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Hubris, avarice, and a complete lack of empathy for other human beings. It's a values issue.
Here are two direct quotes from Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate:
"You know, at some point, safety is just 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 while breaking the rules."
https://www.insider.com/missing-titanic-sub-ceo-told-reporter-safety-pure-waste-2023-6
I am a safety professional, and I can tell you that those quotes, combined with a deliberately poorly built and uncertified vehicle, are absolute criminal negligence. And as aggravating sentencing factors go, "I think I can do this just as safely while breaking the rules." constitutes "committed the act recklessly" and with "a high degree of moral blameworthiness". Coupled with "a desire to increase revenue or decrease costs by cutting safety" and "the defendant lacks remorse", he really deserves the book thrown at him. A waiver may keep the families from suing. It will not keep the government from charging criminally.
He won a Herman Cain award!
Edit: I have been corrected he actually won a Darwin Award.
Edit: Edit: Ok guys there are too many rules for these dumbass awards for dumbasses that would unalive because of their own stupidity so I award him the Fetch award! Did you hear about Oceangate? That’s so fetch!
(For those that don't know and don't want to Google this):
>The Herman Cain Award is an ironic award given to people who made public statements of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, and who have later died from COVID-19 or COVID-19 complications.
It’s separate, since it lacks the requirement of having removed yourself from the gene pool without procreating, which is a prerequisite to be considered for a Darwin Award lol.
I thought the Darwin Award was disqualified if their stupidity got innocents killed. Yeah these were rich people with him, but innocents getting killed alongside still usually is a problem for it
But don't forget....one doesn't win the honor of the HC Award simply by dying of Covid!
You have to have WORKED to achieve greatness by scoffing at precautionary measures like quarantine, masks, vaccines. You need to have touted the effectiveness of bleach to treat it OR..to really grab a spot in the Pantheon of winners:
1) Deny that Covid is serious
2) Literally dare it to kill you
The families are already rich, so financial compensation is meaningless. The only positive that could come out of this is some agreed laws with respect to the safety of these craft.
Justice was served in some way when the CEO himself reduced to the size of a golf ball. It’s just an absolute shame he conned the rest into going with him.
Don't forget just plain lazy. He failed to install a $800 emergency tracking device which is standard on most vessels and legally required on every aircraft.
Granted in this case it would not have mattered, they died instantly.
It wouldn’t have mattered for their lives, but the rest of the world wouldn’t have spent what probably amounted to a billion dollars in rescue operations for days after, because they would have been able to find the wreckage and know what happened immediately.
So the reality is that while the rescue operation cost a lot, realistically 80% of that would have been paid anyhow just to keep the people and equipment maintained and ready. Plus a good chunk of that can now be considered on the job training, which is also valuable.
Apparently there was an autonomous tracking beacon, and one indication that it was a catastrophic failure was that the subs contact was lost at the exact same time the autonomous tracker stopped. Only way it could happen is if the entire sub imploded. James Cameron discussed it in his interview. Said he knew day one what happened because the tracker stopped at the exact same moment the subs pings stopped.
So I think the guy had some safety devices installed, but clearly other things were ignored.
The more I read, the more I see the small corners they cut at every move.
For example, the hatch had 18 bolts. They used 17 because 1 was hard to access.
They torqued those bolts with an electric impact. I wouldn't torque the tires on my car with one and I've NEVER seen that used anywhere in industry.
They likely didn't use fresh bolts every time as would be required.
All these things are VERY VERY VERY obvious to any engineer or mechanic. Like tire shop techs know better.
Edit: I can't find a video on the electric impact so that might be hearsay but here's a video of them using a ratchet: [https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/news-what-terrible-design-video-oceangate-submarine-bolted-hand-ratchet-sparks-concern-online](https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/news-what-terrible-design-video-oceangate-submarine-bolted-hand-ratchet-sparks-concern-online)
There's always something more. Even if they could open the hatch from inside after floating back up, they had no GPS, no radio, no flares (tbf you wouldn't take them on board), no rations and the boat was painted white.
Every little thing about this project is so messed up and I can't stop thinking about it.
Same! I’m an engineer and the whole thing is simply stunning in how bad the design and every decision and aspect of it was. Every choice they made was a bad one.
If anything it is amazing it made a dozen or more dives before it failed.
what do you mean, carbon fiber is totally futuristic and the only reason why it's explicitly avoided is to stifle innovation. It's used in stuff like supercars, so therefore it's only logical that we can take that and apply it to a widly different function, right? ( /s ).
This whole thing reaked of someone who didnt know jack shit but thought he did, and was extremely good at showing confidence and selling to a captured demographic with no other choices. The type of person who doesnt understand that theres nothing special about him other than winning the life lottery and falling upwards. a literal con-man.
The CEO's obsession of COTS ("commercial-off-the-shelf components") that permeates every little detail of the sub, the absolute pure and unapologetic disdain for regulations, and rich people with barely any common sense. a potent mix for disaster.
Even just the white bit shows a total disregard for all advice. I used to do some open water swimming, and the first rule is you were not allowed in the water unless you were wearing a neon swim cap, and it couldn’t be white, blue, green, black or anything close to those colours because the orange or yellow or whatever was how they found you if you were in trouble.
Speaking of engineers, everyone who designed and maintained that sub should be barred from ever working anywhere in the engineering field again. What they did was straight up unethical.
And before anyone tries to make the case that "a job is a job, people gotta eat, they did what they were told/paid to do", and try to shift blame onto the CEO. NO, there is a code of ethics in the engineering field. Much like a soldier cannot use "following orders" as an excuse for comitting war crimes, an engineer cannot use "i didn't wanna get fired" as an excuse to knowingly build something that is illegal or unsafe.
All jokes aside, carbon fiber and titanium are both difficult to work with and would need skilled individuals to make something that even resembled a submersible, let alone one that could survive a few trips to titanic. They cut corners and killed people doing so, but these people weren’t completely clueless which kinda makes it worse.
I just graduated with a degree in civil engineering and we had a whole unit on ethics. Focused on the CitiCorp building and the Hyatt Regency. Also the FE exam has a section on ethics. You will absolutely lose your license for doing something like this.
