Renault at 12:45 PM on June 22, 2023 [11 favorites]

IV. Death by Water

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

--- The Waste Land, TS Eliot
posted by SPrintF at 12:47 PM on June 22, 2023 [29 favorites]

All Ye Who Comment Here Please Read Above First Before Posting
posted by y2karl at 12:48 PM on June 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

Yes, reporters know they look stupid and sometimes ghoulish for asking.

Oh, and one more thing -- any spokesperson worth their salt WANTS questions like this because questions like this help them. They give the org the opportunity to speak positively and on the record about the overall expertise of the operation, how adept they are at coordinating resources, the strength of their resources, the team's demonstrated commitment to the work. Positive press -> respect from the public -> more funding and power to do what they do.
posted by mochapickle at 12:48 PM on June 22, 2023 [15 favorites]

do not read about the Byford Dolphin if you are squeamish. its really bad.

This.
posted by jgirl at 12:50 PM on June 22, 2023

Like, even now..."all passengers are believed to be dead." I hate the journalism rules, why phrase it like that. Say all passengers lost if you don't want to say dead. But they are gone.
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:51 PM on June 22, 2023

I seriously hope you aren’t trying to infer that the USCG and the other rescuers are somehow culpable in these deaths, or were in any way inept.

No. I'm speculating, baselessly but based on the entire sketchy move fast break things of the company, that they knew from the very beginning that everybody was already dead.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 12:52 PM on June 22, 2023

.....

It would have been quick, at least . Given how fast gas heats up under instant compression, they (and the carbon fibre shell) would have incinerated instantly.

One of my friends was a newly-qualified doctor working the North Sea rigs when he was called to attend the Byford Dolphin. We know never to ask him about it.
posted by scruss at 12:53 PM on June 22, 2023 [17 favorites]

. . . . .

A tragic ending, but at this point the least possibly traumatic of tragic endings, for the folks involved at least. There are worse ways to go. I'm relieved in a way.

Given what's come out so far about safety protocols and such, I guess we're going to find out shortly what to call a scandal involving an organization whose name already ends in -gate.
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 12:55 PM on June 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

A tragic, though not unexpected, outcome. There's a lot about this to pick apart - from design to risk management to the international attention the fate of this vessel got - but for the moment, its a relief to know it ended fast.
posted by nubs at 1:01 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

They got the ROV and ROV pilots on site as quickly as possible. Then they went immediately to the last known position and found the wreckage. All the other sonar and surface searching was going on in hopes that it had not imposed on the sea floor and was drifting there.
posted by interogative mood at 1:01 PM on June 22, 2023 [15 favorites]

.
posted by mazola at 1:03 PM on June 22, 2023 [27 favorites]

(coughs politely in Canadian): within the territory/jurisdiction of Canada, please. It sank in our waters

And so began the US/Canada war of 2023.
posted by azpenguin at 1:07 PM on June 22, 2023 [9 favorites]

No. I'm speculating, baselessly.........

That they did so specifically to avoid liability, which makes no sense; if anything delaying and allowing an elaborate rescue to proceed while affirmatively knowing the craft was lost would enhance liability in all aspects, such as if a rescuer perished. So maybe don't speculate baselessly.

Everyone at Oceangate knew it was no longer a going concern when they called in the authorities, even if the rescue succeeded. If anything, that's why they waited.
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:09 PM on June 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

I thought the guy on Twitter trying to shift some blame focus onto the US Coast Guard was super-gross.

That's an unfair characterization of both the tweet and the National Geographic article it linked, which was a good piece about the delays in giving the Magellan approval to come to the site.

Also, .
posted by mediareport at 1:13 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

I hope it was mercifully fast, for all of them. but especially for Suleman Dawood, 19 years old.

.
posted by BlahLaLa at 1:26 PM on June 22, 2023 [11 favorites]

That's an unfair characterization

Hm, agree to disagree I guess. The phrasing ("red tape", "life-saving equipment") and the timing, and the (probably unavoidable) condensation of a nuanced thing into a tweet, definitely gave it a criticism flavor.
posted by ctmf at 1:29 PM on June 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

Pointing folks to this again, an article from 2020 where the CEO told Geekwire the hull rating had been reduced to 3000m, and then an article from this week noting there's nothing on the OceanGate site about any improvements or replacements done before the company started repeatedly taking folks down to 3800m in the same vehicle a year later.
posted by mediareport at 1:31 PM on June 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

scruss: (coughs politely in Canadian):

I'll overlook the matter if you happen to confuse us with Germany or Belgium.
posted by Stoneshop at 1:49 PM on June 22, 2023

definitely gave it a criticism flavor

Well, he's an editor at NatGeo, so I gather you'd say the same about the article his tweet links? It's worth a read if you haven't yet. Also, the head of the Explorer Society has *definitely* been offering anxious criticism throughout the week of the mixed messages that kept the Magellan grounded, and specifically called on the Coast Guard for answers. He knew 2 of the crew members. Was he being "super-gross" as well?

I don't want to sound snippy (the whole thing is just so damn sad it seems petty to argue about this part) but while there was still hope, raising those questions was very fair, and I disagree strongly with your characterization of the folks who reported on it. I'll let it go now.
posted by mediareport at 1:49 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oceanographer Bob Ballard speaking to ABC... followed by James Cameron speaking to ABC after the news, about the design, the risk, and ... Cameron's being very restrained. Right at the end is an 'interesting' line. "They probably had a warning that their hull was starting to delaminate, and it was trying to crack... it's our belief, we understand from inside the community that they had dropped their ascent weights and they were coming up, trying to manage an emergency."

If so (and it does sound like Cameron knows more), then the end would be mercifully quick but the minutes beforehand would be pure terror.
posted by ewan at 1:55 PM on June 22, 2023 [16 favorites]

MSNBC reported that Suleman Dawood's sister said that he didn't want to go, but agreed to accompany his Titanic-obsessed father.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 1:56 PM on June 22, 2023 [18 favorites]

James Cameron Says Titan Submersible Deaths Are ‘Impossible to Process,’ Diving Community Had Been ‘Concerned’ About the Sub

“Titanic” director James Cameron spoke out during an ABC News interview about the tourist submersible Titan that lost contact on its way to reach the Titanic. After submarine company OceanGate released a statement on Thursday saying that the five people who went down are believed dead, Cameron gave his thoughts on the tragedy as a longtime member of the diving community, who has made 33 trips to the Titanic himself.

“People in the community were very concerned about this sub,” Cameron said. “A number of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company, saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that it needed to be certified. I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result. For us, it’s a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded.”

posted by bitteschoen at 1:57 PM on June 22, 2023 [21 favorites]

MSNBC reported that Suleman Dawood's sister said that he didn't want to go, but agreed to accompany his Titanic-obsessed father.

that is truly horrific.
posted by supermedusa at 1:59 PM on June 22, 2023 [39 favorites]

How would Cameron know any of this? Unless the surface ship got a last transmission from the sub that they've not released (and I'm not sure I would want to hear it either).
posted by meowzilla at 1:59 PM on June 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

I assume since they found the undercarriage, they can tell if ballast weights were dropped and in what fashion.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 2:02 PM on June 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

Did anyone involved really think those banging sounds they detected could have been coming from the submersible? It seemed unlikely to me. But I do wonder what they would've been coming from, in that case.
posted by wondermouse at 2:15 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Cameron is very much part of the deep submersible vehicle community, not least because of his solo trip to Challenger Deep on a vehicle he contributed to, but also with all his work around Titanic, etc. It does not come to me as a surprise that a close-knit community group of people would be in touch with each other in a situation like this, namely the first loss of a manned DSV.

I also see that Cameron has said nothing while it was a search and rescue mission. Now that's over, he has communicated to the world just how much regard he (and ergo the community) had with OceanGate.
posted by ewan at 2:18 PM on June 22, 2023 [14 favorites]

On the ballast weights, one of the contingency plans if weights were stuck was to rock the Titan from side to side with the body mass of the crew, to allow the weights to slide off... so any implosion would surely shake the weights off?
posted by ewan at 2:20 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

"...it's our belief, we understand from inside the community that they had dropped their ascent weights and they were coming up, trying to manage an emergency."

That might explain some things, like the large surface search area and the delay for some ROVs. OTOH, I would have expected some mention of it during the USCG presser.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 2:25 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

.... for the passengers
* for the corner-cutting CEO
posted by kirkaracha at 2:25 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

All the other sonar and surface searching was going on in hopes that it had not imposed on the sea floor and was drifting there.

I guess because that was the point all along: if they were on the sea floor, there was never a way to get them back alive in time, if at all. Finding them on the surface was ever the only option of rescue. So focusing on the surface while there was a chance they still had air made perfect sense.

Being optimistic is a job feature for the Cost Guard, and for the press, it makes a better story if there is still hope.
posted by uncle harold at 2:35 PM on June 22, 2023 [15 favorites]

I'm not impressed by the background rumbling criticism of the Coast Guard - I used to deal with them a lot and they are far and away the most professional and effective US government department I'm aware of.
Some things are genuinely difficult to do - the idea that they let those people die because of excessive bureaucracy and red tape is just the usual kind of tech bro whining I'd expect from the likes of the Explorers Society guy - Richard Garriot, aka Lord British, another rich passenger on other people's projects and, as a tech bro, unable to deal with the idea that the physical universe imposes it's own complex and unavoidable limits on what we can do.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 2:37 PM on June 22, 2023 [38 favorites]

Link to an NBC article quoting Suleman Dawood's aunt saying the 19 year old was "terrified" of the trip:

Azmeh Dawood — the older sister of Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood — told NBC News that her nephew, Suleman, informed a relative that he "wasn't very up for it" and felt "terrified" about the trip to explore the wreckage of the Titanic.

But the 19-year-old ended up going aboard OceanGate's 22-foot submersible because the trip fell over Father's Day weekend and he was eager to please his dad, who was passionate about the lore of the Titanic...
posted by mediareport at 2:37 PM on June 22, 2023 [22 favorites]

Also, the head of the Explorer Society has *definitely* been offering anxious criticism throughout the week of the mixed messages that kept the Magellan grounded, and specifically called on the Coast Guard for answers

I think that's the Explorer's Club, and the United States Coast Guard doesn't answer to Lord British, of all people.
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:41 PM on June 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

From a friend's posts on twitter (@Oceanbound is a former Coastguard involved with SAR)...

"And the Coast Guard will continue actually doing the work. Let me explain something here (besides the fact that those images could be from anywhere)
"Seriously- one of the things in a SAR case is also making sure that no one else ends up a SAR case or dead.
"Yes a lot of random assets were offered up, but this isn’t a typical surface rescue it is looking for people in a place that almost no one has the tried and tested capability to go.
"You want the Coast Guard to look for a sub that shouldn’t have been in those waters…with another sub that isn’t made for those waters? Sit down chuckles and let the professionals work.
"Then let’s talk about how hard it is to coordinate multiple air and sea assets especially when they come from different branches/countries. The more you throw out there the more complex it gets and the more likely you are to have an additional accident."
posted by ewan at 2:47 PM on June 22, 2023 [37 favorites]

To paraphrase Lois McMaster Bujold, "You can fool the man, you can fool the machine, but you will never fool the metal." (or the carbon fiber)
posted by Soliloquy at 2:50 PM on June 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

so any implosion would surely shake the weights off?

That was one of the deballasting methods. First one would have been releasing three metal tubes used as ballast, controlled electronically with manual backup, and also with dissolving links that release after 16 hours. That last method will have caused the main ballast to drop anyway given the time under water, but maybe there's an OceanGate engineer who might be able to tell from the state of a latch, if found, whether the ballast drop was commanded or not. After that were the roll-off weights, and those will surely have dropped from the shelves they rested on or rather, the sub imploding robbing the shelves of their support, and the ballast shot bags will likewise have detached.

But the whole thing had no black box like airplanes have, or telemetry data relayed to the support ship (just about impossible given the bandwidth constraints), so whatever data people will want to know has to be pieced together from what is found.
posted by Stoneshop at 2:52 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

The more you throw out there the more complex it gets and the more likely you are to have an additional accident.

See: The Incident Pit
posted by Artw at 2:54 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

That's not really what the incident pit is about, but it's a very useful concept to be familiar with.

When one of these minor incidents becomes difficult to cope with, or is further complicated by other problems usually arriving all at the same time, the situation tends to become an emergency and the first feelings of fear begin to appear - illustrated by the next layer of the pit. If the emergency is not controlled at this early stage then panic, the diver's worst enemy, leads to almost total lack of control and the emergency becomes a serious problem - illustrated by the third layer of the pit. Progression through to the final stage of the pit from the panic situation is usually very rapid and extremely difficult to reverse and a fatality may be inevitable - illustrated by the final black stage of the pit.

It should be noted that the general concept is transferable between domains; but not so much the specifics. The time aspect is particular to diving. There's a famous adage in aviation that when something goes wrong the first thing you should do is wind your watch. So as to react deliberately. (Though some things in aviation do demand an immediate response, and helicopters are different.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:01 PM on June 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

Wall Street journal is reporting that top secret Navy systems detected the implosion
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 3:09 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Oh for fuck's sake. The "anti-woke" crowd have seized on a quote that the CEO gave in a softball interview with Teledyne Marine (now deleted from the Teledyne site) that was highlighted in the generally thoughtful criticism in the Sub Brief Youtube channel video that was linked above a couple of days ago. Interviewer asks about the relatively young crew he saw on a trip and lobs a "tell us about that" to Stockton Rush, who says when you look at other sub companies you typically see ex-military folks "and a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys."

You can watch the full exchange here (do it soon since that copy probably won't stay up long, but the channel looks like it's a conspiracy mess, so don't click if that bugs you); the question starts around 26:45 and Rush's answer at 27:12.

"I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational," Rush says. "I'm not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology," he says, "but a 25-year-old who's a sub pilot or platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational." He goes on to say they've gotten "very intelligent, motivated, younger individuals involved," though he somehow fails to mention the youngsters are almost certainly a helluva lot cheaper than an experienced staff would be.

He also says he wanted a more diverse crew so the 10-day trips would be more interesting than if everyone on board was a former nuclear sub soldier, e.g.

It's more of the same "We're doing something new!" bullshit that fills OceanGate's PR, but folks should know that the "50-year-old white guys" crack is now being paraded around by the usual crowd as WOKENESS GONE MAD KILLED THOSE FIVE PEOPLE.

As opposed to, say, techbro move-fast-break-shit gone mad, but whatever.
posted by mediareport at 3:13 PM on June 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

I knew damn well there wasn’t a woman or minority involved in the company because if there were, the poor soul would be trending to hell and back.
posted by Countess Elena at 3:15 PM on June 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

Wall Street journal is reporting that top secret Navy systems detected the implosion

I bet Jonesy heard it.
posted by kirkaracha at 3:16 PM on June 22, 2023 [9 favorites]

Omg that is so tragic about the 19 year old. I was thinking that the family would be incensed at the father for taking him along, and yikes... that fact that he went to please his father. Oof.
posted by AnyUsernameWillDo at 3:16 PM on June 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

I knew damn well there wasn’t a woman or minority involved in the company

Well, Rush's wife (the Titanic descendent) apparently ran communications from the surface ship on at least some trips; the CBS reporter mentions that in the podcast transcripts way above, and the video I just linked shows pics, anyway, of young women as part of the team.
posted by mediareport at 3:17 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Right at the end is an 'interesting' line [by James Cameron]. "They probably had a warning that their hull was starting to delaminate, and it was trying to crack... it's our belief, we understand from inside the community that they had dropped their ascent weights and they were coming up, trying to manage an emergency."

This sounds like Cameron losing it a bit and saying what the community would like to imagine, rather than conveying the existence of inside information. Because think about where such inside information would have to have come from, and what it would imply about what Wendy Rush told the Coast Guard and when.
posted by heatherlogan at 3:18 PM on June 22, 2023 [9 favorites]

Bob Ballard also weirdly certain they were on the ascent for some reason.
posted by Artw at 3:19 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

(I'm ruling out telepathy and necromancy, of course.)
posted by heatherlogan at 3:20 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yeah, seeing a lot of "you could have told us that yesterday!" in the comments about the sound being detected, but that's kind of silly. That little thing would most likely have made a very small sound, totally unremarkable among all the other sounds. Identifiable in retrospect, when you're intentionally combing through looking for a specific thing with a good time estimate, but in real-time, completely unremarkable.
posted by ctmf at 3:22 PM on June 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'll bet a bunch of ex-military former submariners with families would also have noped right out of this clearly amateur operation.
posted by meowzilla at 3:23 PM on June 22, 2023 [14 favorites]

Yeah, leaving Stockton to get his crews from less knowledgeable, much younger folks.
posted by mediareport at 3:25 PM on June 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

It's probably based on information from someone with some knowledge of how the undisclosed strain measurement system works. Not necessarily the actual inside information, just assertions from someone in a position to be credited.

So not telepathy or necromancy, just very difficult to resist copium from those who want to feel OK about their hand in it wafting out of the Clubhouse.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:26 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

“While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission.”

Sounds like unnamed navy listening program did what it needed to do.
posted by Artw at 3:28 PM on June 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

Wall Street journal is reporting that top secret Navy systems detected the implosion

This is very important because it provides a timestamp, which can be compared to the time of the last communication to determine whether the communication failure was a separate event or directly caused by the implosion.

Considering that comms were routinely lost on other dives, and that the surface vessel waited until the scheduled end of the dive several hours later to call for help (apparently implying that the operating procedure was to continue with the dive even if comms were lost), this is nontrivial information.
posted by heatherlogan at 3:40 PM on June 22, 2023 [11 favorites]

Barely 98 years later, sans any grave marker or hit record, this is The Death of Floyd Collins all over again.
posted by y2karl at 3:41 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Maybe Cameron and especially Ballard can see something in the debris field that suggests they were ascending.
posted by bluesky43 at 3:49 PM on June 22, 2023

Maybe Cameron and especially Ballard can see something in the debris field that suggests they were ascending.

Have images/video been released?
posted by Thorzdad at 3:55 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

At least it was all over very quickly. I only hope Cameron, et al, are wrong and there was no warning to the occupants.