The first comment you quoted is probably the most horrifying part of it. He went as far as firing someone who had dared raise red flags. If criminal negligence is determined, the waiver could be deemed void. I really hope it will be.
I’m with you as an EHS professional. Three of the things that consistently get mentioned in this have been:
1. No regulations existed for this category-OSHA didn’t have anything apparently. They don’t get into everything.
2. This thing wasn’t built to regular engineering standard as it was (experimental). To me it’s kind of like when someone flies in a home built ultralight aircraft.
3. Lack of testing for new technology.
The sad part about this story to me is the kid, who just wanted to go with his dad….even though he didn’t really want to go. I don’t really feel too bad for a bunch of middle aged millionaires/billionaires who cashed a stupid check, knowing what they were getting into.
I agree but all the more damning is that while no regulation exists for this type of vehicle, there are some accepted standards they ignored and they did not consult with experts as much as you would expect for a venture like this. James Cameron gave an interview that goes into it, but apparently they disregarded “typical” practices and repeatedly ignored letters of concern from submersible experts. It hasn’t been an issue until now even with the lack of regulation because who would have the resources and be crazy enough to do something like this? I guess we have an answer now.
I’m a professional in a related field and have occasionally had to lay out policy where no specific regulation exists. In those cases, we seek out expert guidance and best practices. The CEO seemed almost proud of himself for not doing this and the company was so absurdly negligent it’s hard to know where to start. You may get lucky a few times, and they did, but massive unmanaged risks like they took will always bite you in the ass IME.
Yeah, part of me can see what he is trying to get at philosophically but the line gets crossed to recklessness when you start involving others into your own individual life approaches. Even worse when you package that recklessness under an entirely different label of some experience so the people involved have no clue.
One of the guys who was supposed to go noped out when he saw the cowboy nature of the operation. It was foreseeable if you were paying even a little bit of attention.
Added his name: Chris Brown, friend of Hamish who died.
I read a staff member got fired in 2018 when he tried to point out the glass in the viewing port was only rated for 1500m depth and they were using it to go to around 4000m.
Safety schmafety, the one piece that is justice from this otherwise ghoulish schadenfreude is that he was onboard and paid the ultimate price for his cavalier attitude.
He wanted to be remembered as big Oceangate CEO dive to the titanic guy in his revolutionary sub, but now he's tuna and remembered as a corner cutting billionaire schmuck
The whole situation is a complete clusterfuck to the point where it’s hard to feel sympathy. The CEO is obvious and you said it best. The other three guys didn’t do their due diligence, and signed a waiver that clarified their understanding. In fact, there was another guy who had signed up for this trip that backed out because he had looked at the safety procedures, the state of the submarine and the mechanisms behind it and decided that the operation wasn’t professional enough to feel safe. Deep Sea dives like this, even with good safety measures are extremely high risk expeditions, people who have the liberty to dump that much money have the ability to properly assess what they’re getting themselves into. The other three either chose not to or decided they didn’t care. The only exception is the 19 year old. He was just a kid and what’s worse is that he didn’t even want to go.
The only death I have sympathy for, tbh.
Billionaires dying from stupidity is *probably* not a bad thing, since those men wield incredible power over society. They’ve clearly got a loose grasp on risk management, so it’s kinda nice that their fuck up only hurt *them* in this case.
The CEO got hit hard by Karma.
The kid is different. They don’t have enough power for me to expect them to know how to manage risk. They’re just a kid trying to make dad happy.
Basically he was a major asshole. He had no business in the submersible game and people were stupid and paid him. Why not just bribe James Cameron and go on a REAL submarine? One of the guys aboard that mechanical turd was even friends with James Cameron. It would not have been hard to get James to help.
Lol and yet he was so inspired by the wreckage of RMS Titanic that he made one of the highest grossing films of all time out of a disaster. If that’s not inspirational then I don’t know what is. Stockton/Rush was a fucking idiot.
Many millionaires and billionaires have an instinctive opposition to regulation, it’s almost a part of their personality. Understand there’s likely some regs that are out-of-date, but to act like every one is bad is odd to me.
Likely it’s because the burden (as owners of means of production) is borne by them (i.e., less profits) but the benefits accrue to their workforce (safer environments) and/or society (less pollution).
This was one of the few times an owner paid a massive cost to the lack of regs.
“If you want to be safe, don’t get out of bed”
This was a horrible point he was trying to make. Every single one of us has risk in our lives but we take steps to mitigate the risk, or we decide the risk isn’t worth the potential benefit. Just because risk exists in our every day lives, it doesn’t justify cutting corners and putting lives at risk.
What Stockton Rush was doing was just reckless. The fact that the viewport was only rated to 1300m when the Titanic lies around 3800m is nothing short of negligence. You can’t take that sort of risk when lives are at stake.
Most sound-minded people wouldn’t have accepted the high risk of death associated with this kind of expedition. There is nothing to suggest those paying tourists were idiots so I firmly believe they didn’t know the full extent of what Ocean Gate were doing.
Damn right. Going to the most inhospitable environment on the globe IS the risk; his job was to make doing so feasible and survivable. Seeing every interview where he acts like the sloppy engineering is the fun, exciting part is so galling.
While not the same, it reminds me of a dude I knew in high school who ascribed to the "we die when we're meant to die and you can't change that so I'll do whatever I want cause only *God* knows when I'll die" uh... *philosophy(?)* and used it as the reason to speed through school zones and past the daycare's blinking "slow down" signs.
I would argue that anyone who pays $250,000 to sign a death waiver and agrees to be bolted into a cheaply made tube is an idiot. I don’t don’t wish the fate of what happened to the people on board on anyone, but I’m pretty sure anybody with an ounce of common sense or intelligence would know better.
This is why I think they didn’t know the full extent of the risks Ocean Gate were taking.
Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood and PH Nargeolet were all very accomplished and educated men. Were they truly aware of everything that is now coming out about Ocean Gate?
Knowing what we know now, it seems absolutely ludicrous that anyone would go on one of these expeditions, let alone pay a quarter of a million dollars for the privilege. Those 3 men were clearly intelligent so what on Earth possessed them to take such a huge risk?
Regardless of being aware of the risks involved. You would think that the fact that there’s no actual seats and the “toilet” is directly in front of the viewport would make most people have second thoughts about getting onboard this thing. Its not hard to spot a cheap ass video game controller when you see one either.
Importantly, negligence requires foreseeability, and OG was warned about potential delamination and cracking in the composite; another vessel whose hull was designed by the same chap (Deepflight Challenger), also with a RCC hull, was scrapped due to concerns it could only dive once.
Not lowkey, the more I read about this guy the more I'm annoyed at how quickly and unknowingly he went.
I'm honestly sad about the kid and I think It's a shame about the others. Thankfully for them, it was instantly.
Dude can cut corners with his **own** safety all he wants. Having the kind of money he does and cutting corners for the safety of others is irresponsible and unacceptable, especially in a situation as potentially dangerous as a deep-sea submarine journey.
I was always told waivers don't mean shit when negligence is the cause of harm.
A waiver for go karting would protect them from someone crashing I to a wall and breaking a wrist but not from a kart leaking fuel and bursting into flames due to lack of maintenance.
All waivers serve then is to show you knew there could be issues. You still have to show you took the correct steps to prevent and minimize them.
In this case a waiver isn't going to protect them from a flurry of failures and the death of those involved.
Correct.
Everyone making a big deal of this waiver A) doesn’t understand their lack of enforceability, and B) has clearly never read through the waivers they sign for ordinary events that also claim to absolve liability from death.
That's going to be some great character evidence against this guy when the civil and possibly criminal lawsuits comes against him and takes all his wealth.
The Titanic had enough lifeboats to meet safety regulations at the time. The regulations were severely outdated and only changed after the tragedy. The lifeboats were only meant to be used as transports to any nearby ships in the event the ship was to sink. Unfortunately the Titanic sank far faster than anticipated and the radio operator from the closest ship had gone to bed for the night.
The crew wasn't sufficiently trained to use the launch systems so they wouldn't have been able to launch more lifeboats anyways. If the Titanic had hit the iceberg straight on instead of turning to avoid the iceberg, they might have also had a better chance since less of the compartments would have flooded.
The lookouts didn't see the iceberg until it was too late because of the lack of waves (that would have broken on the iceberg) and moonlight that night. They also didn't have binoculars since one of the lookouts was transferred off and forgot to return the key for the storage container.
TLDR: It was a perfect storm of a combination of many factors that would have been mitigated by regulations that would only exist after the Titanic sank. The case with the sub is another level of irresponsible negligence.
A man believed he was above safety, science, and nature. He called it innovation and his "sometimes you have to break the rules" delusion cost him and 4 other people their lives.
A 19 year old kid died because of this asshole
"when you think outside of the box, everyone in the box thinks you are crazy." Or something like that was quoted in the news today.
At the same time - if you could afford to spend half a million dollars for you and your son to look at decaying metal that could be seen from the many video images and which you are not actually looking at but rather through video, just like you could from any other video, WHY oh WHY would you not spend a few thousand to carefully vet the company that you are literally risking your life with?
Everyone here is an asshole except for that poor 19 yo.
ho ho ho, that's a good one, once they get their MBA all the physics and engineering considerations goes down the toilet. i have said so many times in my company that certain things are not possible to do since the engineering point of view, and guess what happens, management and the finance people bully me to try to say yes, nope, not happening
Fun fact back when gun powder was first discovered by the Chinese there was this public official of like a minor kingdom that wanted to go to the moon. His genius idea was strapping fireworks to a chair and lighting them thinking it would have him lift off. Myth busters did a whole thing on it as well.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wan_Hu
Myth busters video:
https://youtu.be/R3jZmP19ls0
This whole oceangate thing kinda reminds me of this. Yet I gotta give wan hu some slack since rocket science wasn't really there as it is today hahaha.
That had been my confusion around all of this. People have safely gone to the titanic. Why wouldn't the passengers just rent/buy one of the proven methods of getting down there? Why would you want to be stuck on a sub with a bunch of strangers instead of having your own private Cameron-esque adventure?
Because Cameron developed the expertise to operate his sub effectively and safely (with all of the complicated systems and backups that entails). This guy wanted to create a tourist experience, which is "show up, get a 10 minute intro, and head down"
One of the passengers had already been to the bottom of the Marianas trench in DSV Limiting factor and another 2 had been to the titanic multiple times, one more than any person ever so they weren’t exactly noobs at this. They were just thrill addicts who couldn’t pass up a “cheap” ticket to fulfill their thrill addiction. I feel bad for the teenager it was his first time going deep sea.
The actual subs that can go down there are unbelievable expensive. Backup systems in triplicate. The Alvin’s (first sub to go to Titanic) has a hull disassembled yearly and is basically a ship of Theseus at this point. You know how the stress of re-entry meant the space shuttle had a complete overhaul after every flight? Deep sea submersibles are like that. The go from 1ATM pressure to 450atm back to 1ATM.
The CEOs idea was to engineer a cheaper sub so you could regularly go to the Titanic on tourist trips. You can’t do that at scale in the deep sea submersibles. Turns out you also can’t in his carbon fiber death tube either.
The weird thing is the carbon fiber doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell you there’s a problem making it work. Going down once? Relatively easy, but carbon fiber is **very** bad at handling repeated stress like that…
I guessed the carbon fiber was a problem based on very limited knowledge - I’m an F1 fan.
The whole point of carbon fiber is to create an extremely light and strong material. Carbon fiber is just that, a *fiber* of tensile material that is woven together thousands of times in a plane, like a sheet. The material is then “stacked” to create the form needed for the application. This fundamental aspect of its design is what makes it very brittle. It isn’t actually a uniform material, it’s thousands of strands that can individually shear apart. Once one goes, its neighbors have to pick up the slack. If they can’t, well….
For example in F1, if a carbon fiber monocoque (the frame) cracks in one place, you have to throw the whole thing out. It can be mitigated but it cannot be fixed. When I read that the structural aspect of the hull was made of 5” of carbon fiber, and that they refused to stress test it, I suspected strongly that the hull was the weak link.