Genuinely sickening to hear how the 19 yo son didn't want to go.
posted by Pouteria at 4:11 PM on June 22, 2023 [10 favorites]

I've been sickened today by the number of memes gloating about this posted on Facebook by friends I'd always thought of as kind and compassionate but who I now think less of. Yes, these were billionaires who could have spent the money in much better ways. But they were people too, with family and friends who loved them - and who are now grieving the loss of their loved ones. I hope the end was quick, because the alternative is too horrific to contemplate.
posted by essexjan at 4:14 PM on June 22, 2023 [13 favorites]

Was just in a crowded rush hour office building elevator a few minutes ago, and as we got off at the bottom a young guy made an attempt at a joke comparing the ride to the submarine. There was a second of absolute pure silence before *everyone* told him it was not appropriate at all and he skulked off. Oooffhhh
posted by inflatablekiwi at 4:27 PM on June 22, 2023 [11 favorites]

Some things are genuinely difficult to do - the idea that they let those people die because of excessive bureaucracy and red tape is just the usual kind of tech bro whining I'd expect from the likes of the Explorers Society guy - Richard Garriot, aka Lord British, another rich passenger on other people's projects and, as a tech bro, unable to deal with the idea that the physical universe imposes it's own complex and unavoidable limits on what we can do.
Such people are more than happy with the idea that the world should jump in to save others like them, without regard to the lives of the people that would end up at extraordinary risk in doing so. One of the most important things in managing any emergency like this is to avoid creating another emergency in the process. An environment like this is not something to fuck with and, given any objective assessment would conclude this was most likely an exercise in finding out where the passengers died, the absolute right thing was to proceed with cautious haste.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the CEO of OceanGate had just assumed someone would come to save him if things went wrong.
posted by dg at 4:28 PM on June 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

Christine Dawood lost her husband and son. Her daughter Alina lost her father and brother.

Linda Harding lost her husband, her sons Rory and Giles lost their father, and her daughter Lauren and son Brian from a previous relationship lost their stepfather.

Sidonie Nargeolet lost her father.

Wendy Rush lost her husband and her son and daughter lost their father.
posted by kirkaracha at 4:31 PM on June 22, 2023 [29 favorites]

I was looking at Triton, the company that makes the DSV Limiting Factor which uses a titanium alloy main hull, and interestingly their next-generation Titanic-depth class submersible has a beautiful acrylic spherical pressure hull.

The website went down today, but google images has many official renderings.

There's been a lot of discussion about not using carbon fiber, but I just thought it was interesting that non-metallic hulls are even possible that deep.
posted by polymodus at 4:35 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

*possible on paper that deep
posted by inflatablekiwi at 4:36 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

On humour: What could have happened?
posted by Artw at 4:38 PM on June 22, 2023 [24 favorites]

WSJ: U.S. Navy Heard What It Believed Was Titan Implosion Days Ago
posted by achrise at 4:41 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

*possible on paper that deep

I was browsing on my phone but literally this morning Google showed a recent paper discussing the use of acrylic pressure hulls, because they have special compressive properties or something. So literally there are papers

But after this tragic event, maybe Triton and other companies would be motivated to scrutinize their own designs again.
posted by polymodus at 4:44 PM on June 22, 2023

But after this tragic event, maybe Triton and other companies would be motivated to scrutinize their own designs again.

They maybe are continuously motivated to do this anyway.
posted by Artw at 4:46 PM on June 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

This is very important because it provides a timestamp, which can be compared to the time of the last communication to determine whether the communication failure was a separate event or directly caused by the implosion.

According to the New York Times (emphasis mine):

The U.S. Navy, using data from a secret network of underwater sensors designed to track hostile submarines, detected “an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion” in the vicinity of the Titan submersible at the time communications with the vessel were lost on Sunday, two senior Navy officials said on Thursday.

posted by cheshyre at 4:47 PM on June 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

Curse the English language's ambiguity.
I initially read "at the time communications ... were lost" as referring to when the sound was detected.
However, I just realized it could simply refer to the vicinity of the submersible, so this doesn't actually clarify the situation.
posted by cheshyre at 4:51 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

They maybe are continuously motivated to do this anyway.

Of course they are, Triton built the DSV Limiting Factor so they know what they're doing. But their next-gen DSV has an acrylic sphere for a hull. It's on its own webpage.

If I were a working engineer at a different company and I saw on the news that a non-metal hull did not work out, I would ask myself well what about our non-metal hull and why would that work/not work? That level of self-reflection is entirely appropriate and normal.
posted by polymodus at 4:52 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

The passengers may also have gotten the impression that paying lots of money for their trip meant there was a semblance of testing and safety involved. If it was completely free, they would be more worried.

And having the type of money to pay for this trip means that they'd likely taken on lots of experiences where this stratified, rarified level of risk was involved (with the exception of the lady who spent her life savings on this). Harding was a passenger on Blue Origin, regularly hung out with Buzz Aldrin, had circumnavigated the poles, held world records for submersible dives. Nargeolet also had records for submersible dives and had been to the Titanic 37(!) times. The Dawoods no doubt had astronomical access to exceptional experiences as well, through Shahzada's wealth and professional prestige.

And I think that changes your calibration a bit, that access to exceptional wealth, exceptional danger. You're inured to it.

Also, these people lived their lives with a level of wealth and comfort knowing that if they ever fail, or a situation crumbles around them, they're going to end up generally okay. If your day-to-day way of life is set up in a way that you're always going to come out on top no matter what, you might authentically start to believe it.
posted by mochapickle at 4:58 PM on June 22, 2023 [17 favorites]

The debris field.
posted by bluesky43 at 4:59 PM on June 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

I would ask myself well what about our non-metal hull and why would that work/not work?

James Cameron has thoughts on that
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:03 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

They were people with families and it is appropriate to feel sympathy for the families. I also feel strongly for that poor kid who apparently was bullied into going (and even if he wasn't, 19 year olds don't excel at risk assessment). The others exercised what I would charitably call poor judgement, where being extraordinarily rich contributed at least partially, and while every persons death diminishes me, this is tragedy in the dramatic, fatal flaw, pride sense as well as the commonplace sense.

The main reason I don't feel gloaty is I doubt whether I could withstand the warping force of billions on my character either.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 5:04 PM on June 22, 2023 [11 favorites]

Archived webpage advertising Triton's 13000/2 "Titanic Explorer" submersible, featuring an optically perfect acrylic pressure hull and a gull-wing design that can fold down for maneuverability:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201001061729/https://tritonsubs.com/subs/gullwing/
posted by polymodus at 5:05 PM on June 22, 2023

The debris field.

For anyone else who's squinting at it in confusion, it seems to be the *Titanic's* debris field with a not-to-scale 1600 foot radius drawn around the Titanic's bow? (Given the 1970-foot distance between the bow and stern.)
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 5:05 PM on June 22, 2023 [16 favorites]

James Cameron has thoughts on that

And interestingly in that clip, he says he has a stake in Triton precisely because they have acrylic hulls. In that clip, Cameron asserts that acrylic hulls are a valid idea because they are a contiguous material (like steel, or titanium), which permits computer modeling. Cameron's problem with OceanGate and its predecessors is that those were attempting composite materials.
posted by polymodus at 5:08 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

So we now know the implosion the Navy's secret sonar net detected aligns with the time comms was lost. And we've got both Cameron and Ballard saying the Titan was making an emergency ascent. Cameron specifically saying that the hull was delaminating

Is there a chance that the crew heard the hull failing, and had messaged the support ship about their emergency abort? And none of this is in the press yet, but the DSV community has known the timeline for days now?
posted by thecjm at 5:23 PM on June 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

I just hope it happened so fast they didn't feel the terror.

Now matter how rich you are, ugh. I can't even finish the sentence.

.
posted by Windopaene at 5:23 PM on June 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

For anyone else who's squinting at it in confusion, it seems to be the *Titanic's* debris field with a not-to-scale 1600 foot radius drawn around the Titanic's bow?

That article's layout is pretty confusing. I think they're trying to show that the Titan's wreckage is somewhere on the edge of the yellow 1600-foot radius circle around the Titanic's bow. "Debris from the Titan were found approx. 1,600 ft. from the bow of the Titanic."

The picture at the top of this Wired article looks a lot like the Titanic bow.
posted by kirkaracha at 5:25 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Now matter how rich you are, ugh.

At least if you're rich, the world knows your name when you die.
posted by swift at 5:33 PM on June 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

Is there a chance that the crew heard the hull failing, and had messaged the support ship about their emergency abort?

I would like to think that if that were the case, they wouldn't have waited until they were overdue before declaring them missing.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:38 PM on June 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

And I wonder, too, how much their being a commercial enterprise played into the delay. If they had released alarming information to the public only for the Titan to pop up to the surface safe and sound an hour later, they ran the risk of ruining their reputation enough to dissuade even the type of passenger who had previously found the level of danger acceptable.

Or at the very least, it would make things incredibly weird for the employees' relationship to the CEO, whose personal and professional success fully depended on the success of this enterprise.
posted by mochapickle at 5:45 PM on June 22, 2023

I don’t doubt that acrylic can be very strong, but it may also have drawbacks.

Remember the collapse of that huge aquarium in the lobby of the Radisson Blu in Berlin awhile back?

As I understand it, that aquarium was acrylic, and one of the commentors in a YouTube video about the event had some interesting things to say about acrylic:

In a reply below, a poster stated that the acrylic was polished during renovation. Polishing acyrlic heats the acrylic and causes internal stresses that make it prone to shattering. Had the same thing happen to the high strength acrylic dasher panels of a hockey rink in an arena I work at. They had someone polish out the scratches and then the panels started to shatter. We had to start replacing them with new panels, and when they get all scratched up, we again replace with new panels. […]

posted by jamjam at 6:02 PM on June 22, 2023 [9 favorites]

James Cameron mentions that when he was doing his deep water dives, there was a competing sub design that used the same concept as the OceanGate Titan: a carbon fiber tube with structural endcaps.

This design, the DeepFlight Challenger, would be piloted by also-a-billionaire Richard Branson but was determined to be suitable only for a single dive, not the repeated uses that had been planned as part of Virgin Oceanic service. This was known in 2014.
posted by meowzilla at 6:16 PM on June 22, 2023 [12 favorites]

At least if you're rich, the world knows your name when you die.

Deportee
posted by Big Al 8000 at 6:35 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

via Twitter: Here's the late CEO talking about how the tourism was a front for deep-sea mining.
posted by armacy at 6:38 PM on June 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

Here's the late CEO talking about how the tourism was a front for deep-sea mining.

That's ironic. Traditionally, deep-sea mining is a front for recovering sunken submarines.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 6:46 PM on June 22, 2023 [18 favorites]

The looming threat of deep-sea mining
posted by Artw at 6:57 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Musée des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
posted by kirkaracha at 7:22 PM on June 22, 2023 [26 favorites]

It is very sad that everyone died, but it is a small blessing that they died very, very quickly. It is kind of a scandal that the Navy, and likely Ocean's Gate, knew that the sub had imploded very soon after the event, and let the families languish in uncertainty.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:27 PM on June 22, 2023

Where did you see the navy knew right away? I was under the impression they found the anomaly when reviewing their data with an eye to that time frame.
posted by JenMarie at 7:29 PM on June 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

https://fox59.com/news/national-world/us-navy-detected-what-was-likely-titan-implosion-on-sunday-official-says/
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:32 PM on June 22, 2023

Could be a combination of that AND a delay while getting approval to release the information. You can't just give out data from highly-classified sources without someone considering any side effects of that. But I would think that would be a matter of hours or A day, not multiple days. And the Coast Guard may have gotten the controlled information, not for release, before it was actually released to the public.
posted by ctmf at 7:34 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

That the raw data was detected on Sunday does not mean that they analyzed what they had found sufficiently to make the identification on Sunday.
posted by Earthtopus at 7:35 PM on June 22, 2023 [32 favorites]

Detected can have multiple meanings. The equipment might of detected it but the humans might not have identified the meaning until today. The ocean is loud.
posted by interogative mood at 7:36 PM on June 22, 2023 [13 favorites]

This design, the DeepFlight Challenger, would be piloted by also-a-billionaire Richard Branson but was determined to be suitable only for a single dive, not the repeated uses that had been planned as part of Virgin Oceanic service. This was known in 2014.

To be fair, this was for diving to far greater depths, 5500 to over 10000 meters.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 7:36 PM on June 22, 2023

without someone considering any side effects of that

For instance, if it's guessable how much noise the implosion would have made, now you've just given away a minimum bound for how sensitive our instrumentation in that area is. They might not want to do that, unless that's already known information.
posted by ctmf at 7:45 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

The looming threat of deep-sea mining

I think that Peter Weller might have similar sentiments about the Tri-Oceanic Mining corporation (Note: video contains scenes of deep-sea peril. And Ernie Hudson).
posted by JDC8 at 7:47 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

My guess is that the Navy did communicate with the families of the people on board with instructions to keep it under wraps. That might be how James Cameron knew — word got out to the deep sea diving community. They had to do a search anyway just in case, and they figured it was better not to tell the public the search was pointless until the 'timer' had run out.
posted by cosmic owl at 8:02 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Or the USN didn't detect it but want their enemies to think they did #Vizzini
posted by Rumple at 8:08 PM on June 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

During World War 2 the US used the implosion of small metal spheres to locate pilots who crashed in the ocean. We have a lot of expertise listening for these kind of events over long distances.
posted by interogative mood at 8:08 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also looking at the language in grumpybear69's link
- The Coast Guard did know about what the Navy knew, but it wasn't enough because
- sounds "consistent with an implosion" implies it wasn't an obvious "dang, something just imploded" but more of a "for other reasons I think something might have imploded, and that could very well be this right here on the tape"

But then look at the rest of the language, "in the general vicinity of where the TITAN submersible was operating" but "general vicinity" is carefully vague. That went through some approval before getting released.
posted by ctmf at 8:09 PM on June 22, 2023 [9 favorites]

We have a lot of expertise listening for these kind of events over long distances.

Sure. But you have to know what you’re listening for. Those Navy systems are primarily listening for enemy submarines and other large craft, and anything else gets filtered. I suspect the capture of the sound of the implosion wasn’t discovered until someone went back and checked the records from Sunday. I truly doubt the Navy knew they had definitely captured the specific implosion of a relatively tiny craft the moment, or even the day, it happened.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:25 PM on June 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

It is kind of a scandal that the Navy, and likely Ocean's Gate, knew that the sub had imploded very soon after the event, and let the families languish in uncertainty.

I think people are over interpreting what the Navy means when they say something like "detected an acoustic signature consistent with an implosion on Sunday in the general area where the Titan submersible was diving in the North Atlantic when it lost communication with its support ship"

It's not like they got a pop up alert that said "Titan implosion." Acoustic signatures are extremely difficult to parse and locate so 'general area' may basically mean 'north Atlantic'. And consistent with means just that - it's not definitive. Just like the reports that someone was detecting banging on the hour / half hour - these things are incredibly noisy and the desire to see something in the data likely caused someone to overinterpret some artifacts - it's entirely possible to pluck stuff out of the data once you know you're supposed to be looking for it, even if it's not really there.

Think about the reverse reaction - the Navy says "we heard what sounded like an implosion around there, around then" so they call off the SAR and in 6 months the Titan washes ashore in Ireland. Proceeding as if there was still a chance of rescue until they had solid confirmation of the craft's destruction was the only responsible thing to do.

* I'm a former Anti-submarine Navy pilot so some of this is parochial but I've also participated in SAR operations where the likelihood of survival was very low but we searched for days because that's what you'd hope someone would do for you if you ended up in the water. Also, I have no knowledge of the specific system that detected this and am assuming it basically works like every other sonar system in the Navy / world.
posted by macfly at 8:28 PM on June 22, 2023 [74 favorites]

Why would they tell the families but not make it public. Literally no one cared more than the families.
posted by JenMarie at 8:28 PM on June 22, 2023

Because the families would support doing a search no matter how low the likelihood the sub was still intact, while the public would call it a waste of time and resources if it seemed like there was sufficient evidence of implosion, and that reaction could get in the way of the search they were going to do no matter what. Again, I'm guessing, but my feeling is that they didn't want the people who were searching to think it was a fait accompli.
posted by cosmic owl at 8:31 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Okay. That seems like a huge stretch to me; if the debris weren’t found today I doubt people would question a continued search for the wreckage or whatever. But it’s not a hill I’d die on.
posted by JenMarie at 8:33 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think the families deserve to know, and getting them a special "need to know" approval would be quicker than completely declassifying the info. Especially if you knew it was going to be released pretty soon anyway. You just ask them to keep it to themselves for a while.

In fact, we often hold fatality information from the public UNTIL the families are briefed. Similar concept.
posted by ctmf at 8:35 PM on June 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

I mean maybe waiting on declassification I could buy. That’s vastly different than being worried about public criticism for using resources.
posted by JenMarie at 8:42 PM on June 22, 2023

It's probably less that, and more you don't want them to find out from the newspaper.
posted by ctmf at 8:44 PM on June 22, 2023

Think about the reverse reaction - the Navy says "we heard what sounded like an implosion around there, around then" so they call off the SAR and in 6 months the Titan washes ashore in Ireland. Proceeding as if there was still a chance of rescue until they had solid confirmation of the craft's destruction was the only responsible thing to do.

The real life "failure is not an option" speech for the Apollo 13 was exactly this. It was not a locker room pep talk. It was informing everyone at NASA that as long as Apollo 13's crew was still alive, all efforts had to be made to secure their safe return, and that no NASA workers were going to prepare for, or discuss, handling the crew's deaths.
posted by ocschwar at 8:45 PM on June 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

Oh right, but that wouldn’t explain a five day delay. I definitely get that families are notified first so they don’t hear the bad news from the media.
posted by JenMarie at 8:46 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

"an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion" does not mean an implosion. There's a lot of noises that propagate though the ocean (eg, whatever that banging sound was.) The debris field was what cemented the loss of life.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 8:49 PM on June 22, 2023 [10 favorites]

Someone in the US military approved spending maybe upwards of $100 million on a search and rescue mission for folks they almost certainly knew were dead, but the knowledge came from a technological capability they determined would best not publicly acknowledged? Operation: Mincemeat comes to mind.
posted by MarchHare at 9:00 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Someone in the US military approved spending maybe upwards of $100 million

Even presuming the Navy was certain of the detection, which seems unlikely, the cost estimates you see for these kinds of operations are not like a receipt tape. They're based in large part in the notional expense for flight-hours and man-hours and etc., and even so I'm not sure where you'd get $100M for some ships to put out to sea, which is what ships do, and for patrol planes to fly, which is what patrol planes do, and for people already in the USN or the USCG to go to work, etc.

Look what just happened with US Ukraine aid: the government noticed that it had erroneously (but perhaps conveniently at the time) inflated the amount of aid delivered roughly twofold, by using replacement value to account for what was delivered, rather than the depreciated value of the surplus. Presto, there's room for billions of additional aid under the authorized cap.

Some stuff was airlifted in a hurry. The fuel for that, and extra maintenance associated with those cargo flights were probably the largest wasted cost. Maybe the sonobuoys if those aren't recovered.

We have no idea if Oceangate or anyone else (like the families involved) agreed to compensate any of the commercial concerns involved.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:08 PM on June 22, 2023 [9 favorites]

I think it was more that if the information were more definitely dispositive, they would have gotten it released faster. But since it wasn't enough to call off the search in good conscience, there was no rush. (To release it to the public, my understanding is the Coast Guard did know)

I'm just guessing, of course, I wasn't there. But being qualified in Emergency Command Centers for big incidents, doing a lot of hairy drills (and a few real incidents) sitting right near the public affairs group, I know those decisions aren't simple.
posted by ctmf at 9:11 PM on June 22, 2023 [9 favorites]

Is the inevitable investigation into the the company going to be called OceanGategate?
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:21 PM on June 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

Titangate, we've already had a Gaetzgate in the US and a Gategate in the UK.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:27 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

We seem to be heading towards OceanGate truther territory here with speculation about who pays for this, what the Navy knew and when they knew it, contemplating that this is some deception operation like Operation Mincemeat.
Good grief.
posted by interogative mood at 9:30 PM on June 22, 2023 [13 favorites]

I mean obviously "visiting the wreck of the Titanic" is a cover story. Who does that?
posted by ctmf at 9:33 PM on June 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

Maybe back up and consider what "truther" refers to, scroll up, reread, and then log off for a while.

The Navy really does try to avoid disclosing classified shit, that's routine. No conspiracies needed. Speculating about cost is reasonable, now that it's all over.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:36 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

In searching Twitter for something else I stumbled on a rich seam of cranks claiming that Biden made the navy sit on the news of the implosion so the resulting media circus around possible survivors and search would deflect attention from coverage of Hunter... I'm afraid every story now has "truthers" busily fitting it into their conspiracy theories, within minutes of it breaking.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:04 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Coast Guard operations budget is 9.62 billion for 2023. I’m sure they have many ways to cover the costs of this without needing supplemental funding. SAR is one of their big missions and it isn’t very often they get to have their people do a real world operation for a submarine. They will probably just cancel or defer a training exercise to cover what ever variance this was over normal daily operations costs.
posted by interogative mood at 10:13 PM on June 22, 2023 [10 favorites]

One summer day in 1989, when I was ten, my dad and I went to see a double feature of The Abyss and Leviathan. That was a good day. I love you, dad.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 10:26 PM on June 22, 2023 [22 favorites]

I'm still waiting for the sequel: Son of Abyss.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:34 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Fun fact: I first saw The Abyss on a submerged Trident submarine. Also Crimson Tide, which wasn't supposed to be a comedy, but...

I guess everyone hates how Hollywood mangles their profession.
posted by ctmf at 10:37 PM on June 22, 2023 [15 favorites]

RIP to the teen who died trying to bond with his dad.

As to the cost, when something like this happens, the resultant attempts including mistakes expand our understanding of how to improve S&R. That has value.
posted by cyndigo at 10:41 PM on June 22, 2023 [18 favorites]

New York Times, quoting two anonymous "senior Navy officials":

Because there was no visual or other conclusive evidence of a catastrophic failure, one of the officials said, it would have been “irresponsible” to immediately assume the five passengers were dead, and the search was ordered to continue even though the outlook appeared grim.

posted by cheshyre at 11:32 PM on June 22, 2023 [15 favorites]

MarchHare: Operation: Mincemeat comes to mind.

Utterly incomparable, both as the actions performed and by whom, and the reasons for it.

I'm seriously baffled by your comparison, and I think you really mean another operation of a somewhat similar name.
posted by Stoneshop at 12:54 AM on June 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

I mean, of course you continue the search while there’s even a theoretical chance of rescue? It’s what anyone in any of the crews searching would expect. And I don’t think it’s reasonable to value judgements as to who you should or shouldn’t spend time and effort on. On which, fuck the powers that be that don’t do the same when it’s refugee ships.
posted by boogieboy at 1:24 AM on June 23, 2023 [14 favorites]

I'm just some guy on the Internet whose expertise in designing submersibles is indistinguishable from none, but when James Cameron talks about the unsoundness of using carbon fibre composite as a hull material ^ I find myself nodding along in vigorous agreement.

Solids are, to a very good first approximation, incompressible. Apply a force to a solid and its shape will change much more than its total volume does.

Consider a familiar hollow solid: a toy balloon. As you blow it up, its wall gets thinner. Let it down, and the wall gets thicker again. The shape changes a lot, but the total volume of rubber changes very little.

A submersible hull has a similar geometry, though designed to work in compression rather than tension. Any loading that reduces the overall size of a hull must increase its wall thickness accordingly. Obviously a hull is made of a much stiffer material than balloon rubber, but that doesn't change what the shape does, only the extent to which it does it.

Composite materials are strong because the reinforcing fibres are very stiff. But because they are fibres - long, narrow shapes - that stiffness is much more apparent in tension than in compression. In compression any individual fibre will want to buckle, and in a composite material a fibre's resistance to buckling depends heavily on how well supported it is by the matrix that surrounds it.

In a composite hull pretty much every reinforcing fibre is going to be in compression, and it seems to me that the thickening of the walls in response to external pressure is going to decrease the support that individual fibres have against buckling. It also seems to me that whenever a fibre does buckle, it might also de-bond from its local matrix and create a microcrack at the buckling point. I would expect to see the number of such microcracks increase each time a composite hull is subjected to pressure cycling, and for the hull to become progressively weaker overall as a result.

I would expect a structure as insanely stiff as a submersible's hull to be way less strong than when first built by the time enough microcracks have grown and merged to start making audible crackling noises as the material deforms under compression. And I've watched enough Hydraulic Press Channel videos to make me very skeptical about any warning system based on detecting such noises proving early enough to be worth spit.

As Cameron said, non-homogenous materials are really hard to do simulated stress response analysis on; actual real-world physical testing is the only practicable way to gain confidence in their safety margins. And charging members of the general public a quarter of a million dollars each to risk their lives as participants in that kind of real-world physical test is an egregious ethical failure.

That poor bloody kid. He was given so little choice.
posted by flabdablet at 1:41 AM on June 23, 2023 [46 favorites]

The ship/sub communication logs and delay in contacting the coast guard are going to come under scrutiny. Was it imposed by OceanGate? Were they reaching out to the deep sea community? Given that they couldn't have predicted where the sub would surface it seems sensible to have aircraft up as soon as possible so the delay is baffling.
posted by epo at 3:57 AM on June 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

I agree, epo. As usual the cranks (on Twitter) are pointing at the military conducting a taxpayer funded effort as the source of a conspiracy instead of the private company who waited hours and hours to reach out for assistance. If there’s any likely conspiracy at this point, it’s OceanGate potentially knowing there was a catastrophic incident and delaying notifying the Coast Guard so they could consult with attorneys first on how to handle.

There is some frustration on my part again that a device built shoddily (by all accounts) with the designer bemoaning regulations or unnecessary safety mechanisms now creating a scenario where the Coast Guard and others have to put their lives at risk to search for them. I am glad we have a Coast Guard and agencies who do this - they are skilled at these missions, and it’s necessary - but frustrated at incidents where good public servants need to risk their lives because of arrogant anti-regulatory / anti-safety narcissists.
posted by glaucon at 4:38 AM on June 23, 2023 [25 favorites]

In my social media wanderings about this unfortunate and tragic incident, I'm seeing dudes go full "Alpha male" in re: to the poor kid who didn't want to go but did to please his father. I'm like, bish you won't even go to therapy what makes you think you'd stand up to your dad get your issues sorted
posted by Kitteh at 4:46 AM on June 23, 2023 [35 favorites]

'There is no excuse for what happened here': Director James Cameron on Titanic sub tragedy (ABC News on YouTube, 9m5s)
posted by flabdablet at 5:24 AM on June 23, 2023 [9 favorites]

Fun fact: I first saw The Abyss on a submerged Trident submarine.

Let me think, the perflourocarbon scuba tanks, that water tentacle that morphs into a human face and the bends-be-damned instant no problemo surfacing of the alien ship all drove me crazy -- and you?

As for The Crimson Tide, I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and it was so scary at the time. It became even scarier decades later when I found out we came closest to Armageddon when the Navy started dropping depth charges on the B-59, which had one torpedo with a nuclear warhead about which no American topside had a clue -- which was almost launched because the crew aboard equally had no idea what was going on above and were thinking World War III was on. And we were saved by Vasliy Arkhipov swallowing his launch key.

Which was the back story behind The Crimson Tide. Arkipov along with Stanislav Petrov made it twice that Soviet military officers saved humanity. A thought which is scary scary to think about, given Putin's tactical nuclear warhead bluster of these latter days. We can only hope that if a third time comes, it is equally a charm.

Man, you were a submariner -- you so have my respect. And a million questions for another time or twenty.
posted by y2karl at 7:25 AM on June 23, 2023 [17 favorites]

It's not a sound that is detected.. it's not silence followed by a boom.
The sensors constantly detect a multitude of sounds. Every surface ship, every piece of machinery, every whale, dolphin etc.
Then every refraction , every reflection of each individual sound combines together.
That total sound is what is measured
Extracting that wanted piece of sound , that desired piece of information from the cascade of sounds is difficult and time consuming.
And highly classified.
posted by yyz at 7:28 AM on June 23, 2023 [18 favorites]

Fun fact: I first saw The Abyss on a submerged Trident submarine.

Is that like how they watch The Thing at the South Pole on the first night after the winter closure?

I know that there are a few WhatsApp groups where information has circulated before it is public, including one with Explorer's Club people in it and one of my old Dubai tech diving groups which has people in it who knew Hamish. It is possible that there are things that James Cameron has been told or seen that are not public yet.
posted by atrazine at 7:48 AM on June 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

It is possible that there are things that James Cameron has been told or seen that are not public yet.

From the ABC interview linked above, he is familiar with the filament-wound CFRP design of Titan, and had previous knowledge of the Virgin Oceanic DeepFlight Challenger which tried a similar approach and was determined (through the thorough analysis and testing that was never done for Titan) to only be capable of making a single dive to the bottom of the Challenger Deep before the material properties were degraded below safe limits. While he admits it was speculation, as the Challenger Deep has much higher pressures than the Abyssal Plain where the Titanic is located, it would not be surprising that after repeated deep dives that Titan would fail in the same way predicted for the DeepFlight Challenger design.

So - his existing knowledge of the sub design and deep sea operations would be enough to make an informed guess about the fate of Titan, and he did not necessarily need an inside line.
posted by cardboard at 8:10 AM on June 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

Cameron is also quoted earlier in this thread, saying: "People in the community were very concerned about this sub. A number of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company, saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that it needed to be certified."
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 8:18 AM on June 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

James Cameron thinks the authorities didn't say what they knew (Times Radio)

He also isn't claiming they were ascending in this clip.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 8:40 AM on June 23, 2023

Cameron gave a bit more info on the timeline in this interview on CNN with Anderson Cooper.

Specifically he learned of the implosion noise on Monday. He suspected it was an implosion from the outset.
posted by interogative mood at 8:40 AM on June 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

The real life "failure is not an option" speech for the Apollo 13 was exactly this. It was not a locker room pep talk. It was informing everyone at NASA that as long as Apollo 13's crew was still alive, all efforts had to be made to secure their safe return, and that no NASA workers were going to prepare for, or discuss, handling the crew's deaths.

It'd be irresponsible not to prepare for or discuss these kind of contingencies internally.

You're just wrong, there was no "real life" Failure Is Not An Option speech, it was literally locker room pep talk just invented for a 1995 movie.
posted by Sunflowers Beneath the Snow at 8:52 AM on June 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Hey everyone, if you are quoting someone in this thread it’s helpful to include a link in case others want to go to the original comment for more context or whatever. Thanks.
posted by JenMarie at 8:55 AM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

From the interview with Ballard and Cameron, it's pretty clear that they didn't have any specific information about a catastrophic failure other than they surmised that when coms were lost along with all of the other tracking information about the submersible, a catastrophic failure was the best and only explanation. Nthing the comments above about the acoustic info - figuring out what that was would've taken time and until there was conclusive evidence (the debris field) making conclusions like this public would've been irresponsible (so said Cameron).
posted by bluesky43 at 8:58 AM on June 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

you won't even go to therapy what makes you think you'd stand up to your dad get your issues sorted

I'm with you on this one.

When I was 19, my father (may he rest in peace) had already been out of my life for more than a decade, having parted ways with my mother when I was about 4.

Still, even with that estrangement and even at 19, when we're all supposedly at our most rebellious w/r/t our parents, even if he had shown up out of the blue inviting me to join him in something that utterly terrified me, I still would have literally jumped at the chance to spend time with him, dangers and "sigma grindset" be damned.

May they all rest easy, especially young Mr. Dawood.
posted by lord_wolf at 9:04 AM on June 23, 2023 [20 favorites]

Titan sub CEO dismissed safety warnings as "baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone'," in emails seen by BBC

Warnings over the safety of OceanGate's Titan submersible were repeatedly dismissed by the CEO of the company, email exchanges with a leading deep sea exploration specialist show.

In messages seen by the BBC, Rob McCallum told OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush that he was potentially putting his clients at risk and urged him to stop using the sub until it had been classified by an independent body.

Mr Rush responded that he was "tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation".

The tense exchange ended after OceanGate's lawyers threatened legal action, Mr McCallum said.

"I think you are potentially placing yourself and your clients in a dangerous dynamic," he wrote to the OceanGate boss in March 2018. "In your race to [the] Titanic you are mirroring that famous catch cry: 'She is unsinkable'".

In the messages, Mr Rush expresses frustration with the criticism of Titan's safety measures, writing in one email: "We have heard the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone' way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult."

posted by bitteschoen at 9:21 AM on June 23, 2023 [15 favorites]

In the messages, Mr Rush expresses frustration with the criticism of Titan's safety measures, writing in one email: "We have heard the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone' way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult."

I am sorry that Mr Rush is dead, but I am also sorry that there is never going to be a cross-examination in court where he is taken to a copy of that email and asked to read it out.
posted by Major Clanger at 9:24 AM on June 23, 2023 [44 favorites]

"We have heard the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone' way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult."

I solemnly vow to be more personally insulting to those in positions of power.
posted by phunniemee at 9:25 AM on June 23, 2023 [34 favorites]

I am personally annoyed that this shitgibbon was hoist on his own petard.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:31 AM on June 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

I am personally annoyed that this shitgibbon was hoist on his own petard.

It was the exact opposite of each element of being hoist on a petard, and yet, he still very much was.
posted by Etrigan at 9:36 AM on June 23, 2023 [11 favorites]

I was speculating earlier in the thread about why the Navy didn't release the intel about the implosion-seeming noise they detected. I understand that speculation can be irresponsible, but I don't think I was engaging in truther-ism. I think it was the right call not to release the information until the search was over, whether it was ended by the timer running out or by finding the debris field. I wasn't trying to imply anything about the search being a deception operation, and I don't feel it was. I didn't make any normative judgments. I didn't see anyone else do so either. Calling it truther-ism is very uncharitable.
posted by cosmic owl at 9:47 AM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Still, even with that estrangement and even at 19, when we're all supposedly at our most rebellious w/r/t our parents, even if he had shown up out of the blue inviting me to join him in something that utterly terrified me, I still would have literally jumped at the chance to spend time with him, dangers and "sigma grindset" be damned.

Same. I have a very complicated relationship with my estranged father and I would have been more likely to do something this foolish for the sake of salvaging our relationship or spending time with him. I am currently with a new therapist and we are unpacking that shit so I can stop feeling that way.

/apologies for derail, end of derail
posted by Kitteh at 9:47 AM on June 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

James Cameron thinks the authorities didn't say what they knew

That's kind of a weird interview where he seems to denigrate/dismiss the search.

The authorities probably suspected what Cameron also suspected, but absent confirming evidence I don't know how you just 'not search' based on suspicion however well informed.

Much of the initial search seemed to be surface (whether looking for an intact vessel or surface debris). Of course they found it quickly at the bottom when they looked for it, but getting that equipment there was not immediate.

Anyway, pat on the head and a cookie to Cameron for being right I guess?
posted by mazola at 9:55 AM on June 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

It’s both the obvious conclusion and the search was kind of obligated.

I can see being annoyed at all the excitement about the knocking and talk of the days of air supply which, in retrospect, seem quite fanciful.

Mainly the person to be annoyed at is not anyone who did the searching or revealed/did not reveal that information is the person who set up the obligation by going down in their janky submarine which was clearly on the edge of disaster every single time.
posted by Artw at 10:01 AM on June 23, 2023 [9 favorites]

Rush's arrogance and refusal to entertain doubt should remove any possible defence against a negligence and possible manslaughter charge. The bollocks about calling them 'crew' will not even last a millisecond in court, nor will it be shown that passengers were fully informed about the risks.