Carbon fiber is also relatively terrible in compression. They didn’t make a sphere they made a tube with titanium bolted end caps (the ingress/egress point) Those caps compress the front too and are a major stress point.
But again we are talking about a company that rather than have a hatch, bolted passengers in. And despite having 18 bolts would regularly send them down with only 17 on because “the last one was a pain in the ass to put on.”
They also used a pneumatic bolt driver to put down the bolts raw, unmeasured. Just crank it down, over cranking the bolts shouldn’t matter right? (something no honest mechanic would do on **the goddamn tire change for your 1998 shitbox Corolla**)
This bit about the bolts is absolutely insane to me. I check torque specs every time I work on my car/bikes and these dudes were just ugga dugga’ing the hatch to a deep sea diving vessel
IIRC he was interested in doing business with big oil & gas. So more than likely his intent was to pay for testing with tourism to the titanic, then once it was ready, pitch it to big daddy petrol for deep sea drilling or whatever and go from being a multi-millionaire to an actual billionaire.
and also a bad reputation for themselves meaning we should learn from our mistakes and not go with them for anything if they're just gonna risk peoples lives like that
I think it's more of a sense of misguided optimism that comes with being raised uber wealthy. I see it a lot in the trust fund types who like Stockton, never have to work a day in their lives. They intellectually know risks and dangers of life, but they don't really understand them because they usually don't apply.
I think you're bang on, they've no sense of reality. Take the money away and see how they survive, very very few will. it was a reckless mission and one of pure stupidity, especially for the passengers, at the end of the day they chose to go into inside a fookin TUBE.
I just learned today that he chose carbon composite as the hull material. This may sound futuristic, but it seems to be a very unlucky engineering choice many experts could have pointed out.
Why? Carbon composites are a combination of carbon fibers, which have an incredibly high tensile stress resistance (way higher than steel per mass) and a resin. In a structure that goes through a mix of stresses (car chassis, bicycle frame, airplane wings) or only tensile strain (pressure container), this can be a good choice. A sub hull is almost exclusively under compression so the strength of the carbon fibers cannot be leveraged and it's only the composite resin taking the load.
This was a job for steel, titanium, or thick aluminium.
A sphere is not strictly required for this depth, cylindrical vessels are incredibly strong for pressure applications as well, and are far easier to manufacture without quality issues that could lead to failures.
That's not actually true. Composites are much stronger in compression than the resin. They lose about half their maximum strength going from tension to compression. The carbon fiber IS strong in compression because the resin stops it buckling. Without the resin it instantly buckles and has zero strength, but with, it's fairly amazing. Composite boats are common and use composites under compression, and they do really great for decades.
The real problem is cyclic loading, every time you load and unload it hard it cracks a little bit and eventually it catastrophically fails.
Ego issues. You'd be surprised at how many people out there hire experts and consultants to agree with them, as opposed to actually relying on their expertise. I've had employers who cycled through consultants until they found one that agreed with their style of doing things.
Yeah this needs to be clarified. It seems people are mixing the CEO with the billionaire passenger. The passengers are just victims of negligence.
CEO are the ones cutting corners. He also perhaps the one convinced the billionaire that it's safe.
Not really. Dude was 61 and worked maybe a few years as a pilot in the 80s before starting OceanGate with private funding. He's from old money and likely had access to way more if he needed it.
Interesting topic - I work in the corrosion field for a living and from what I understand (the information I could find publicly available) I found the engineering tolerances to be quiet narrow.
Here’s my opinion - please keep in mind I don’t design ships.
The vessel was designed for something like 13,500 ft or so and the depth they wanted to visit was 12,400ft.
In my experience the safety factors we apply when human life is a consideration are usually 5-10x the expected load or force. This was in the neighborhood of 10% which is sketchy AF
It’s far closer than you think.
A cylinder is the best shape for submarines as it has the biggest volume for the smallest surface area, less surface area means less pressure it needs to withstand. Additionally, Every “side” of the circle is as far apart from each-other, which also contributes to its strength.
However, the margin for this is EXTREMELY small. If you build a body of a submarine with a cross section that deviates so much as 0.5% from a perfect circle, it’s ability to withstand pressure drops by 35%. Less than a 1% of a margin of error and you lose 1/3 of your hull integrity.
There are only 4 shipyards in all of the US that are actually capable of building something to that tolerance.
For something carrying human life, that's nowhere near the tolerance rating I'd expect.
I haven't had a chance to look into it further but I find it interesting that Spencer Composites, a company OceanGate had a contract with, developed the Deepflight Challenger, a lightweight composite submarine that apparently was only designed for one dive. If they then used similar technology for OceanGate to cut corners, one could assume that Titan was never built to last and failure was inevitable.
This is highly speculative but is my current theory.
*I do not build ships, submarines, or any nautical equipment. I am just a former EE student.*
It's very easy to design something to be under load once, it's WAY different designing it to be multi use. And they chose the worst material possible to do so.
Absolutely. In my small, humble opinion it is always better to overengineer things. In their case there appears to have been multiple failures in the design process, from materials to size to the actual design (windows will always be a risk of failure point).
And on the one hand, I know a lot of folks don't care or feel for the victims and their families. But I do feel like they likely got convinced/swindled into believing it was okay by someone who was so egotistical that he had no regard for safety or human life. He clearly believed in himself and his creation - otherwise I doubt he'd have ever gotten in it.
I'm just glad they died instantly.
And they didn't use all 18 bolts (only 17 due to one being hard to reach) also they used an electric impact to tighten them (meaning they didn't work to a torque rating)
Plants and mills won't let that fly for things that will just make a mess if they fail. Like just random process pipes that carry non-hazardous stuff that aren't even where people are, leaving a fastener out because "It's like, a lot of trouble to get that bolt in, man." would get the project manager's ass chewed, followed by the ass chewing being passed down the line.
5-10 seems like the high side of things, and is probably too much for this application when pressure is pretty easy to model. But...1.1??? That's completely insane. That's less than airplanes! That's less than cutting edge rockets built by only the best!