Oceangate should be stripped of all value and its officers reduced to penury to pay damages to the family of the victims and to repay rescue costs. Which is why I would be very curious about the levels of Oceangate's assets and finances before and after the Sunday morning descent.
posted by epo at 10:01 AM on June 23, 2023 [12 favorites]

should remove any possible defence against a negligence and possible manslaughter charge

You can't charge ANY corporation with manslaughter in the US because you would need a federal law on the books that says there is even such a thing as federal corporate manslaughter, and you can't charge dead people with crimes.
posted by Sunflowers Beneath the Snow at 10:12 AM on June 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

(habeas corpus sez any person charged with a crime be brought into court and it's implied like not a corpse)
posted by Sunflowers Beneath the Snow at 10:17 AM on June 23, 2023

Gonna need the sieve the entire ocean for that one.
posted by Artw at 10:19 AM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

The oceangate.com website has gone offline.

Im guessing the lawyers have started calling, the last cached version includes a job opportunity for a Submersible Pilot/Marine Technician: "Can work autonomously with limited daily supervision",
"Have a positive attitude, are energetic, and have a good sense of humor"
posted by Lanark at 10:22 AM on June 23, 2023 [10 favorites]

In the various James Cameron interviews linked above, he states that the craft was found on the floor below where the vessel lost contact (ie exactly where they should have expected to find it). Is there any info of why the debris wasn't found sooner? It seems obvious that that would be the first place to look, if anything, to see if the vessel was tangled in something below.

Is it that the 'water column' size is still quite large, and the debris was scattered further than expected, or did they not look there, or did they not have the right vessels for searching? What were they using to search with? All ROVs?
posted by hydra77 at 10:26 AM on June 23, 2023

their other site is still around: oceangateexpeditions.com. Including, mind you, the "titanic expedition."

the price does not include travel or personal insurance.
posted by i used to be someone else at 10:28 AM on June 23, 2023

The treatment of corporations in law (not just the US) is a disgrace. Rush may be dead but Oceangate wasn't just him however much the remaining personnel will claim it was.
posted by epo at 10:28 AM on June 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

hydra77: What were they using to search with? All ROVs?

ROVs capable of working at 4km down arrived on site on Wednesday. Also, it has been described as searching in a dark cathedral using a small flashlight.
posted by Stoneshop at 10:35 AM on June 23, 2023 [10 favorites]

In the various James Cameron interviews linked above, he states that the craft was found on the floor below where the vessel lost contact (ie exactly where they should have expected to find it). Is there any info of why the debris wasn't found sooner?

ROVs were not initially on scene. It sounds like they quickly found debris when they became available.

Here's a timeline for reference. Seems like ROVs were diverted to investigate 'banging' on Wed, which make sense if you think there might be a chance for a positive result?
posted by mazola at 10:35 AM on June 23, 2023

Consider what 'corporate manslaughter' would enable. There isn't supposed to be a liability shield for that, and it would only dial up the folly of equating entities with 'people.' That liability is supposed to stick to the actual human people responsible for it, as a further deterrent, with additional liability for the corporation. Rather than offering up the corporation for a 'criminal' death penalty, which is indistinguishable from dissolution in bankruptcy.

Corporations can be sued for wrongful death, which is probably what the comment intended.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:35 AM on June 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

one of my favorite extremely relevant buttons right by another of my favorite extremely relevant buttons (mefi cabal)

get your own
posted by phunniemee at 10:39 AM on June 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

A few interesting things which will probably come to light in the aftermath

- How did Rush manage to convince Paul-Henri Nargeolet, an explorer also known as "Mr. Titanic," with scads of experience (35 dives to the wreck according to his wikipedia page, though some of these were probably via an ROV), that the Titan sub was safe enough to risk the lives of paying passengers, to say nothing of his own life?

- What was the work environment like at Oceangate? Did it start to become cult-like?
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 10:41 AM on June 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

"Have a positive attitude, are energetic, and have a good sense of humor"

Must be able to climb ladders, tolerate confined spaces, lift up to 50 pounds, and/or withstand pressures up to 600,000 psi
posted by ctmf at 10:44 AM on June 23, 2023 [23 favorites]

I'm guessing that for Nargeolet, this was the only viable option to visit the Titanic.

They may also have paid him a lot of money to be the "celebrity" guide for the rich passengers.
posted by meowzilla at 10:47 AM on June 23, 2023 [8 favorites]

ROVs capable of working at 4km down arrived on site on Wednesday.

So yeah, that makes me think: even if I want to do tourism with a manned submersible, how much cooler would it be if I also had a ROV go down with me, both to command from the inside to get a better look, and also to record an external view of me doing the thing? Souvenir video.

(which would also be controllable from the surface to search if anything happened, and act as a kind of flight data recorder of all the events)
posted by ctmf at 10:49 AM on June 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

- How did Rush manage to convince Paul-Henri Nargeolet, an explorer also known as "Mr. Titanic," with scads of experience (35 dives to the wreck according to his wikipedia page, though some of these were probably via an ROV), that the Titan sub was safe enough to risk the lives of paying passengers, to say nothing of his own life?

This is what I have been wondering more than anything. Doesn't make sense.
posted by ericthegardener at 10:59 AM on June 23, 2023 [9 favorites]

How did Rush manage to convince Paul-Henri Nargeolet...

I’d have to guess a check with many, many zeros on it. I can’t see any other possibility, given Nargolet’s experience.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:15 AM on June 23, 2023

~Have a positive attitude, are energetic, and have a good sense of humor"

~Must be able to climb ladders, tolerate confined spaces, lift up to 50 pounds, and/or withstand pressures up to 600,000 psi

Must be an experienced XBox gamer.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:17 AM on June 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

if I also had a ROV go down with me

The Russian venture using the Mir submersibles went down as a pair, as you would diving.

Rush didn't even want a lowerable hydrophone on the ship, so he probably would have insisted such a ROV be controlled from the Titan.
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:25 AM on June 23, 2023

(which would also be controllable from the surface to search if anything happened, and act as a kind of flight data recorder of all the events)

Their surface vessel not being able to maintain comms with their sub probably also translates into them not being able to operate a ROV, which should probably also be a thing raising multiple flags.
posted by Artw at 11:42 AM on June 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

Sub Brief yt cued to Rush's comms choices [19m10s if the link doesn't work]
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:52 AM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

The fact that Rush believed his own bullshit enough to go down in that thing multiple times is one of the most incredible things to me.
posted by Mavri at 11:55 AM on June 23, 2023 [14 favorites]

Artw: them not being able to operate a ROV

If with the 'them' here you also mean the surface vessel: losing contact with one doesn't necessarily mean losing contact with the other as well. Especially since the Titan was, by order of Rush, not fitted with more than a single, low-speed comms channel to transmit and receive direction instructions. So the Titan's comms equipment going on the blink would mean loss of contact, and with it loss of the sub's status.

A companion ROV could have much more, and more robust, means of keeping in contact with the support vessel.
posted by Stoneshop at 11:55 AM on June 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

"I've stayed quiet on the whole lost submarine thing since the beginning, because I am not an expert on underwater search and rescue. However, now that there's stuff about underwater acoustics, this is a bit more in my wheelhouse. 1/n" [Twitter thread]
posted by ctmf at 11:56 AM on June 23, 2023 [13 favorites]

The fact that Rush believed his own bullshit enough to go down in that thing multiple times is one of the most incredible things to me

And in so doing, convinced himself and others that it would always be so and everyone else were just being jealous whiny-heinies.
posted by Kitteh at 11:57 AM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

I hope the passengers didn't have time to realize. But I hope Rush did.

Why did he think the surface wanted to "chat too much"? There's an entire protocol for comms that -- okay, I'm going to wait to have time to watch Sub Brief.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:02 PM on June 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Pelagic Research Services has issued a statement:

PELAGIC RESEARCH SERVICES ROV ODYSSEUS 6K DISCOVERS TITAN DEBRIS FIELD
AND CONTINUES RECOVERY EFFORT

PELAGIC RESEARCH SERVICES’ ROV, Odysseus 6K, was immediately deployed from Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic within the rescue viability window early Thursday morning. Odysseus was the subsea asset that first located the debris field referenced by the U.S. Coast Guard.
Working in conjunction with OceanGate on the ship Deep Energy, which had the lifting capacity to bring the Titan submersible to the surface, the Odysseus was rigged specifically for a rescue operation.

PRS was contacted by OceanGate on Sunday evening, June 18, and was fully mobilized with all deepsea assets and crew of nine ready for deployment from Buffalo Niagara International Airport within 20 hours. Three U.S Air Force C-17s transported all assets to St. John’s, Newfoundland by Tuesday afternoon for immediate deployment aboard the Horizon Arctic.

PRS was instructed to start searching within the vicinity of the last-known location of the Titan. Once Odysseus was able to reach the ocean floor the debris field was located not long after
posted by yyz at 12:04 PM on June 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

I've been seeing the theory on Twitter that tourism wasn't the primary goal, he was just fundraising for some sort of deep oil exploration on-the-cheap research. I'm not sure what source that's coming from though, anyone know?
posted by ctmf at 12:05 PM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

ctmf: https://www.fastcompany.com/40406673/the-man-who-wants-to-send-us-to-the-bottom-of-the-ocean
posted by applemeat at 12:07 PM on June 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

I think it is great that there will always be people designing and building deep sea subs for people, but…I bet investing in better ROV tech could really offer better experiences faster and cheaper. In a sub you have limited field of view, distortion through thick plexiglass, etc. You can probably have ROVs with much better visual quality, wider field of view, etc. You could create an amazing viewing experience, have a live expert, and even let someone pilot the ROV from a first person view. They could even have the experience of going out on the ship with the crew. If you want, you could do it from a comfortable chair, or you could sit on the floor and have someone put a metal trashcan over you so it feels more real.
posted by snofoam at 12:14 PM on June 23, 2023 [11 favorites]

There's a chance to test your idea snofoam.
Beginning June 25 there is a live stream of ROV expedition on the west of Vancouver Island
Various locations, deepest 2600 meters . Some hydrothermal vents etc.

Ocean enthusiasts all over the world can remotely join the deep-sea exploration and see this underwater world illuminated by remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) Hercules and Atalanta streaming live 24/7. Viewers will also have a topside view to watch the dive mobilizations, and the opportunity to connect directly with the team through livestream events.

here's a link to the expedition details

posted by yyz at 12:25 PM on June 23, 2023 [9 favorites]

i mean, there are detailed 3d scans of the titanic already

and with ar/vr technology is getting better, depending on the data, it could possibly be adapted to an experience
posted by i used to be someone else at 12:28 PM on June 23, 2023

Can I revisit a question I’ve had this entire time: How in the hell do you see anything of value anyways from Titan’s porthole at depth? It seems to me you would not be able to see much at all.
posted by glaucon at 12:36 PM on June 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

There has been enjoyable live-streaming from Nautilus and maybe some NOAA stuff for years. The video quality can be great. I think we are on the brink of being able to experience this in a much more immersive way. I doubt I would pay to go deep on a submarine again, but I would love to do it virtually if it was a really refined experience.
posted by snofoam at 12:41 PM on June 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

It's kind of like asking, why go to a concert at the Hollywood bowl when you won't be able to see the stage, just the big TV screens? And the answer is, being *there* is part of the magic.

(Note this is not a defense of OceanGate or it's CEO. But I do understand the urge of people to climb Everest or dive to shipwrecks even if you would never catch me there. But providers of these experiences for money have an ethical obligation beyond any question of what is legal.)
posted by muddgirl at 12:45 PM on June 23, 2023 [15 favorites]

Yeah, I was going to build one of these submersibles, charge folks $250k to sit in it. We'll dump it in the ocean and go down a few hundred feet, wait about 90 minutes, then turn on the screen I installed in place of the porthole. No one will be any the wiser.
posted by hydra77 at 12:48 PM on June 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

It's kind of like asking, why go to a concert at the Hollywood bowl when you won't be able to see the stage, just the big TV screens? And the answer is, being *there* is part of the magic.

Yes, but it is a very different experience. At a concert you can look around you at thousands of fans or hear music at a much louder volume than you might play at home, etc. On a sub you are in a little ball and can only look through a window that might be pretty small. Of all the experiences where a virtual version could offer a lot of the benefits, I think deep sub is high on the list.
posted by snofoam at 12:50 PM on June 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

well, it turns out one wouldn't be able to see anything out of the porthole at all. it was only rated for 1300m.
posted by i used to be someone else at 12:52 PM on June 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

And the answer is, being *there* is part of the magic.

Well that mostly, but also the exclusive nature of it. Anyone can watch it on TV. If I'm a billionaire, I want to do things only a billionaire can do.
posted by ctmf at 12:52 PM on June 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

I had to throw out my script about this submarine simulator - YouTube. Tom Scott: "In an old mill in a remote corner of Italy, sits the Bathysphere Project at Explorandia: a submarine simulator that explores an actual, small pond. It might be the best homemade project I've ever seen."
posted by zengargoyle at 12:53 PM on June 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

but also the exclusive nature of it.

I think there are ways to do this, like doing a personalized experience where you are piloting a million dollar ROV and you have a celebrity guide. Like, maybe there are two ROVs and you are piloting one and James Cameron is doing the other one, or whatever. That would still be something unique you could brag about.
posted by snofoam at 12:58 PM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

If I'm a billionaire, I want to do things only a billionaire can do.

Like make sure the entire world is, for starters, food secure? I like the way you think!
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 12:58 PM on June 23, 2023 [25 favorites]

I'd probably start with medical debt in the US. Maybe buy people's house mortgages and just give them the house. As a hobby, among other more serious things. I'd probably do some silly things too, like learn to fly a plane even though I have no need of that and it's somewhat dangerous. You would not catch me doing things like experimental submersibles, wingsuits, or anythng that needs a "you'll probably die" waiver.
posted by ctmf at 1:07 PM on June 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

their other site is still around: oceangateexpeditions.com. Including, mind you, the "titanic expedition."

2023 Expedition
Currently underway
Inquire for available dates

posted by kirkaracha at 1:14 PM on June 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

PELAGIC RESEARCH SERVICES’ ROV, Odysseus 6K, was immediately deployed from

Well, there's your problem. You wanted to call Benthic Research Services for this one.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 1:20 PM on June 23, 2023 [17 favorites]

During a trip on board the Titan off the coast of the Bahamas in April 2019, Karl Stanley, an expert in submersibles, knew immediately that something was off: He heard a cracking noise that got only louder over the two hours it took for the submersible to plunge more than 12,000 feet.

[...]

In the April 2019 email to Mr. Rush, Mr. Stanley said the loud cracking sounds that they had heard during their dive “sounded like a flaw/defect in one area being acted on by the tremendous pressures and being crushed/damaged.” He wrote that the loud, cracking noise signaled there was “an area of the hull that is breaking down.”

Submersible Expert Raised Safety Concerns After 2019 Trip on Titan
posted by meowzilla at 1:21 PM on June 23, 2023 [10 favorites]

At Tokyo DisneySea they have a great version of the venerable 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea attraction with no water at all. This is a more recent version of the submarine attraction at Disneyland and the former 20,000 Leagues attraction at Walt Disney World.
posted by chrchr at 1:24 PM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Well that would be terrifying. You do sometimes hear noises like a house settling - the hull has to contract and expand, and fixtures and hangers don't just smoothly move, they kind of occasionally snap or jump. And everything's louder in an enclosed space. But wondering if that noise is the one - I guess that's what would make it exciting, like a haunted house. Except when you're right.

Which is probably why the ex-employee wanted to do NDT, checking for de-lamination and voids, etc.
posted by ctmf at 1:27 PM on June 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

So, all these industry experts and internal whistleblowers were saying the Titan was dangerous for years. Despite all their warnings, OceanGate refused to change their plans.
What could/should they have done to stop the Titan?

I'm not trying to blame anybody (besides Rush), but there are certainly other potential disasters* currently under development by private industry. If the companies won't be persuaded, where should other Cassandras turn to prevent future tragedies?

* disasters = projects which put lives and health at risk, rather than simply the bottom line
posted by cheshyre at 1:43 PM on June 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

On a sub you are in a little ball and can only look through a window that might be pretty small. Of all the experiences where a virtual version could offer a lot of the benefits, I think deep sub is high on the list.

And you can only see as far as the lights shine. It's not like you get down there and see a vast sunken ship, you see parts of a ship. It seems fundamentally different from an experience like a concert or climbing Everest. I don't doubt it's cool as hell, but virtual does seem comparable to looking at a limited field of view through a little window.
posted by Mavri at 1:45 PM on June 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

Holy shit I went to Eckerd College with Karl Stanley. He ran a pop up used textbook store on campus every quarter, and spent most of his college time building a small sub that he launched at our boat ramp into Frenchman's Creek, where our marine SAR team was based. He's been in the Caribbean running sub tours for years, if I'm not mistaken.
posted by Pantengliopoli at 2:06 PM on June 23, 2023 [9 favorites]

2023 Expedition
Currently underwayter

FTFY
posted by chavenet at 2:14 PM on June 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

My sub rides were with Karl in Roatan. He's more of a submersible expert than most people, but I think also mostly self-taught. I am pretty surprised he went down in the Titan, because he knows enough to be very skeptical about that design. But I guess he also really likes being deep under the ocean. I'm glad he didn't die on the Titan.
posted by snofoam at 2:19 PM on June 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

well, it turns out one wouldn't be able to see anything out of the porthole at all. it was only rated for 1300m.

Sorry, that is nonsense. It wouldn't suddenly turn opaque at 1301m down.

And it held up on previous dives, probably due to the safety margins it was designed with. The matter was simply that the manufacturer didn't test it for use at those depths, and thus wouldn't certify it for any deeper than 1300m.

Which basically means "if it breaks due to use beyond the certification depth you get to keep the pieces and don't come complaining."
posted by Stoneshop at 3:11 PM on June 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

TIL James Cameron is a prolific deep sea explorer, not just an Academy Award winning director.
posted by bendy at 3:12 PM on June 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

they had heard during their dive “sounded like a flaw/defect in one area being acted on by the tremendous pressures and being crushed/damaged.” He wrote that the loud, cracking noise signaled there was “an area of the hull that is breaking down.”

And they puttered on? That would have been about an hour before the guy with the torque wrench would need to pry my hands off Rush's elevator button(s).
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:12 PM on June 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

Even the ludicrously inappropriate name of 'Titan' for such a tiny vessel would have given me pause because it expresses identification with the wrecked ship, and of course its only possible resting place would be at that ship's side in the deep.