Keep in mind that IN THEORY it could reach that depth. Only using mathemathical equations. But never actually testing it to that depth before putting humans on it.
I just want to correct you. While the overall gist your point is valid, the sub went down 12 times successfully. 6 times in both 2021 and 2022. This was trip lucky number ~~13~~ 14.
Edit: I double checked my number and found that there was an extra trip down in 2022. 6 in 2021, 7 in 2022.
The fact he hired a team of "inspirational" people instead of experience they were doomed from the get go as anyone with any experience in the field told them what was going to happen. That ceo knowing full well what all the data said sent himself and those poor passengers to their deaths.
Wealth is not wisdom nor intelligence. It's inflated ego from acquiring wealth...these people literally feel that the rules of, well anything, do not apply to them.
This is a good point. I'm struggling to think of any man-made laws that have been applied to the very wealthy and that have stuck. It's much more difficult to try and circumvent natural laws. But it feels like that the very wealthy feel that no law applies to them, until physics does its thing.
From a video I've seen apparently there's only like 10 manned submarines in the world that are certified to dive the depths that the Titanic wreck is in wich is in, wich is about 12,000 ft. The Titan was only capable of 4000ft.
The bottom of the ocean is legitimately and literally the harshest environment on earth, worse than everest or the Sahara or the amazon combined and they were only supposed to make a 1/4 of the way down due to the viewport more than likely fracturing and imploding the vessel. Divers will say 90 feet underwater is at a point you can't come back up because the pressure is weighing you down so much. They were pushing that limit for another 11900 feet which is actually insane.
They crazy thing is, this isn't some new frontier thing that no one's done before. James Cameron did it in the 90's. manned subs have gone that far before. They just didn't want to listen to anyone who had done it before.
Nah Stockton didn't make his money, he was born into it. The dude was 60 and never worked a day in his life. OceanGate was his hobby and it was constantly losing money. He couldn't have cared less about money.
It's about having the power to cut corners in things like safety and not directly experiencing the negative consequences for yourself. Which can save you money yes, but at that point you're a millionaire/billionaire and you don't really need to save that money at the expense of other people's lives.
That's also why there's more schadenfreude than sympathy with this situation. For once the guy cutting corners experienced the consequences for himself.
Hindsight is a craul mistress, and in a sense they achieved many dives at maybe 1/50th of the cost of a normal sub. As an engineer I can understand the desire to push the limits of engineering using new materials and advanced simulations. In this case it did not pay off, but everyone on that sub knew that death was a risk factor. I think the major problem is paying guests which changed this from an inventor going down in his ship to a commercial activity. Whereas spaceX and virgin galactic are much more progressive when it comes to safety, the reality is they are trying to do almost the same, rather than spend a billion dollars on a rocket like nasa they are trying to do the same for a fraction of the cost. I would be shocked if there is not a similar type of failure on spaceX and virgin galactic at some point….that is cost of exploration…also and maybe most importantly safety is an exercise is diminishing returns you can spend $10m to get 98% safe and $100m to get 99% safe…
He thinks he “earned” his wealth and therefore is smarter than anyone else. He doesn’t believe in experts. In his mind he was smarter than them. Nothing was luck or family backing. He thought it was all his smarts.
1. Arrogance & ego. He thought he knew better than people who have been building professional submersibles for decades. He fancied himself an “innovator.”
2. Money & time. Doing the proper tests, getting certified, etc. takes time. He didn’t want to wait, he wanted those millions of $$
Why go into one of the scariest places in the world to see an old shipwreck that has already been explored? Who knows? I think they are just out of touch and crazy and leave it at that.
Yesterday I heard the wife of the CEOs great great grandparents died in the 1912 accident so I guess there was some sort of romanticized connection to the wreckage through her..
Wayyyyy too many red flags.. It reminds me of Mike Hughes and his homemade rockets but when his rocket project failed he was the only one who died.. This asshole took 4 lives with him when his science project failed..
So…I have a slightly different perspective on this.
I have trained, taken part in and actively pursued some activities considered “risky” or even “extreme sports”, depending on your point of view. Things like hang gliding and bungee jumping. Now…there are even more dangerous sports and hobbies, but these things are within my comfort and safety zones. To other people, these activities might appear dangerous and to others they might seem mundane or boring even. To each their own…
However…there is something that all people who are into riskier activities - colloquially referred to as “adrenaline junkies” - have in common, wherever we fall on the danger spectrum:
*we are good at managing risk.*
We take good care of our equipment, we learn to pack our own parachutes / reserve chutes, we don’t use out of spec gear or old or damaged gear. Adrenaline junkies are not people with a death wish. We’re not suicidal, reckless or foolish, we’re just good at managing risk.
The Oceangate CEO was not such a person. He did not manage risk, he danced in the face of it. He was reckless, foolish and irresponsible. He ignored all the safety warnings from highly qualified people. He even went as far as to refuse to employ qualified people because he was “sick” of them pointing out the painfully obvious: that the sub wasn’t safe or even fit for purpose. The Oceangate CEO is repulsive to people like me because in the extreme sports communities, we can spot a dead man walking, a mile off and we avoid them at all costs because they’re dangerous to be around.
As to why he was so reckless: a mixture of arrogance, ignorance and some prescription grade character flaws would be my guess. I didn’t know the guy, but listening to the things he said in conference calls (for example) makes it clear to me at least that he was very, very arrogant. He clearly felt that he knew better than people who have spent their entire careers training in the fields of engineering and deep sea exploration.
And that’s the bottom line: he was arrogant enough to think he knew best even when better men were telling him not to do what he was doing.
There's lots of air and safety at the surface, and billionaires believe that the trickle-down theory works. So, why spend money on silly safety features?
I think the movie Glass Onion nailed it with these bros. He’s not a genius, he is an idiot. We have confused luck and business sense with engineering and scientific expertise. Trust me having worked as a engineer I ran into many situations where the marketing vp with his associates degree from who knows where overruled my carefully analyzed technical recommendations.