For what it’s worth, Titan is also the name of the doomed vessel in Morgan Robertson’s book Futility, a novel about a fictional 800-foot long British ocean liner that collides with an iceberg in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage one April night, with a staggering loss of life because of the lack of sufficient lifeboats. (Robertson, by the way, published the book 14 years before Titanic set sail.)
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:13 PM on June 23, 2023 [32 favorites]

Ricochet biscuit that parenthesis needs to be in bold/italic/blink.WTF!!!
posted by WaterAndPixels at 4:30 PM on June 23, 2023

In light of Robertson's prophecy and all the other echoes up and down the timeline, ricochet biscuit, Freudians might call the tragedy of the Titanic 'overdetermined'.

I don’t know what to call it.
posted by jamjam at 4:34 PM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

To be fair, I have never actually read Futility, but I understand he published a new edition in 1914, and also included with it a new short story called “Beyond the Spectrum” about a future war between the US and Japan, begun by a surprise attack by Japanese forces on American ships and concluding with the US using a new weapon called a “sun bomb” against Japan to force a surrender.

If he was ever interviewed about the whole Titan/Titanic thing, I have never come across his thoughts on it. He died in 1915.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:44 PM on June 23, 2023 [21 favorites]

Project Gutenberg: The Wreck of the Titan by Morgan Robertson, includes 3 other stories one of which is Beyond the Spectrum
posted by glonous keming at 4:50 PM on June 23, 2023 [11 favorites]

"Beyond the Spectrum" text.
posted by kirkaracha at 4:54 PM on June 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

I am totally fascinated by Morgan Robertson doing that and I meant to look it up and post it here, too. Thank you!
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:11 PM on June 23, 2023

i can't even:

Rush told Weissmann that "he had gotten the carbon fiber used to make the Titan at a big discount from Boeing because it was past its shelf life for use in airplanes," Weissmann wrote.
In his recollection, he asked Rush whether that was a problem, but he said he was told that the shelf-life dates "were set far before they had to be."

posted by cheshyre at 5:24 PM on June 23, 2023 [22 favorites]

wow I had never heard of Morgan Robertson or Futility before. that is REALLY weird. like, has someone combed all of his works for references to the future???
posted by supermedusa at 5:37 PM on June 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Every new bit of info about this Rush guy and how he operated just makes him look worse and worse.
posted by Pouteria at 5:37 PM on June 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

gotten the carbon fiber used to make the Titan at a big discount from Boeing because it was past its shelf life for use in airplanes

And then marketed that as some kind of collaboration with Boeing to bring aerospace magic to the stodgy mariners.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:38 PM on June 23, 2023 [8 favorites]

Jesus, this is turning into a farce. The discounted CF story tells me Project H.U.B.R.I.S. was gonna do what Project H.U.B.R.I.S. pretty much always does.
posted by tigrrrlily at 5:55 PM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Well it reached its tensile strength life, but not its compression strength life; so half-off maybe?
posted by achrise at 6:07 PM on June 23, 2023

CF, while expensive, isn't that expensive. Seems like a foolish place to skimp even if you are building a composite that is inches thick. Though the raw cloth generally has a shelf life measured in years. I wonder if what Rush actually bought was expired prepreg which does go bad relatively quickly, if stored above freezing it can expire in as little as four weeks.
posted by Mitheral at 6:31 PM on June 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

How much did he save, in the short run, by using carbon fiber rather than steel?
posted by sebastienbailard at 6:50 PM on June 23, 2023

Steel would be heavier, requiring external buoyancy from e.g. syntactic foam or the old low-tech way: barrels of gasoline. Gasoline works because it is lighter than water, incompressible, and cheap. But I think these days the foam is preferred.
posted by ryanrs at 6:58 PM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

A possible explanation for wanting to save weight is the transport costs of deployment. Fits in a shipping container, can be transported on a flatbed truck, maybe inside a larger cargo plane, easy. Which would make sense if the idea was to have a fleet that served oil and gas explorers. Cheaper to make, cheaper to send where they need to go. When they wear out, just make a new one... problem is the exploration co's didn't bite straight away so Rush had to keep re-using Titan and pivot to Titanic dives while he tried to get them on board.

(not my idea, I read this somewhere on Twitter last night, maybe Alexandra Erin)
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 7:11 PM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

The composite tube was used as an extension between the two titanium hemispheres to increase the cabin size and seat more paying crew members. If you look at other deep sea vehicles, they have a spherical pressure hull and more limited capacity.

Engineering structural analysis courses teach how cylinders are significantly weaker than spheres made of the same material - which probably drove the use of the strong but less reliable filament-wound carbon fibre instead of metal in the cylinder to compensate.
posted by cardboard at 8:29 PM on June 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

It was the source of novelty. Disruption, as it were.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:30 PM on June 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Not to mention making reliable joins between two very different materials (carbon fibre and titanium).
posted by Pouteria at 9:07 PM on June 23, 2023

You don't just screw them together?

If this hadn't resulted in loss of life and an international search, it would be comical.
posted by ctmf at 9:12 PM on June 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

I bet he could have made a hell of a narco sub, though.
posted by ryanrs at 9:37 PM on June 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

You don't just screw them together?

No, you use two minute noodles and superglue.
posted by flabdablet at 9:41 PM on June 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

How much did he save, in the short run, by using carbon fiber rather than steel?

Well, about a million in fuel on each of the dives that won't happen now.
posted by delfin at 9:49 PM on June 23, 2023 [7 favorites]

> You don't just screw them together?

i normally try pretty hard to refrain from being judgey about stuff i don't know much about and it's something presumably someone else is paid a whole lot of money to know about

but holy shit, who the fuck runs screws straight into the carbon fibre hull of their submarine?!?
posted by glonous keming at 9:57 PM on June 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

Well nobody, now.
posted by ctmf at 10:00 PM on June 23, 2023 [11 favorites]

That wall mount image can't be real can it?
posted by tigrrrlily at 10:01 PM on June 23, 2023

per the thread, it turns out that's just a separate interior lining, not the hull itself (one of the videos demonstrates)
posted by rifflesby at 10:02 PM on June 23, 2023 [8 favorites]

To make a steel tube instead of carbon fiber to perform under those pressures and expansion/ contraction would be challenging. As an amateur blacksmith/welder/machinist with limited knowledge I can think of two options. First is a hammer forging technique line they use for artillery barrels, followed by machining to final dimensions. That is going to give you a consistent metal grain and should be relatively homogeneous limiting the chances that it crushes like a tanker car in that mythbusters episode. Unfortunately I suspect you’d have to build the tooling and forge setup because it don’t think it exists. The second is some combination of rolling and welding to make a tube. The downside to this is that you’ll have to figure out some normalization process so the welds don’t deform differently from the rest of the steel causing the cylinder to crush under pressure. Either way is going to be expensive and even then it might be too heavy to be able to float back to the surface.
posted by interogative mood at 10:32 PM on June 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

For steel, you heat it up and it expands, it cools and contracts. The trick is that it actually contracts more than it expanded. So to curve an I-beam or the like you heat one side but not the other. If you do it right you get a nice curve. My father did the calculations for this to build bridges and various other things. The fabrication plant also had the most powerful press east of the mississippi that could just bend stuff. (Although putting a penny on the railroad tracks and letting a train roll over it made a flatter penny, go figure). Dad had these magic crayons that melted at different temperatures and an RPN HP calculator program to do the math to be able to lay out the blowtorch here until it melts across a large hunk of steel and then go back with measuring equipment and make sure the piece was curved just right. Good times... I was in elementary school and going in to work with dad on the weekends, had my own harhat and vest with a nametag, piloted overhead cranes, learned how to weld and work a torch.

It's not that hard to bend steel and a cylinder is pretty easy on multiple ways. It's the pressure outside vs inside that's the hard point, don't know nothing about that.
posted by zengargoyle at 11:07 PM on June 23, 2023 [13 favorites]

For comparison, consider the DSV Limiting Factor.

Key features:
- dives 3x as deep as the Titan
- real 96 hours endurance (plus another 106 hours emergency reserve)
- 3.5" titanium hull
- only fits 2 people

Cost to build was $37M, which doesn't even sound like all that much money, considering.
posted by ryanrs at 11:10 PM on June 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

Right, so any Titanic-obsessed billionaire who wants can commission their own sub to visit Titanic (and I guess Cameron did exactly that), doing it properly, and not make a dent in the billion. Total fecklessness not to have done this.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:31 PM on June 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

Not just the Titanic, that $37M sub will get you to the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean. It is rated for 1 Earth ocean.
posted by ryanrs at 11:42 PM on June 23, 2023 [10 favorites]

Under pressure - A live rant about carbon fiber submarines (Scott Manley, YouTube livestream, 1h59m35s)
posted by flabdablet at 12:17 AM on June 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm not trying to blame anybody (besides Rush), but there are certainly other potential disasters* currently under development by private industry. If the companies won't be persuaded, where should other Cassandras turn to prevent future tragedies?

Get authorities to throw the goddamn book at anyone and everyone involved with designing, operating, or in any other way signing off on the Titan. Everyone is focusing on Rush, but there is a whole company. There will be VPs, execs, lead engineers. They should all be held responsible for manslaughter. We can't prevent the existence of future Stockton Rush types, but we can try and make it so that nobody else with any credibility will work with them for fear of going to prison.
posted by Dysk at 3:09 AM on June 24, 2023 [12 favorites]

If I'm a billionaire, I want to do things only a billionaire can do.

Like make sure the entire world is, for starters, food secure? I like the way you think!
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 2:58 PM on June 23 [15 favorites +] [!]

I'd probably start with medical debt in the US. Maybe buy people's house mortgages and just give them the house. As a hobby, among other more serious things. I'd probably do some silly things too, like learn to fly a plane even though I have no need of that and it's somewhat dangerous. You would not catch me doing things like experimental submersibles, wingsuits, or anythng that needs a "you'll probably die" waiver.
posted by ctmf at 3:07 PM on June 23 [3 favorites +] [!]

Yeah, that's kind of my point. You and I don't *think* like billionaires. Learning to fly? That's pennies* compared to what Rush/Musk/Bezos are doing just to show who has the biggest set.

Philanthropy is anathema to them. Maybe not even that... Just an alien concept. "Does not compute". I honestly think that is one of the reasons Mackenzie Scott divorced Bezos. (That, and I think there was some cheating?) Here's my first search on how much she has given away.

So, yeah, if YOU were a billionaire, I think you would do right. Those that ARE billionaires (via "hard work" aka good luck or inheritance) seem to have their heads wired way differently.

It wouldn't take much for them to take the change out of their pocket at the end of the day and do some serious good in the world.

*I originally mis-typed peenies. Almost left it, as it goes well with the rest of the sentence.
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 5:52 AM on June 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

I keep coming back to this quote in the "Murky Regulations Governing Submersibles" link Kirkaracha posted above:

What really surprises me about this whole thing is that usually a third-party entity, this classification society, is a requirement for insurance, so I’m not exactly sure how the company obtained insurance to operate.

Very much still interested in the answer to that question.
posted by mediareport at 7:17 AM on June 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

On option is, this activity being unregulated, they just didn't have any. Rush sounds like exactly the kind of guy who would just roll the dice. Afterall it's not like he was going to get sued personally if something went wrong.
posted by Mitheral at 8:12 AM on June 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

Who needs insurance? That just stifles innovation...
posted by Windopaene at 8:17 AM on June 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

DSV Limiting Factor.

My mind is now reeling off a raft of morbid Culture-style names for the Titan.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:34 AM on June 24, 2023 [11 favorites]

The various libertarian tech entrepreneur slogans should provide a rich field for that - DSV Move Fast and Break Things, etc…
posted by Artw at 8:36 AM on June 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

So, yeah, if YOU were a billionaire, I think you would do right. Those that ARE billionaires (via "hard work" aka good luck or inheritance) seem to have their heads wired way differently.

I mean, there are some who lean in better directions sometimes. Like how Bill Gates has given billions to charitable efforts and plans to give billions more to fight diseases and climate change, and in his words, "to no longer be on the Richest Persons list before I die."

And for his efforts, he has the usual crackpots accusing him of being in league with George Soros, the New World Order, the Illuminati, the Globalist Cabal and the Reverse Vampires in their efforts to subject all good-thinking people to mind control, tyranny, control over their rights, land, food, health and travel, and outright decimation. This isn't to suggest that the "let's go visit Titanic in an oversized Pez dispenser" billionaires have secret altruistic streaks that we've somehow failed to notice, mind, just that few good deeds go unpunished.
posted by delfin at 8:36 AM on June 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

(Just a reminder that George Soros is also a real life wealthy person who has given a lot of money away, mostly to promote democracy of all things, and not in fact a boogey man unlike the rest of that list)
posted by hydropsyche at 9:24 AM on June 24, 2023 [11 favorites]

Why couldn't you build a larger version of the DSV Limiting Factor, Deepsea Challenger, or even the Trieste?
posted by kirkaracha at 9:50 AM on June 24, 2023

Probs better off making more of them than bigger ones, and operating them in packs.

The bigger you make a pressure vessel, the more total loading the pressure translates to; also, the strength of any curved wall comes from its curvature, and the bigger you make one, the less curved it will necessarily be. You can compensate for that by making the wall thicker, but at some point you run into the limitations of the materials themselves.
posted by flabdablet at 10:21 AM on June 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

> My mind is now reeling off a raft of morbid Culture-style names for the Titan.

DSV Breaking The Rules
DSV Safety Is Just Pure Waste
DSV Real-World Testing Is Anathema To Rapid Innovation
posted by automatronic at 10:35 AM on June 24, 2023 [14 favorites]

DSV Pearls That Were His Eyes
posted by chavenet at 10:39 AM on June 24, 2023 [13 favorites]

DSV In Pursuit of Shareholder Value
DSV The Next Quarter's Earnings Report
DSV Safety Third
DSV OSHAcide
DSV Disruptor
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:57 AM on June 24, 2023 [8 favorites]

Why couldn't you build a larger version of the DSV Limiting Factor, Deepsea Challenger, or even the Trieste?

You could build however big a sphere the pressure would permit out of an Iowa class's 12-inch armor belt if you really wanted to. It would just be expensive.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 11:02 AM on June 24, 2023

DSV Rich and Strange
posted by flabdablet at 11:15 AM on June 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

DSV Discount Carbon Fiber
DSV There Is A Rule That You Don’t Do That. Well, I Did
posted by ctmf at 11:21 AM on June 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

DSV Trust Me
posted by seanmpuckett at 11:26 AM on June 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

DSV Oceans Eleven
posted by flabdablet at 11:54 AM on June 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

DSV Tempting Fate
DSV Irony Is Dead
DSV High School English Definition of Hubris
posted by graymouser at 11:55 AM on June 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

DSV It's cool, it's supposed to sound like that
DSV It's called innovation, square, look it up
posted by From Bklyn at 11:57 AM on June 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

DSV Insufferable Arrogance
posted by MrVisible at 12:05 PM on June 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

DSV Debris Field
posted by chavenet at 12:07 PM on June 24, 2023 [9 favorites]

(Is this thread over? Can I go home now?)
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 12:15 PM on June 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

DSV Rich and Strange

How I describe my random thoughts on an average day.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:28 PM on June 24, 2023

DSV this one's going to work.
posted by Pendragon at 1:10 PM on June 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

DSV Let Me Take You Down
posted by flabdablet at 1:12 PM on June 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

seaQuest DSV

in any case, this article has quite a doozy of a detail

emphasis mine

Only one thing concerned me: He said he had gotten the carbon fiber used to make the Titan at a big discount from Boeing because it was past its shelf-life for use in airplanes.

I asked him if that weren't a problem. He replied that those dates were set far before they had to be, and that Boeing and even NASA had participated in the design and testing of the Titan.

posted by i used to be someone else at 1:14 PM on June 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

DSV Boob Tube
DSV Bathoscaphe
DSV Locked Thread
DSV Rushed Construction
DSV Tightly Wound
DSV No Strain No Gain
DSV Web of Lies
DSV Depth of Character
DSV You Bet Your Bottom Dollar
DSV Knock Knock Who's There
DSV Capitalist Expenditure
DSV Cut Corners
DSV Edge Case
DSV Hot Compress
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:17 PM on June 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

DSV I Work Best Under Pressure
posted by ctmf at 1:21 PM on June 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

and more

For the past two years, the platform and Titan were carried by the support ship Horizon Arctic, where they sat on the deck and were lowered into the water with a crane. This year, however, Oceangate CEO, Titan designer and pilot Stockton Rush told me that the cost of leasing the Horizon Arctic skyrocketed to $200,000 a week. The economics of chartering the Polar Prince, built in 1959, made more sense, even though it required that the platform and submersible be towed behind the ship, hitched to the Polar Prince's stern by a long rope. Although Rush told me the platform was designed to be towed, this would prove problematic in a few days.

...

...last year when something went wrong putting the sub back onto the Horizon Arctic, and the Titan bobbed overnight on the sea. Hamish had told me about it during our April conversation. "I heard it was pretty rough on the people inside," he had said.

pt 3

I said that I thought many of the problems with my nondive may have arisen because this was the first season that the Titan was being towed behind its support ship rather than being kept on its deck. I said I thought the sub and platform were being tossed around pretty roughly on a daily basis.

posted by i used to be someone else at 1:25 PM on June 24, 2023 [7 favorites]

DSV Dead Before You Knew There Was a Problem (quote from Nargeolet)
DSV So a Sub is Under Water. Why is That a Problem? (quote from Rush)
posted by i used to be someone else at 1:34 PM on June 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

oh man, from pt 3:

Between the wind, waves, fog, platform issues (the platform and sub tipped on another day, though not as precariously and was righted more quickly), the knowledge that the sub was made from carbon fiber that could not be certified to be used on aircraft and with endless checklist items that needed to be tended, you might wonder why I was still willing to go on a dive if it were offered.

Reading that paragraph, I wonder myself. But the answer, in the moment, was the presence of P.H. Nargeolet. I felt that if such an experienced wreck diver and explorer, who had seen and understood so much more than I did, was comfortable going down in the Titan, then I could be, too.

posted by mochapickle at 1:39 PM on June 24, 2023 [10 favorites]

Vanessa O'Brien has no confidence in the ability of a joint between disparate materials to stand up to the punishment of pressure cycling.

I've seen no details on how the interface between the titanium domes and the ends of the main cylinder were constructed beyond vague mentions of an interface ring, but I do wonder whether the design was supposed to allow for being bashed about by surface waves as well as repeated pressure cycling.

If you were building something like that you'd have to allow for some relative movement, because the rim of the titanium dome is obviously going to want to stretch a little as the pressure tries to flatten it, while the end of the cylinder is going to want to shrink. I'm finding it hard to imagine what kind of material you could put between them that would allow for that while also not being destroyed by the working load and also not trying to delaminate or abrade the carbon fibre.
posted by flabdablet at 1:50 PM on June 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

Just the adhesive from the video I’ve seen. IIRC they’ve stated it’s not a problem as the pressure would only push the titanium collar down into the carbon fiber, tightening the seal, something that in hindsight is open to a lot of questions like yours.
posted by Artw at 1:54 PM on June 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm not that kind of expert in that I've been IN them, but I don't design them. I have been in a case though, where the mini-sub sitting on top of our sub was not really sealed to it. It had some latches to hold in in place when we got rolled around on the surface, but it leaked until we dove down a bit and sea pressure forced it together metal-to-metal. I had to McGuyver a shower enclosure with a drain to contain the rain on the surface and at periscope depth.

My concern about this one is, the hemispheres would be forced toward each other, sure, tending to seal the hemisphere to the tube. But carbon fiber isn't known for making a good butt seal like metal-to-metal does. (Or is it?) Also, that would put a huge compressive load on the carbon fiber longitudinally in addition to the obvious circumferential compression from the sea pressure. As a lay person on the design side, I'd be raised-eyebrow-ing that idea, and I'd like to say I would before I even knew in hindsight there was a problem.
posted by ctmf at 2:04 PM on June 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

(Is this thread over? Can I go home now?)

[ash] I think it's safe to assume the crew and passengers aren't zombies, [/ash] so yeah. It's all done.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 2:29 PM on June 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

DSV Good Butt Seal
posted by chavenet at 2:44 PM on June 24, 2023 [9 favorites]

Since a sphere or a topological equivalent to a sphere can’t be combed without a cowlick or a point that sticks straight up, a carbon fiber sphere would always have at least points of relative weakness.

A toroid, however, could have a warp going through the hole and a weft circling around it, as well as hybrid fiber paths that circle around but go through the hole once, and etc. — and each of these paths could cover the toroid completely and homogenously.
posted by jamjam at 3:37 PM on June 24, 2023

A toroidal hull would also have a mixture of positively and negatively curved sections, with zero curvature on the boundary. Not ideal for homogeneity.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 4:11 PM on June 24, 2023

DSV Red Tape

(I claim this has a double entendre)
posted by soylent00FF00 at 5:04 PM on June 24, 2023

Just seen on BoingBoing (emphasis mine):

James Cameron makes it pretty clear, there is a super-rich explorer dude's backchannel where he learned, very early on, that the Titan submarine was no more. It is a small community of guys who design super deep submersible vehicles, and he is in the club. Their likely discord, slack channel, or Facebook group shared the news that communications were lost, and the Titan's independently powered and housed positioning beacon failed simultaneously. There was very little chance the sub was intact at that point.

This is the first I've heard of a beacon, but if that's true, why did the parent ship wait so long before radioing for help?
posted by cheshyre at 5:09 PM on June 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

"The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand" applies in many contexts.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:59 PM on June 24, 2023 [16 favorites]

A responsible organization dealing with risks has an emergency response plan to define procedures and the people who need to execute them in the case of a variety of incidents. This gives people an anchor in what is likely a very emotional time, and prompts them on what to do and when.

OceanGate did not look to be a responsible organization, so they were probably standing around yelling WTF at each other for a while, thinking about what had been the unthinkable up to that point, and panicking about their colleagues/family down below. It’s always possible they were stalling, trying to manage the optics and corporate concerns, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on this for now.
posted by cardboard at 7:07 PM on June 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

This is the first I've heard of a beacon

James mentioned it in several of the clips posted above. AFAICT, that's the first time anyone mentioned it. He's also claimed they were ascending, which would make the delay weird in its own right. I'm a little dubious that his info is quite that concrete, but "good thinking" seems to have been a rare commodity on that expedition regardless.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:07 PM on June 24, 2023

This is the first I've heard of a beacon, but if that's true, why did the parent ship wait so long before radioing for help?

Big 'if,' but if so because they had a protocol, an established track record of scrubbing way way more trips that reached the wreck, a megalomaniacal leader underwater, and a likelihood that summoning assistance would end the enterprise to his vitriolic displeasure and everyone else's material loss.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:37 PM on June 24, 2023 [8 favorites]

And had gotten worn down by their previous occasions where they lost their other communication channel.
posted by sebastienbailard at 7:44 PM on June 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

Professor Mercogliano who is an expert in these maritime matters and host of the “What’s Going on with Shipping” YouTube channel makes some good points. lots of details about the legal SAR efforts, the navy’s detection of the implosion, coast guard capabilities and shortcomings, insurance/liability.
posted by interogative mood at 9:59 PM on June 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oceangate Titan: analysis of an insultingly predictable failure (just alex, YouTube, 21m21s) shows, among other things, exactly how the titanium end rings were bonded to the carbon fibre cylinder: epoxy resin adhesive, applied by hand, with no post-application degassing and no post-cure inspection. It also makes some good points about the ways in which apparently non-safety-critical ancillary equipment can become safety critical under difficult conditions.

I've also seen some descriptions of how the carbon fibre was laid up: 800 layers, alternating between pre-impregnated fibre oriented along the tube and continuous filament wound around it. Which, fine, if you're building a fibre-reinforced structure intended to resist being stretched either lengthways or outwards, such as you might need for aerospace, but wouldn't do much to help such a structure resist delaminating from the inside out as external compression induces wall thickening.

I would be very interested to see pressure chamber tests where a hollow fibre-reinforced structure gets compared against another of identical shape made entirely out of the same matrix resin with no fibre. I would not expect the results to differ very much and I'm curious about whether that expectation is right.
posted by flabdablet at 6:42 AM on June 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

I'd like to take a moment to note James Cameron is dressing like an 80's BMXer for these TV interviews.
posted by srboisvert at 9:06 AM on June 25, 2023 [25 favorites]

Given all the revelations, the amazing thing is that they managed to make multiple previous trips without fatal disaster.
posted by tavella at 12:56 PM on June 25, 2023 [13 favorites]

"So far, so good!" he said, as he fell past the twentieth floor.
posted by flabdablet at 1:01 PM on June 25, 2023 [12 favorites]

flabdablet—I saw the video of their putting the sub together and immediately thought: glue! It’s glue! I don’t care if it’s some powerful chemical bonding agent; at the end of the day, it’s fucking glue! Even though I am not handy and I’m inclined to trust people about their expertise, I would never have gotten on the thing if I had seen them gluing it together beforehand. I used epoxy to fix my broken license plate holder, for God’s sake.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:33 PM on June 25, 2023 [6 favorites]

Boeing's 787s are about half carbon fiber and glue. But 1. They know what they're doing, and 2. They're not making compression vessels out of the stuff.
posted by sebastienbailard at 2:59 PM on June 25, 2023 [11 favorites]

The epoxy holding the caps on is really just acting as a gasket. There is mechanical keying preventing the caps from moving under applied pressure produced by the dado in the cap fitting over the raw ends of the cylinder.
posted by Mitheral at 3:00 PM on June 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

The epoxy holding the caps on is really just acting as a gasket.

At 4000m, the word "just" is doing a lot of work there.
posted by automatronic at 3:13 PM on June 25, 2023 [6 favorites]

The caps aren't going to go flying off with 6000 psi holding them on. A lot of things have gone sideways before that interface fails. Using epoxy to bed the mating surface of the composite tube is likely one of the least sketch things about the construction.
posted by Mitheral at 5:01 PM on June 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

The caps aren't going to go flying off with 6000 psi holding them on.

Maybe not, but is the epoxy going to keep 6000psi out?
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:11 PM on June 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Gluing the end caps on with epoxy is perfectly fine and most interfaces between carbon fibre and metal are going to be done this way. The epoxy glue used would be a mix of the same epoxy resin used in the manufacture of the carbon fiber tube and a thickening agent to make it workable as a glue. Using mechanical fasteners such as bolts would actually weaken the carbon fibre significantly and increase the number of places leaks could occur. As Mitheral points out, the pressure is keeping the caps on - if the vessel was built to hold internal pressure, the end caps may have bolts (and additional carbon fibre reinforcement around them) because the pressure would be trying to push the caps off.
posted by dg at 5:18 PM on June 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

Ricochet biscuit that parenthesis needs to be in bold/italic/blink.WTF!!!

If you poke around the odd bits of history, you start to see the rhyme scheme. Well before Lin-Manuel got famous, the minute I heard about Dick Cheney shooting someone, I thought about Cheney joining Aaron Burr on a very short list. And perhaps ninety seconds after I turned on the TV on 9/11, I was wondering how long it would be before any network mentioned that time in 1945 when a plane flew into the Empire State Building (Narrator: “It was four days.”)
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:53 PM on June 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Boeing's 787s are about half carbon fiber and glue. But 1. They know what they're doing, and 2. They're not making compression vessels out of the stuff.

and 787s are at 43k feel in the air, where the air pressure is ~14kPa with much of the force going outwards. this sucker was going 3.8km below in sea level, where the inward pressure is ~38MPa, or ~2,700 times what the 787 is facing.
posted by i used to be someone else at 7:31 PM on June 25, 2023 [6 favorites]

Water is just so heavy. Go on a camping trip where you have to carry your water.

It's barely fathomable (I see what I did there) for us surface dwellers to comprehend.
posted by Windopaene at 7:42 PM on June 25, 2023 [16 favorites]

The caps aren't going to go flying off with 6000 psi holding them on.

Obviously not. But under 6000psi of compressive load, what kind of a job is the titanium to composite interface going to do of transferring strain between parts whose stiffness is different? And if the interface incorporates voids because it wasn't degassed before curing, what's stopping those from acting as nuclei for cracks under shear stress?

"Flying off" is just the wrong mindset for dealing with huge compressive loads. Think more "relentless grinding".
posted by flabdablet at 8:57 PM on June 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

most interfaces between carbon fibre and metal are going to be done this way.

Most interfaces between carbon fibre and metal are not subject to compressive loads varying from 0 to 6000psi and back.
posted by flabdablet at 8:59 PM on June 25, 2023

The critique that there was no post-application vacuum outgassing, is that something that would have been part of due diligence? I can understand why you wouldn't want voids in a bonded interface, but vacuum outgassing involves making the bubbles *bigger* in order to encourage them to depart. Doesn't that mess with the interface just as much?

I can also see how entrained air would increase flexing during repeated pressure cycles... Anyone have insight?
posted by tigrrrlily at 9:44 PM on June 25, 2023

tigrrrlily: but vacuum outgassing involves making the bubbles *bigger* in order to encourage them to depart.

That's where the viscosity and the curing time of the epoxy used in the bonding comes in.

5 minute JB Weld isn't quite the stuff to use there.
posted by Stoneshop at 10:35 PM on June 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

"I was really happy for them because both of them, they really wanted to do that for a very long time," she said.

Teenager on sub took Rubik's Cube to break record, mother tells BBC
posted by chavenet at 5:14 AM on June 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

If you were curious about what it felt like to visit the Titanic aboard Titan then William Legate’s first hand video chronicle of his experience might interest you. In Spanish but with English dialogue from crew members.
posted by rongorongo at 9:09 AM on June 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've just figured out that the compressive load on that epoxy joint wouldn't be the ambient 6000psi, it would be much higher than that. It's going to be the total force that a disc the same diameter as the end cap would see at 6000psi (i.e. the total end-to-end compressive load on the hull) divided by the area of the ring formed by the end of the CF tube section.

Per Wikipedia, the internal diameter of the tube was 56 inches, wall thickness 5. That makes the external diameter 66 inches. A disc with that diameter has an area π × 66² / 4 = 3421 square inches; a disc with the internal diameter has area π × 56² / 4 = 2463 square inches, so the area of the end of the CF tube's wall was 3421 - 2463 = 958 square inches. So the end-to-end compressive force applied to the CF tube comes to 6000psi × 3421 square inches = 20527000 pounds = 10264 tons, and the pressure seen by the epoxy interface comes to 20527000 pounds / 958 square inches = 21423psi.

This chart at masterbond.com lists 26000psi as the highest available compressive strength for their epoxy resin adhesives. At pressures over the compressive strength, the resin will deform plastically i.e. non-reversibly and since it's quite stiff stuff, that deformation will likely involve cracking that could easily spread into the CF tube it's bonded to.

There's not much headroom between 21000 and 26000 psi.
posted by flabdablet at 9:22 AM on June 26, 2023 [8 favorites]

Yikes, the pressure in the circumferential direction will be even greater, and while the tube was a composite material there were no fibres running radially to resist the walls thickening as the resin deformed.
posted by mscibing at 9:38 AM on June 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

this just underscores why so many of the actual crew sections of the deep-sea vehicles are spheres, rather than other shapes.
posted by i used to be someone else at 10:34 AM on June 26, 2023 [6 favorites]

no fibres running radially t

The tube was composed of alternate radial and axial oriented fiber components.
posted by Mitheral at 10:43 AM on June 26, 2023

Wow, rongorongo, that video. At first I was feeling mildly panicky even from the comfort of my wide-open family room as I saw just how dark and cramped that tube was, and I thought there was no way I would ever get in that thing ... but then they came to the Titanic and I can't deny that the thought of seeing it with my own eyes holds a certain fascination. If I had the means, AND I believed the OceanGate "experts" when they repeatedly insisted that it was safe, I do think I might have overridden my self-preservation instincts for a chance to see the Titanic.

I'm going to take that as a reminder to be less trusting of people who have a financial interest in getting me to trust them.
posted by DingoMutt at 11:19 AM on June 26, 2023 [8 favorites]

flabdablet: yeah that's what I was getting at upthread and even disregarding the joint, i'd be super-concerned about the in-line compression of the straight-sided cylinder. Like standing on an empty soda can, it might theoretically hold, but buckle with an asymetrical dynamic force. Like getting head butted by an orca, for instance.
posted by ctmf at 11:58 AM on June 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

(the orca part's a joke, no need for an orca facts explainer)
posted by ctmf at 12:10 PM on June 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

orca facts explainer

Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your daily text facts.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:15 PM on June 26, 2023 [7 favorites]

you tellin' me an orca explained these facts?
posted by cortex at 12:19 PM on June 26, 2023 [5 favorites]

The tube was composed of alternate radial and axial oriented fiber components

Nope. Alternating layers of axial prepreg and hoop, not radial, wet-wound filament. All of the fibre in that tube was at right angles to its radii. None of it was oriented to resist wall thickening.
posted by flabdablet at 12:36 PM on June 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

i'd be super-concerned about the in-line compression of the straight-sided cylinder.

Yep.

Have a look at the way cylindrical test samples fail under axial compression. The tubes made of isotropic, homogenous materials all develop bulges near the ends before failing. The carbon fibre one doesn't, presumably because it has some hoop-oriented fibres that do a good job of resisting the tension forces involved in forming those bulges. Instead, it just delaminates starting at one end.

Note particularly that the force required to keep the CF tube delaminating all the way down its length is less than the force required to start the delamination. If the pressure that delaminates a carbon fibre tube is applied by a liquid medium that can move as fast as the speed of sound in water, that process is going to happen rather faster than it does in a press.

The isotropic materials, by contrast, require more pressure than that required to form the initial failure bulges before those bulges grow to the point where they collapse.
posted by flabdablet at 12:48 PM on June 26, 2023 [5 favorites]

the pressure in the circumferential direction will be even greater

If my understanding of these geometries is correct, it should be possible to calculate the circumferential pressure by slicing the tube along a diametric plane and treating the two resulting halves as "end caps" that see a force normal to that plane, multiplied by the area of the projection of the wall onto the plane. So for Titan, that's a rectangle 95 inches by 66 = 6270 square inches. At 6000psi that comes to 37620000 pounds = 18810 tons.

That whole force is borne by two 95 inch wall sections 5 inches thick each, for a total cross sectional area of 950 square inches. So the circumferential pressure comes out to 37620000 pounds / 950 square inches = 39600psi.

Which I guess answers my earlier curiosity about whether plain epoxy resin with no fibre in it would work. The fact that the thing didn't collapse instantly on the first dive must mean that the wound filament fibre is, in fact, bearing most of that compressive load.
posted by flabdablet at 1:07 PM on June 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

Every time I see another calculation in feet and inches and pounds I slash another 50% off the depth I would consent to ride this thing
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 2:01 PM on June 26, 2023 [12 favorites]

Ricky/Two Bit Divinci has made a nice synopsis of the story of Titan and Oceangate. - As an engineer he seems to be torn between a respect for the company trying to break new ground - and a horror of the shortcuts that they took to get there.

He gives the example of DeepFlight challenger - built with composites made by the same company used for Titan. Richard Branson wanted to use the vehicle for a 5 dive program but DeepFlight refused to support the idea on the basis that the vehicle had been designed to use once only. By contrast, OceanGate do not seem to have published an operational life limit for Titan at all.For all $250,000 sounds like a stratospheric ticket price - he argues it should have been way higher to allow the vessel to be periodically replaced.
posted by rongorongo at 2:04 PM on June 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

you tellin' me an orca explained these facts?

Easy peasy -- just like explaining the pyramids to an anthill.
posted by y2karl at 3:03 PM on June 26, 2023

...under 6000psi of compressive load, what kind of a job is the titanium to composite interface going to do of transferring strain between parts whose stiffness is different? And if the interface incorporates voids because it wasn't degassed before curing, what's stopping those from acting as nuclei for cracks under shear stress?