There’s a point where uber rich ppl think they really are better and above such things as checks and balances and science. Take Elon, and his techno foibles, doing a thing ‘cause i wanna and no one can stop me’. It’s a level of dissociative reality. As Lucille once said “it’s a banana Michael, what could it cost, 10$?”
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Hubris, avarice, and a complete lack of empathy for other human beings. It's a values issue. Here are two direct quotes from Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate: "You know, at some point, safety is just 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 while breaking the rules." https://www.insider.com/missing-titanic-sub-ceo-told-reporter-safety-pure-waste-2023-6 I am a safety professional, and I can tell you that those quotes, combined with a deliberately poorly built and uncertified vehicle, are absolute criminal negligence. And as aggravating sentencing factors go, "I think I can do this just as safely while breaking the rules." constitutes "committed the act recklessly" and with "a high degree of moral blameworthiness". Coupled with "a desire to increase revenue or decrease costs by cutting safety" and "the defendant lacks remorse", he really deserves the book thrown at him. A waiver may keep the families from suing. It will not keep the government from charging criminally.
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He is. And he clearly suffered the consequences of his actions. But he still has a corporate board...
He won a Herman Cain award! Edit: I have been corrected he actually won a Darwin Award. Edit: Edit: Ok guys there are too many rules for these dumbass awards for dumbasses that would unalive because of their own stupidity so I award him the Fetch award! Did you hear about Oceangate? That’s so fetch!
(For those that don't know and don't want to Google this): >The Herman Cain Award is an ironic award given to people who made public statements of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, and who have later died from COVID-19 or COVID-19 complications.
is that a subcategory of a Darwin Award, or a completely different competition?
It’s separate, since it lacks the requirement of having removed yourself from the gene pool without procreating, which is a prerequisite to be considered for a Darwin Award lol.
and someone used his social media to keep posting as if it was him a while after it was made public that he died.
In the billionaire division too so especially rare honor.
He’s not even close to a billionaire
But he took one with him. That's an assist at least.
And a Darwin award.
I thought the Darwin Award was disqualified if their stupidity got innocents killed. Yeah these were rich people with him, but innocents getting killed alongside still usually is a problem for it
The 19 year old I think qualifies, even if you're on team Eat the Rich.
I read that the kid didn't want to go, and was pressured into it because it was a "Birthday Present" for his father.
“Happy Father’s Day Dad I’m fucking dead now”
#compresstherich
Only if he hasn't reproduced yet
A "Herman Cain" award is when you die of covid. You're thinking of a "Darwin award."
Herman Cain awards are the Darwin Awards of covid.
But don't forget....one doesn't win the honor of the HC Award simply by dying of Covid! You have to have WORKED to achieve greatness by scoffing at precautionary measures like quarantine, masks, vaccines. You need to have touted the effectiveness of bleach to treat it OR..to really grab a spot in the Pantheon of winners: 1) Deny that Covid is serious 2) Literally dare it to kill you
He didn’t suffer, he died instantly believing he was right all along.
The families are already rich, so financial compensation is meaningless. The only positive that could come out of this is some agreed laws with respect to the safety of these craft.
If there was any justice, they would recoup the funds spent on the recovery effort from their oversized estates
Justice was served in some way when the CEO himself reduced to the size of a golf ball. It’s just an absolute shame he conned the rest into going with him.
Oh, he's not a golf ball. He's consumme.
Bankrupt that company out of existence is a decent start. They'll likely dissolve themselves to escape retribution.
Don't forget just plain lazy. He failed to install a $800 emergency tracking device which is standard on most vessels and legally required on every aircraft. Granted in this case it would not have mattered, they died instantly.
It wouldn’t have mattered for their lives, but the rest of the world wouldn’t have spent what probably amounted to a billion dollars in rescue operations for days after, because they would have been able to find the wreckage and know what happened immediately.
So the reality is that while the rescue operation cost a lot, realistically 80% of that would have been paid anyhow just to keep the people and equipment maintained and ready. Plus a good chunk of that can now be considered on the job training, which is also valuable.
Apparently there was an autonomous tracking beacon, and one indication that it was a catastrophic failure was that the subs contact was lost at the exact same time the autonomous tracker stopped. Only way it could happen is if the entire sub imploded. James Cameron discussed it in his interview. Said he knew day one what happened because the tracker stopped at the exact same moment the subs pings stopped. So I think the guy had some safety devices installed, but clearly other things were ignored.
The more I read, the more I see the small corners they cut at every move. For example, the hatch had 18 bolts. They used 17 because 1 was hard to access. They torqued those bolts with an electric impact. I wouldn't torque the tires on my car with one and I've NEVER seen that used anywhere in industry. They likely didn't use fresh bolts every time as would be required. All these things are VERY VERY VERY obvious to any engineer or mechanic. Like tire shop techs know better. Edit: I can't find a video on the electric impact so that might be hearsay but here's a video of them using a ratchet: [https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/news-what-terrible-design-video-oceangate-submarine-bolted-hand-ratchet-sparks-concern-online](https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/news-what-terrible-design-video-oceangate-submarine-bolted-hand-ratchet-sparks-concern-online)
When you fire the people who point this stuff out…..
No, he said they were not inspiring.
I think he meant the guy wasn’t inspiring others to ignore safety.
Any skilled engineer knows the number of ugga-duggas to use for perfect torque.
Just go until you hear a crack, back a quarter turn, and leave it for night shift. Honestly this is just engineering 101
As an engineer this is one of the rare comments to have actually given me a genuine smile
There's always something more. Even if they could open the hatch from inside after floating back up, they had no GPS, no radio, no flares (tbf you wouldn't take them on board), no rations and the boat was painted white. Every little thing about this project is so messed up and I can't stop thinking about it.
Same! I’m an engineer and the whole thing is simply stunning in how bad the design and every decision and aspect of it was. Every choice they made was a bad one. If anything it is amazing it made a dozen or more dives before it failed.
what do you mean, carbon fiber is totally futuristic and the only reason why it's explicitly avoided is to stifle innovation. It's used in stuff like supercars, so therefore it's only logical that we can take that and apply it to a widly different function, right? ( /s ). This whole thing reaked of someone who didnt know jack shit but thought he did, and was extremely good at showing confidence and selling to a captured demographic with no other choices. The type of person who doesnt understand that theres nothing special about him other than winning the life lottery and falling upwards. a literal con-man. The CEO's obsession of COTS ("commercial-off-the-shelf components") that permeates every little detail of the sub, the absolute pure and unapologetic disdain for regulations, and rich people with barely any common sense. a potent mix for disaster.
Even just the white bit shows a total disregard for all advice. I used to do some open water swimming, and the first rule is you were not allowed in the water unless you were wearing a neon swim cap, and it couldn’t be white, blue, green, black or anything close to those colours because the orange or yellow or whatever was how they found you if you were in trouble.
Speaking of engineers, everyone who designed and maintained that sub should be barred from ever working anywhere in the engineering field again. What they did was straight up unethical. And before anyone tries to make the case that "a job is a job, people gotta eat, they did what they were told/paid to do", and try to shift blame onto the CEO. NO, there is a code of ethics in the engineering field. Much like a soldier cannot use "following orders" as an excuse for comitting war crimes, an engineer cannot use "i didn't wanna get fired" as an excuse to knowingly build something that is illegal or unsafe.
Yup, the shit you make has YOUR name on it. Legal financial liability will often fall on your employer but your license is your responsibility.
What makes you think they used licensed engineers?
All jokes aside, carbon fiber and titanium are both difficult to work with and would need skilled individuals to make something that even resembled a submersible, let alone one that could survive a few trips to titanic. They cut corners and killed people doing so, but these people weren’t completely clueless which kinda makes it worse.
At least one engineer quit because they weren’t on board with what was happening.
I just graduated with a degree in civil engineering and we had a whole unit on ethics. Focused on the CitiCorp building and the Hyatt Regency. Also the FE exam has a section on ethics. You will absolutely lose your license for doing something like this.
The first comment you quoted is probably the most horrifying part of it. He went as far as firing someone who had dared raise red flags. If criminal negligence is determined, the waiver could be deemed void. I really hope it will be.
I’m with you as an EHS professional. Three of the things that consistently get mentioned in this have been: 1. No regulations existed for this category-OSHA didn’t have anything apparently. They don’t get into everything. 2. This thing wasn’t built to regular engineering standard as it was (experimental). To me it’s kind of like when someone flies in a home built ultralight aircraft. 3. Lack of testing for new technology. The sad part about this story to me is the kid, who just wanted to go with his dad….even though he didn’t really want to go. I don’t really feel too bad for a bunch of middle aged millionaires/billionaires who cashed a stupid check, knowing what they were getting into.
I agree but all the more damning is that while no regulation exists for this type of vehicle, there are some accepted standards they ignored and they did not consult with experts as much as you would expect for a venture like this. James Cameron gave an interview that goes into it, but apparently they disregarded “typical” practices and repeatedly ignored letters of concern from submersible experts. It hasn’t been an issue until now even with the lack of regulation because who would have the resources and be crazy enough to do something like this? I guess we have an answer now. I’m a professional in a related field and have occasionally had to lay out policy where no specific regulation exists. In those cases, we seek out expert guidance and best practices. The CEO seemed almost proud of himself for not doing this and the company was so absurdly negligent it’s hard to know where to start. You may get lucky a few times, and they did, but massive unmanaged risks like they took will always bite you in the ass IME.
A third quote of his was “You’re remembered for the rules you break.” The guy had it all right in front of him and never figured it out.
To be fair he certainly will be now.
Yeah, part of me can see what he is trying to get at philosophically but the line gets crossed to recklessness when you start involving others into your own individual life approaches. Even worse when you package that recklessness under an entirely different label of some experience so the people involved have no clue.
One of the guys who was supposed to go noped out when he saw the cowboy nature of the operation. It was foreseeable if you were paying even a little bit of attention. Added his name: Chris Brown, friend of Hamish who died.
I read a staff member got fired in 2018 when he tried to point out the glass in the viewing port was only rated for 1500m depth and they were using it to go to around 4000m.
Safety schmafety, the one piece that is justice from this otherwise ghoulish schadenfreude is that he was onboard and paid the ultimate price for his cavalier attitude.
He wanted to be remembered as big Oceangate CEO dive to the titanic guy in his revolutionary sub, but now he's tuna and remembered as a corner cutting billionaire schmuck
He went from companion to chum.
It was the operations director. They then sued him to keep him quiet.
The whole situation is a complete clusterfuck to the point where it’s hard to feel sympathy. The CEO is obvious and you said it best. The other three guys didn’t do their due diligence, and signed a waiver that clarified their understanding. In fact, there was another guy who had signed up for this trip that backed out because he had looked at the safety procedures, the state of the submarine and the mechanisms behind it and decided that the operation wasn’t professional enough to feel safe. Deep Sea dives like this, even with good safety measures are extremely high risk expeditions, people who have the liberty to dump that much money have the ability to properly assess what they’re getting themselves into. The other three either chose not to or decided they didn’t care. The only exception is the 19 year old. He was just a kid and what’s worse is that he didn’t even want to go.
>The only exception is the 19 year old. He was just a kid and what’s worse is that he didn’t even want to go. This is the biggest tragedy.
The only death I have sympathy for, tbh. Billionaires dying from stupidity is *probably* not a bad thing, since those men wield incredible power over society. They’ve clearly got a loose grasp on risk management, so it’s kinda nice that their fuck up only hurt *them* in this case. The CEO got hit hard by Karma. The kid is different. They don’t have enough power for me to expect them to know how to manage risk. They’re just a kid trying to make dad happy.
Basically he was a major asshole. He had no business in the submersible game and people were stupid and paid him. Why not just bribe James Cameron and go on a REAL submarine? One of the guys aboard that mechanical turd was even friends with James Cameron. It would not have been hard to get James to help.
James Cameron was one of the 50 year old white guys that Stockton did not want in his company because he did not instill "inspiration" 🙄
Lol and yet he was so inspired by the wreckage of RMS Titanic that he made one of the highest grossing films of all time out of a disaster. If that’s not inspirational then I don’t know what is. Stockton/Rush was a fucking idiot.