Yes, I wonder about the differences in structure between carbon and titanium too. They would definitely react differently to stress and this could lead to decay of the bond between them over time. Also, the epoxy glue would adhere well to the carbon/expoxy composite, but I think Titanium doesn't take glue well and a lot of reliance would be on a mechanical bond rather than chemical in that case. Carbon fibre is usually cured under vacuum to remove any voids, but I'm not sure this is practical for glued joints. From a non-engineer point of view, my thinking is that reducing the number of such joints to the absolute minimum would be better - make the entire capsule out of a single carbon moulding (assuming you are making it from carbon, which may not be the right material for this) and only have any sort of joint where it's absolutely necessary and as small as possible. That should be able to consist of only a single opening big enough for a human to pass through.

The Titan structure was made using a combination of fibre types, including axial wound fibres that, in theory, gives it immense stiffness and resistance to deformation. But that stiffness, a major strength of carbon, brings with it a lack of elasticity that makes it intolerant of repeated stress cycles and the nature of carbon fibre means that there is no tolerance for any weakness at all. Unlike (eg) steel, which has some ability to bend and return to its original form, carbon fibre is immensely strong and stiff right up to the moment it isn't and the instant that point is reached, it fails catastrophically.

The other possible failure in this case is one of design - there's a reason why spherical design is used in vessels subject to immense pressure. It provides for a much more even stress through the vessel where the cylindrical shape means the middle is much less supported and much less able to spread loads, so the middle would have to be significantly stronger than the ends to deal with this.

The video that flabdablet links is interesting in comparing the different properties of materials, but, as they point out, is not compressing the material in the same way as a submersible is compressed. In the case of the carbon tube, it isn't the carbon that failed at all, but the epoxy (not that it matters in any practical sense). I note a couple of things about that sample specifically - the carbon material was plain weave, the most commonly used fabric, but would not be used in a situation where the stress is all from the ends where unidirectional fabric would be better and the sample was crooked in the press, meaning the stresses weren't directed straight down the tube. The stress in carbon fibre is pretty much all taken in the filaments, rather than the epoxy and the job of the epoxy is to make sure the fibres stay in place - epoxy on is own would perform similar to any plastic. The use of axial wound fibres in the Titan would be to use the strength of carbon to spread the load around the circumference, but, again, the cylindrical shape doesn't make the best use of that strength.
posted by dg at 3:13 PM on June 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

... the cylindrical shape means the middle is much less supported and much less able to spread loads, so the middle would have to be significantly stronger than the ends to deal with this.

I think this is why they went with fiber in the middle. There's enough curve on a sphere that it's still efficient to make a simple shape that won't buckle. A titanium tube would have had to be either very thick or a ribbed structure that needed lots of analysis and machining, so costly either way.

Once they figure it out what happened it will be an example of engineering done wrong.

Every time I see another calculation in feet and inches and pounds I slash another 50% off the depth I would consent to ride this thing

Metric has some easy-to-remember calculations, for example: energy (J) is pressure (Pa) times volume (m^3). A cylinder 142 cm in diameter, 2.4m long, with hemispherical ends added has a volume of 5.3 cubic meters. At 300 bar (30MPa) you get about 160 MJ. That's like a 12.5 ton object going 570 kph, or 40 kg TNT equivalent energy.

I'm slashing another 50% off the depth I would consent to ride this thing.
posted by netowl at 8:03 PM on June 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

He gives the example of DeepFlight challenger - built with composites made by the same company used for Titan. Richard Branson wanted to use the vehicle for a 5 dive program but DeepFlight refused to support the idea on the basis that the vehicle had been designed to use once only. By contrast, OceanGate do not seem to have published an operational life limit for Titan at all.For all $250,000 sounds like a stratospheric ticket price - he argues it should have been way higher to allow the vessel to be periodically replaced.

Worth noting that this adds a subtlety to the idea that no responsible engineer would build a deep submersible out of a composite material. It's all actually doing the math and following good processes (otherwise you are not doing engineering but fabrication) and in this case they seem to have come to a justified conclusion that you could use a particular design in composite but that it would only have a rated lifetime of one dive.

I'm sure the eventual formal investigation report (not clear who will be doing it) will review the design process in great detail.
posted by atrazine at 2:05 AM on June 27, 2023

Last night I watched Deepsea Challenge, the 2014 documentary about James Cameron's project to design and build a submersible capable of diving down to 35,000 feet, i.e. the deepest point on the Marianas Trench. (And for reference/reminder, Titanic lies at 13,000 feet; the Bismark at 15,000 feet, and the depth Brigman dives to in The Abyss is 18,000 feet.) This isn't a great documentary---more focus on people besides Cameron would have been nice---but two things are made abundantly clear:

- It required an enormous effort by a team of really smart people to solve all the design and implementation details required for such a craft, to say nothing of the amount of money spent.

- The culture of safety that was engendered throughout the project was crucial to its success.

It's hard not to see Titan as a kind of willful (and inexcusable) deception on the part of Stockton Rush.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 5:42 AM on June 27, 2023 [11 favorites]

In a new video for CBS David Pogue states the Titan only made 12 successful dives in 2021/22 (13 were planned).
So the failure this year was the vessel's 13th dive.
posted by Lanark at 6:57 AM on June 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yeah, the fact that Deepsea Challenger had *four* different backups to the "drop the weights and do emergency return to surface" option shows some of the difference. A second separate path for the pilot to release the weights, a way for the surface monitors to release them, a failsafe where if the capsule lost power the weights dropped automatically (being held on electromagnetically.) And finally, a wire that eroded so that no matter what else happened, after 12 or so hours it would trigger the release.
posted by tavella at 7:36 AM on June 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Titan had similar (but not identical) redundant systems for dropping ballast, including the fusible wires that dissolve after some number of hours in the water.
posted by mbrubeck at 7:59 AM on June 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yeah, the ballast systems seem to be the main area where Titan actually did something right, using knowledge carefully gained from other divers rather than the CEO's so-outside-the-box-it's-genius aerospace experience.
posted by mediareport at 8:50 AM on June 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

I possibly missed this if it was already posted in the thread, but one of my favorite Jeopardy Masters and Steve Martin lookalike seemingly almost went on an earlier trip.

Sam's anecdote on Jeopardy, SLTT
posted by PussKillian at 9:47 AM on June 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Holy cow, that's not Steve Martin??
posted by mpark at 10:00 AM on June 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

the CEO's so-outside-the-box-it's-genius aerospace experience

On behalf of aerospace engineers, Rush didn’t seem to have any structural engineering experience from his CV, but worked in flight test engineering, which is more about checking that aircraft performance meets design goals than designing the aircraft. And the structural engineers that I know, where they didn’t have direct experience designing for particular conditions, would analyze and test the shit out of things until they understood it, and not just declare that they were reinventing the field without showing any receipts. This isn’t a case of lack of experience in the field, but of negligence.
posted by cardboard at 10:11 AM on June 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

"Titan had similar (but not identical) redundant systems for dropping ballast, including the fusible wires that dissolve after some number of hours in the water."

Some of them sound a lot more slapdash, though. 'The passengers will rock from side to side to shake off the weights' in particular.
posted by tavella at 11:38 AM on June 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

If this submersible's rockin', please come a-knockin'.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:55 AM on June 27, 2023 [9 favorites]

Today Explained had a great interview with deep-sea explorer G. Michael Harris who was friends/colleagues with the Frenchman who died on Titan. It was wrenching as he implored his friend not to go on these dives. His position was that it was great that there was innovation in vehicle design but you shouldn't put others at risk.
posted by mmascolino at 12:44 PM on June 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

From Engineering Assessment of the OceanGate Titan Failure, among other things:

It was previously stated by the CEO that each time he descended to that depth, the viewport deformed several inches inward. Whether that was plastic deformation or not is unknown, but that’s what NDE might have determined.

Another obvious problem handwaved away, because it didn't fail and kill everyone in the sub. Yet.
posted by meowzilla at 2:33 PM on June 27, 2023 [12 favorites]

*whimper*
posted by cheshyre at 2:57 PM on June 27, 2023

Here's the part of the video [starts at 22:07] by Spanish actor Alan Estrada, who dove in the Titan as a passenger, in which Rush explains the 7-inch think plexiglass will "squeeze in about 3/4 of an inch - it just deforms" at Titanic depths. Not quite the "several inches" that engineering assessment claims, but I have no idea how normal or abnormal 3/4 of an inch of plexiglass deformation is at that depth or what that means for the testing after each dive Rush may or may not (probably not) have done on it.

What I do know is that Rush's next statement is almost unbelievably appalling and would have had me immediately abandoning ship and swimming for shore:

And acrylic is great because it squeezes in, and before it cracks or fails, it starts to crackle, and so you get a huge warning if it’s going to fail.

Be sure to listen for that crackle when you're hours below the surface, so you have plenty of time to think about it on the long slow ride up, I guess.
posted by mediareport at 3:31 PM on June 27, 2023 [11 favorites]

I’m skeptical that there would be any delay between the crackle and the pop at those pressures.
posted by interogative mood at 9:28 PM on June 27, 2023 [9 favorites]

Rush's statement might have been been correct in the case of the acrylic window. Here's an account of the dive of the Trieste to Challenger Deep from 1960:

At 30,000 ft. a sharp crack rang through the ship, shaking it violently. The water pressure outside was more than 6 tons per square 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.

[Source: Seven Miles Down: The Story of The Bathyscaph Trieste]

Note this incident is recreated in Cameron's documentary.

Whether this is entirely applicable to the design of the acrylic window in Titan or not I can't say. Sounds like the window in Trieste was composed to two pieces and only the outer piece experienced the crack.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 7:44 AM on June 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

They've recovered a lot of large pieces of debris. Including what appears to be titanium sphere containing the window. Here's link to some photos and video
posted by yyz at 11:00 AM on June 28, 2023 [4 favorites]

titanium sphere containing the window

I notice the strap on that goes through where the plexiglass window should be.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:50 AM on June 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Some of them sound a lot more slapdash, though. 'The passengers will rock from side to side to shake off the weights' in particular.

I don't know. To me that sounds like a pretty good last gasp (heh) solution if mechanized solutions have failed. (Not defending the sub in general here.)
posted by brundlefly at 12:02 PM on June 28, 2023 [5 favorites]

I notice the strap on that goes through where the plexiglass window should be.

Well, there's your problem.

Should have changed the tense from containing to contained.
posted by yyz at 12:09 PM on June 28, 2023

Well, there's your problem.

The front fell off....
posted by Pendragon at 12:18 PM on June 28, 2023 [8 favorites]

The more ominous indication to me of a failure is on the first ring, at 0:19 in the video. There's irregular colouring where it must have been attached to the cylindrical part of the hull; the tabs with the two holes will be where the bolts holding the front dome on go through, and those are on the side away from the camera so the side we're seeing is where it was glued to the hull.

The irregular colouring is either a sign that the epoxy didn't attach equally along the contact area, or the epoxy glue split from the cylinder in a way that left irregular amounts of glue on the ring. Hard to tell without seeing more detail, but to me either case would have the hull starting collapsing inwards really near that ring, or even through detaching from the ring.
posted by Stoneshop at 12:20 PM on June 28, 2023

Ummm, "strap on", Greg_Ace?
posted by mpark at 1:19 PM on June 28, 2023

they don't call it the bottom of the ocean for nothing
posted by cortex at 1:30 PM on June 28, 2023 [24 favorites]

Also pretty telling that none of the carbon fibre seems to have been recovered.

If it was the window that caved in first, then I would expect water hammer to destroy the glue joints and blow the end caps off the tube, which would survive largely intact. But if the tube failed first, then I would expect it to have shattered into tiny bits.

That irregular colouring might reflect a glue joint whose integrity had been compromised by repeated episodes of water ingress.
posted by flabdablet at 1:30 PM on June 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

I have been waiting a 1000 comments for someone to mention how much the Titan resembled a huge self-propelled penis, and perhaps did in that sense earn its moniker.

And there is a connection in Greek mythology between Titans and a huge penis in the ocean, since one of Mother Earth's Titan children cut off Father Sky's penis while he was having intercourse with her and threw it into the ocean.
posted by jamjam at 2:49 PM on June 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Well, I hope you're feeling satisfied now that it has come into the thread after all that anticipation.
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:57 PM on June 28, 2023 [5 favorites]

They don’t call it 'the blue' for nothing.
posted by jamjam at 3:03 PM on June 28, 2023

"Deep blew"
posted by Dip Flash at 3:07 PM on June 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

BBC reporting that human remains were recovered in the debris.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 3:32 PM on June 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

The more ominous indication to me of a failure is on the first ring, at 0:19 in the video
I noticed that too. It's clear the bond between the end plates and the carbon cylinder has failed, because there doesn't appear to be any of the carbon adhered to the ring. However, that doesn't mean at all that the bond failure is the cause of the implosion. it's equally possible that the cylinder or the viewport or something else was the first point of failure, leading to deformation of the tube and resulting in the pulling apart of the bond. That bond would definitely be one of the weaker points in the craft, but there are a lot of possible first-failure points in that thing.

That there are uneven amounts of glue along the ring is not a sign of anything - when a glue bond fails, it's normal for it to look like that, unless there is a fundamental failure for the glue to adhere to just one of the surfaces.
posted by dg at 3:41 PM on June 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

I am not sure if this is a dumb question, but how did they retrieve these pieces of Titan?
posted by hydra77 at 4:24 PM on June 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

The pressure vessel imploded; much of the other stuff outside seems to have remained intact (and always needed to be able to tolerate those conditions since it was always going down there outside the pressure vessel). The ROVs working the recovery are capable of these depths and more.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:30 PM on June 28, 2023

I am not sure if this is a dumb question, but how did they retrieve these pieces of Titan?

Using the ROV that found it.

New photos show deep-sea robot being used in Titan sub recovery efforts

Ed Cassano, the project manager for subsea assets aboard the Horizon Arctic, a Canadian vessel that played an integral role in the initial search for the Titan and carried the Odysseus out to sea, said in a statement that the robot has "been successful in investigating identified objects of interest as instructed by onboard incident command personnel."

posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 4:33 PM on June 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

If the tube failed then the resulting cycle of rapid implosion-explosion would have blown both of the ends caps off. No amount of glue is going to hold it together and because it was a weak point expecting to be held on by compression it would have been over. Same thing if the window failed. The small pieces of carbon fiber will be hard to find in the dark depths they are searching.
posted by interogative mood at 4:40 PM on June 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

I notice the strap on that goes through where the plexiglass window should be.

I think it's been partly disassembled: for example the bond rings are seperate from from the hemispheres, which seems more likely due to unbolting than some sort of failure. It's a pretty vital piece of information if the window was intact, but the investigators know. I'm kind of amazed we're seeing wreckage so soon.
posted by netowl at 6:10 PM on June 28, 2023

I doubt they've disassembled it - the investigators would need to be able to examine it in the state it was recovered. The only reason they might do this is if the components were too heavy to lift together, but I doubt the ROV would have the ability to remove the bolts in place. It is interesting, though and maybe points to a failure in the bolts themselves?
posted by dg at 6:51 PM on June 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Well, true. Forget about unbolting. I just think that if all the bolts are gone, the viewport being gone doesn't mean much.
posted by netowl at 7:41 PM on June 28, 2023

If the window didn’t cause the event then the window was destroyed during the event.
posted by interogative mood at 10:03 PM on June 28, 2023

dg: That bond would definitely be one of the weaker points in the craft, but there are a lot of possible first-failure points in that thing.

The thing I'm missing in the design of the rings is a lip (or a diameter step) extending into the cylinder, so that shear forces acting on the glue joint between the hull and the ring as the hull is trying to deform from the outside pressure, are taken up.

However stiff you manage to make a cylinder, the ends are where the least resistance is to radial forces trying to deform it. And while uneven loading along the circumference of the bond during a dive would be improbable, it's not impossible.
posted by Stoneshop at 11:46 PM on June 28, 2023

netowl: I just think that if all the bolts are gone, the viewport being gone doesn't mean much.

The bolts holding the domes in place against their rings are just that, bolts holding the domes in place with sufficient force that the dome is sealed against its ring during the shallower parts of the dive. Once at depth I expect them to in effect be barely loaded, so they don't have to be humongous one-inch diameter monsters. Which is shown by the size of the holes in the tabs protruding from the ring; also, from the video there's only six or eight such tabs with two holes each. The violence of the implosion may well have snapped them.

About the dome, I expect it to have been glued down. Bolting down an acrylic dome, either using clamps or through-hole, is an exceptionally bad idea given its shape and the loading it's subjected to. Again, the joint is loaded on compression, and a dome is the optimal form to take up the forces acting on it. The implosion will likely have knocked the sealing loose and with it rammed the dome out of its seat. I don't expect it to be found intact, but I won't be surprised if it is.
posted by Stoneshop at 12:19 AM on June 29, 2023

The thing I'm missing in the design of the rings is a lip (or a diameter step) extending into the cylinder, so that shear forces acting on the glue joint between the hull and the ring as the hull is trying to deform from the outside pressure, are taken up.

The tube fit into a groove in the ring.
posted by Mitheral at 1:30 AM on June 29, 2023

while uneven loading along the circumference of the bond during a dive would be improbable, it's not impossible.

Also worth noting that the effect of applying pressure normal to the surface of a cylinder that's not quite round is to stress it in a way that tends to exacerbate its out-of-roundness. There's a positive feedback there that's inevitably going to result in asymmetric shear forces being applied to the glue joint between the CF tube and the titanium ring.

Squeezing the end of a cylinder to make it more out of round is also going to try to twist its end face out of flat, applying asymmetric compression forces to the glue joint.

With repeated cycling of those forces, any water that's leaked into the joint is going to get pumped around inside it. That's going to cause cracks and weaken the glue's resistance to shear stresses over time. So as dive counts build up, the peak force applied to the inner lip of the groove in the ring is going to increase.

It's all about the grinding.
posted by flabdablet at 3:53 AM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

I recall reading that if the landing frame was found relatively intact that would mean the crew unloaded it as ballast to rise to the surface, which would imply they had some warning that something was going wrong. It looked relatively intact in the brief seconds of video I saw. We'll see what the investigation determines.
posted by mediareport at 4:00 AM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

That's not much of a lip, more like a positioning ridge. I'd be looking at a step a third to half the thickness of the ring, meaning that the inner diameter of the ring would be 3 to 5 inches less than the tube's ID, and this lip protruding into the CF tube at least 2 inches.

The carbon fibre already doesn't do much w.r.t. the compression the hull will be subjected to, and it'll need more than just a bit of a ridge to deal with any shear forces the bond could get subjected to if the hull wants to start deforming.
posted by Stoneshop at 4:16 AM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Got genuine chills from the report of human remains. I had not expected that. I thought they had been atomized, and I hope that this doesn’t mean they suffered, even just from knowing.
posted by Countess Elena at 4:21 AM on June 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

The landing skid was bolted to the hull rings; the main ballast were lead tubes attached with latches and fusible links. The latter would have separated after 16 hours, so they wouldn't be finding (parts of) the Titan with ballast still attached anyway. And the ballast they'd dump by tipping would be gone too, obviously.
posted by Stoneshop at 4:37 AM on June 29, 2023

Got genuine chills from the report of human remains. I had not expected that.

If the best they can say is "presumed human," that implies bits of tissue to me.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:03 AM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Nothing of [them] that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change,
Into something rich and strange...
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 6:17 AM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

I am not sure if this is a dumb question, but how did they retrieve these pieces of Titan?

Not a dumb question at all.
I'm shocked at how quickly they recovered the wreckage.

Going back to PRS news release for a timeline :

PRS was contacted by OceanGate on Sunday evening, June 18, and was fully mobilized ..ready for deployment from Buffalo Niagara International Airport within 20 hours.

Three U.S Air Force C-17s transported all assets to St. John’s, Newfoundland by Tuesday
afternoon ( afternoon June 20)

. We departed St. John’s within six hours of arrival ( By the vessel Horizon Arctic)

so they arrive onsite earliest sometime June 21

June 22at 21:15 UTC or at 4:15 PM Eastern Time they announce they found the debris field.

Yesterday afternoon June 28 they are unloading debris at the port of St. John's.

It's stunning how quickly they were able to do this.

==
Also the news release emphasizes that they were engaged in a rescue operation.
That they had the ability to bring the Titan and crew up

" Working in conjunction with the ship Deep Energy, which had the lifting capacity to bring the Titan submersible to the surface, the Odysseus was rigged specifically for a rescue operation. '

Just remarkable
posted by yyz at 6:48 AM on June 29, 2023 [8 favorites]

Squeezing the end of a cylinder to make it more out of round is also going to try to twist its end face out of flat, applying asymmetric compression forces to the glue joint.
This would also occur with compression of the cylinder anywhere along its length - any deformation of the cylinder is going to apply a shear force to the bond. With the cylinder bonded to the end cap on the inside and outside as well as the end surface, there's a lot of adhesion to resist that, but I would have thought the bond to the inner and outer surfaces would be much wider (ie the groove in the end cap deeper) to better resist those twisting forces on the bond. It also appears they just plonked the end cap on after applying the glue, with no weight or compression applied to force any air out of the glue and ensure a solid bond, noting that may not have been shown in the video.
posted by dg at 3:27 PM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

One thing that would be nice to see as an outcome of this is for the US coastguard to get its own fleet of deep sea ROV submersibles. As I understand it the USCG had to do an emergency contract to get the ROV and operator team in place. Unfortunately unlike other military branches the coast guard is chronically underfunded.
posted by interogative mood at 4:23 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

How about if you’re operating tourist trips to the titanic you have to pay for that to be in place?
posted by Artw at 4:43 PM on June 29, 2023 [11 favorites]

unlike other military branches the coast guard is chronically underfunded

Well that's relative. Every branch has plenty of worthy things they would ideally want to spend money on, money they weren't given. I tend to think deep sea rescue is infrequent enough that contracting the rare case it's needed is the right thing to do, rather than bearing the expense of maintenance and training. As mentioned earlier, it didn't really seem to slow anything down.

Often times there are MOAs with private industry in place ahead of time for emergency planning purposes. We've got one with a local private-sector hospital for them to maintain a certain capability and lend it to me when I need it, and we've got airlines that will bump passengers for us in a legit crisis. I'm sure there's some benefit in it for them as well, and the whole arrangement is more efficient than for us to maintain the capability "just in case" but hardly ever used.
posted by ctmf at 5:19 PM on June 29, 2023 [9 favorites]

It is unlikely that we will need to have to conduct this exact kind of tourist sub search again but I think the value of having equipment and trained Coast Guard personnel would support future missions related to protecting undersea pipelines and cables, ship wreck accident investigations, illegal dumping and more.
posted by interogative mood at 8:05 PM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Well don't get me wrong, I'm sure the Coast Guard would put them to use. In fact, the Navy used to have a manned, nuclear-powered one, NR-1, that was busy, busy, busy. I guess it's just a matter of whether congress will fund it or not.
posted by ctmf at 9:21 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Contracting it means you can get the latest tech. Military gear (other than weapons) isn't known for that.
posted by ctmf at 9:24 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Contracting it means you can get the latest tech.

...and/or retrieve the latest tech.
posted by Etrigan at 6:18 AM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

How about if you’re operating tourist trips to the titanic you have to pay for that to be in place?

The reputation, at least, of Lloyd's of London is that it will ensure almost anything—for a price.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:57 AM on June 30, 2023

It seems to be submarines all the way down...

From the BBC today:

Experts 'find' submarine buried in Dartmouth park

"Scientists are a step closer to shedding light on suspicions that a submarine is buried in a town park.
Whether or not the boat was actually underneath Coronation Park in Dartmouth is a question that has intrigued residents and historians for years.
Last year a Royal Navy officer began an investigation into the mystery and identified the vessel as HMS E52...."

AND:

"Using radar the team came to the conclusion that E52 "probably lies in the north east corner of the park".

Lt Kemp said the remains located "probably bear very little resemblance to a submarine any more".

Nearby they found another large metallic object, "most likely a German torpedo boat destroyer, S24", Lt Kemp added..."

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-devon-66070871
posted by Jody Tresidder at 10:25 AM on June 30, 2023

Addition to the above, to explain (from same BBC article):

"After the end of the First World War, the UK had a surplus of ships and submarines, including scores seized from the defeated Germans.

Many were driven ashore, left up creeks and anchorages and forgotten about as they decayed over decades."
posted by Jody Tresidder at 10:27 AM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Exactly what happened to Richard the Third.
posted by sebastienbailard at 1:00 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

"After the end of Buckingham's Rebellion, England had a surplus of Richards the Third..."
posted by jason_steakums at 1:13 PM on June 30, 2023 [15 favorites]

The Titan Submersible Was “an Accident Waiting to Happen”
Interviews and e-mails with expedition leaders and employees reveal how OceanGate ignored desperate warnings from inside and outside the company. “It’s a lemon,” one wrote. (New Yorker)
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:13 PM on July 1, 2023 [25 favorites]

Wow, I think I'd read most of the horrifying details individually at one point or another, but to see every one laid out like that is damning. And the insight into Lochridge and Nargeolet is something else.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:20 PM on July 1, 2023 [8 favorites]

From the New Yorker article, there is a detail which backs up some of our speculation- up thread - as to whether those in the deep submersibles community knew immediately that Titan had imploded:

McCallum, who was leading an expedition in Papua New Guinea at the time, knew the outcome almost instantly. “The report that I got immediately after the event—long before they were overdue—was that the sub was approaching thirty-five hundred metres,” he told me, while the oxygen clock was still ticking. “It dropped weights”—meaning that the team had aborted the dive—“then it lost comms, and lost tracking, and an implosion was heard.”

posted by rongorongo at 4:19 AM on July 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

Knew and assumed seemed to be used interchangeably here.
Cameron also used knew when he meant he thought it imploded.

The CEO of PRS, Ed Cassano, who recovered the debris gave a press conference in Buffalo the other day.
There a few interesting details.

The amount of gear they took was 70,000 pounds.
Another ship onsite ,Deep Energy, lost an ROV by pushing it beyond it's depth limits.

The crew had secured a lifting mechanism to the core of the Odysseus, which would have allowed them to get a hold of the submersible if it was found in tact.

"The plan was to grab the Titan," he said. "Then it was going to be attaching beacons. We were carrying extra beacons so if we lost her, other assets could track her. And then we were going to attach this heavy lift capability to the sub. At that point, we would begin recovery."

The Odysseus would carry the Titan up about 3,000 metres, at which point the other ROVs tasked in the search would jump in to help out. The Deep Energy — a ship that lays pipe on the seafloor in normal circumstances — would then use its heavy lift line and pull the Titan to the surface.

As for what the rescue and recovery mission will cost — Cassano had only two words.

"A lot."
posted by yyz at 6:06 AM on July 2, 2023 [6 favorites]

The Hydraulic Press Channel implodes some capped carbon fibre tubing
posted by flabdablet at 7:02 AM on July 2, 2023 [6 favorites]

More from that New Yorker piece Horace Rumpole posted above:

“Stockton strategically structured everything to be out of U.S. jurisdiction” for its Titanic pursuits, the former senior OceanGate employee told me. “It was deliberate.” In a legal filing, the company reported that the submersible was “being developed and assembled in Washington, but will be owned by a Bahamian entity, will be registered in the Bahamas and will operate exclusively outside the territorial waters of the United States.” Although it is illegal to transport passengers in an unclassed, experimental submersible, “under U.S. regulations, you can kill crew,” McCallum told me. “You do get in a little bit of trouble, in the eyes of the law. But, if you kill a passenger, you’re in big trouble. And so everyone was classified as a ‘mission specialist.’ There were no passengers—the word ‘passenger’ was never used.” No one bought tickets; they contributed an amount of money set by Rush to one of OceanGate’s entities, to fund their own missions.

“It is truly hard to imagine the discernment it took for Stockton to string together each of the links in the chain,” Patrick noted. “ ‘How do I avoid liability in Washington State? How do I avoid liability with an offshore corporate structure? How do I keep the U.S. Coast Guard from breathing down my neck?’ ”

posted by mochapickle at 7:41 AM on July 2, 2023 [20 favorites]

The total persecution of Lochridge for trying to save their lives...good god.

I feel like Rush earned his death after all of that. He was absolutely hell or high water pursuing it, no matter what anyone said. What a dick. People complained about rich people doing this? Well, this guy being insistent on doing this when he was constantly told it wasn't safe...
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:35 AM on July 2, 2023 [11 favorites]

The Behind the Bastards podcast just did a two-parter on Stockton Rush and OceanGate. It's good.
posted by LindsayIrene at 8:44 AM on July 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

The Hydraulic Press Channel implodes some capped carbon fibre tubing

Enlightening, but not very surprising.
posted by Stoneshop at 9:14 AM on July 2, 2023

That New Yorker article was pretty damning, but I couldn't help noticing that of all the people the author quoted, there was only a single woman (OceanGate’s director of finance and administration), and the author didn't even bother to give her name.

Also, people need to take a long hard look at the role of hereditary social class in America and how it drives the behaviours that lead to disasters like this.
posted by heatherlogan at 10:13 AM on July 2, 2023 [13 favorites]

well this is weird'
I was looking at their SEC filing January 2020 where they raised $18 million.

It's not the filing that's strange but this story filed here about it also january 2020.
The money is to be used to build 2 new submersibles

In it there's this strange entry;

OceanGate will take advantage of lessons learned during the construction of its carbon-hulled Titan submersible, which was originally built for Titanic journeys. Rush said tests that were conducted at the Deep Ocean Test Facility in Annapolis, Md., revealed that the Titan’s hull “showed signs of cyclic fatigue.” As a result, the hull’s depth rating was reduced to 3,000 meters.

“Not enough to get to the Titanic,” Rush said.
---

I mean what the hell?
posted by yyz at 10:30 AM on July 2, 2023 [12 favorites]

Mike Bell has done an engineering driven animation of the implosion.
posted by rongorongo at 11:07 AM on July 2, 2023 [5 favorites]

It is truly hard to imagine the discernment it took for Stockton to string together each of the links in the chain,” Patrick noted. “ ‘How do I avoid liability in Washington State? How do I avoid liability with an offshore corporate structure? How do I keep the U.S. Coast Guard from breathing down my neck?’ ”

It’s just like Rebecca Watson said in one of her videos, ‘libertarianism killed these people.'
posted by jamjam at 1:38 PM on July 2, 2023 [16 favorites]

Oh hai, here is that video.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:19 PM on July 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

Titanic Submarine and Why We Care - Josh Johnson - New York Comedy Club - Stand Up Comedy
posted by srboisvert at 10:35 AM on July 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

An (alleged) transcript between the Polar Prince and Titan has emerged. Some analysis here. - the overall picture appears to be a dive which took place at a faster rate than usual, a triggering of the RTM (real time monitoring) system when the sub was about 400 meters above Titanic, dropping of basalt and then a slow ascent beginning.
posted by rongorongo at 12:06 AM on July 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

If that transcript is genuine, the idea that the people on board met their end completely by surprise and without even knowing they were at risk goes right out the window. Not only that, but (again, assuming the transcript is real) it was clear almost right from the start that something was wrong and the dive should have been aborted. They should have known the high speed of descent was going to create a major problem with ascending.
posted by dg at 10:06 PM on July 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

I have seen doubts expressed about whether that transcript is genuine. One that arises in my mind is: how would you end up with a higher than planned rate of descent anyway? You know the craft's volume and weight, you know the weight of your passengers and other payload, isn't calculating its effective density and descent rate something obvious and trivial? Were Oceangate operations really that slipshod? or are the descent rate details so odd because the transcript is just made up?
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:28 PM on July 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah, that's what I wondered as well. It's not like it's the first time Titan had done the trip, so calculating the descent rate should be just about the simplest part of the whole thing. The cynical part of my brain tells me that, yes, maybe they really were that slipshod and/or were so overconfident that they did something as monumentally stupid as not considering the weight of the occupants for that specific trip.
posted by dg at 10:52 PM on July 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Real Engineering has released "The Questionable Engineering of Oceangate" - the guy behind the channel has a track record of explaining engineering issues but also specific expertise in the testing of composite materials. His assessment "This is not innovation; it is profiteering"

It's not like it's the first time Titan had done the trip, so calculating the descent rate should be just about the simplest part of the whole thing.
There is anecdotal evidence that the weight of the crew was collected very carefully as part of their standard procedures: if you were planning to take a sandwich with you on the trip for lunch - then you would be weighed with your sandwich. So it sounds as if the goal of achieving neutral buoyancy was a bit of a knife-edge operation. I guess the only problem with this mechanism is that it depends on accurate manual entry of weights in a spreadsheet (5 rows not 4) - and then accurate removal/addition of compensating weights from the sub before the trip. It also depends on not having a CEO who might not want to overload the sub to make the boring old journey down a little shorter. I'm not sure the proper execution of their own precise procedure is something would trust Oceangate to reliably get right.
posted by rongorongo at 11:42 PM on July 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

If the Titan had started to give a little bit more under the increasing pressure of the surrounding seawater than it usually did, thereby decreasing its volume and increasing its density, wouldn’t that have caused it to descend faster?
posted by jamjam at 1:17 AM on July 11, 2023

Titan's hull was super rigid by design. By the time it had deformed enough to affect its buoyancy by more than a few parts per million, it was already imploding.
posted by flabdablet at 3:08 AM on July 11, 2023

If that transcript is genuine, the idea that the people on board met their end completely by surprise and without even knowing they were at risk goes right out the window.

I know more about Internet ghouls than I know about composites engineering, and consequently I'll be treating that transcript as opportunistic disaster porn unless and until it's confirmed by OceanGate.
posted by flabdablet at 3:11 AM on July 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

The purported transcript tracks with what James Cameron said early on about hearing "in the community" that Titan was already ascending when contact was lost. The video that rongorongo posted above, dissecting the transcript, contains several theories/guesses about what might've happened. One guess cites this journalist's account of having been scheduled to go on an earlier dive--and that Titan was usually carried on the deck of the Polar Prince, but that before his ride was canceled, it had been towed in the water instead, and had been tossed around quite a bit. If they did have trouble ascending, and it's plausible that it was because of weight, I'd hope they're looking at the possibility that Titan's hull was compromised during towing. For example, if the weight of Titan was inadvertently increased not by screwing up crew weight calculation, but by the vehicle taking on water undetected during towing before it ever descended.
posted by ImproviseOrDie at 4:42 AM on July 11, 2023

The purported transcript tracks with what James Cameron said early on about hearing "in the community" that Titan was already ascending when contact was lost.

Indeed it does. And the fact that you and I and everybody else in the world had heard him say that well before the existence of a transcript became a talking point is one of the things leading me to suspect that details such as descent and ascent rates might owe more to a ghoul's imagination than to reality. I have met people who would wholly delight in trolling the Internet with something like this.

I don't have a lot invested in the ghoul hypothesis, but it's enough to discourage me from taking the transcript as gospel. I'll wait for the investigators to do their job and release whatever they can before speculating further.
posted by flabdablet at 4:57 AM on July 11, 2023 [7 favorites]

Seawater salinity, temperature, and pressure all affect buoyancy, and all three of those things vary in time and 3d space.
posted by ctmf at 12:17 PM on July 11, 2023

A real submarine measures those factors in real time, by monitoring how much control surface deflection you need to maintain depth and using that to calculate how heavy/light the boat is. They also have expendable instruments they can shoot out that go up to the surface and then down to the bottom to give you a vertical profile of direct measurements. Titan had none of those tools (maybe the tender vessel had the XBTs)
posted by ctmf at 12:20 PM on July 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

I have seen doubts expressed about whether that transcript is genuine.

Yes; the bit about "jettisoning the frame" seemed quite sus.
posted by heatherlogan at 7:33 PM on July 14, 2023

OceanGate Is Getting Majorly Sued (LegalEagle, YouTube, 25m30s)
posted by flabdablet at 11:59 AM on July 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

OceanGate Is Getting Majorly Sued
I'm struck by the irony that Rush seems to have taken far more care about not getting Oceangate into legal jeopardy than he did about anything else. Perhaps ensuring he was on the sub could be seen as a final fail-safe for him to avoid seeing the inside of a courtroom.
posted by rongorongo at 5:52 AM on July 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

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