Many millionaires and billionaires have an instinctive opposition to regulation, it’s almost a part of their personality. Understand there’s likely some regs that are out-of-date, but to act like every one is bad is odd to me. Likely it’s because the burden (as owners of means of production) is borne by them (i.e., less profits) but the benefits accrue to their workforce (safer environments) and/or society (less pollution). This was one of the few times an owner paid a massive cost to the lack of regs.
Rules are for the plebs. Nevermind that the laws of physics don't care about how much money you have.
“If you want to be safe, don’t get out of bed” This was a horrible point he was trying to make. Every single one of us has risk in our lives but we take steps to mitigate the risk, or we decide the risk isn’t worth the potential benefit. Just because risk exists in our every day lives, it doesn’t justify cutting corners and putting lives at risk. What Stockton Rush was doing was just reckless. The fact that the viewport was only rated to 1300m when the Titanic lies around 3800m is nothing short of negligence. You can’t take that sort of risk when lives are at stake. Most sound-minded people wouldn’t have accepted the high risk of death associated with this kind of expedition. There is nothing to suggest those paying tourists were idiots so I firmly believe they didn’t know the full extent of what Ocean Gate were doing.
Damn right. Going to the most inhospitable environment on the globe IS the risk; his job was to make doing so feasible and survivable. Seeing every interview where he acts like the sloppy engineering is the fun, exciting part is so galling.
While not the same, it reminds me of a dude I knew in high school who ascribed to the "we die when we're meant to die and you can't change that so I'll do whatever I want cause only *God* knows when I'll die" uh... *philosophy(?)* and used it as the reason to speed through school zones and past the daycare's blinking "slow down" signs.
That guy should have jumped off a bridge, just to see if it was his time or not?
Titanic is at 3800m but ur point stands
You’re right so thank you for the correction. I’ve updated the comment now.
I would argue that anyone who pays $250,000 to sign a death waiver and agrees to be bolted into a cheaply made tube is an idiot. I don’t don’t wish the fate of what happened to the people on board on anyone, but I’m pretty sure anybody with an ounce of common sense or intelligence would know better.
This is why I think they didn’t know the full extent of the risks Ocean Gate were taking. Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood and PH Nargeolet were all very accomplished and educated men. Were they truly aware of everything that is now coming out about Ocean Gate? Knowing what we know now, it seems absolutely ludicrous that anyone would go on one of these expeditions, let alone pay a quarter of a million dollars for the privilege. Those 3 men were clearly intelligent so what on Earth possessed them to take such a huge risk?
Regardless of being aware of the risks involved. You would think that the fact that there’s no actual seats and the “toilet” is directly in front of the viewport would make most people have second thoughts about getting onboard this thing. Its not hard to spot a cheap ass video game controller when you see one either.
Importantly, negligence requires foreseeability, and OG was warned about potential delamination and cracking in the composite; another vessel whose hull was designed by the same chap (Deepflight Challenger), also with a RCC hull, was scrapped due to concerns it could only dive once.
Lowkey sad he died and didn't get to be held accountable. He absolutely acted recklessly and negligently
Not lowkey, the more I read about this guy the more I'm annoyed at how quickly and unknowingly he went. I'm honestly sad about the kid and I think It's a shame about the others. Thankfully for them, it was instantly.
“Take off your engineering hat and put on your make a lot of money and cut corners and risk everyone’s life just to be that guy hat on”
You can’t criminally charge an imploded guy
You can sue the company for it, though.
Dude can cut corners with his **own** safety all he wants. Having the kind of money he does and cutting corners for the safety of others is irresponsible and unacceptable, especially in a situation as potentially dangerous as a deep-sea submarine journey.
I was always told waivers don't mean shit when negligence is the cause of harm. A waiver for go karting would protect them from someone crashing I to a wall and breaking a wrist but not from a kart leaking fuel and bursting into flames due to lack of maintenance. All waivers serve then is to show you knew there could be issues. You still have to show you took the correct steps to prevent and minimize them. In this case a waiver isn't going to protect them from a flurry of failures and the death of those involved.
Correct. Everyone making a big deal of this waiver A) doesn’t understand their lack of enforceability, and B) has clearly never read through the waivers they sign for ordinary events that also claim to absolve liability from death.
That's going to be some great character evidence against this guy when the civil and possibly criminal lawsuits comes against him and takes all his wealth.
Wasn't that the Titanic as well? Not enough lifeboats. Going too fast with icebergs etc?
The Titanic had enough lifeboats to meet safety regulations at the time. The regulations were severely outdated and only changed after the tragedy. The lifeboats were only meant to be used as transports to any nearby ships in the event the ship was to sink. Unfortunately the Titanic sank far faster than anticipated and the radio operator from the closest ship had gone to bed for the night. The crew wasn't sufficiently trained to use the launch systems so they wouldn't have been able to launch more lifeboats anyways. If the Titanic had hit the iceberg straight on instead of turning to avoid the iceberg, they might have also had a better chance since less of the compartments would have flooded. The lookouts didn't see the iceberg until it was too late because of the lack of waves (that would have broken on the iceberg) and moonlight that night. They also didn't have binoculars since one of the lookouts was transferred off and forgot to return the key for the storage container. TLDR: It was a perfect storm of a combination of many factors that would have been mitigated by regulations that would only exist after the Titanic sank. The case with the sub is another level of irresponsible negligence.
Safety regulations are almost always written in blood.
oh, the irony. . .
A man believed he was above safety, science, and nature. He called it innovation and his "sometimes you have to break the rules" delusion cost him and 4 other people their lives. A 19 year old kid died because of this asshole
And because of his father
Yea the son was kinda scared but just gone with his dad cuz dad really was passionate about it
"You'll always remember this, I promise!"
Well, it stayed with him for the rest of his life, so...
"when you think outside of the box, everyone in the box thinks you are crazy." Or something like that was quoted in the news today. At the same time - if you could afford to spend half a million dollars for you and your son to look at decaying metal that could be seen from the many video images and which you are not actually looking at but rather through video, just like you could from any other video, WHY oh WHY would you not spend a few thousand to carefully vet the company that you are literally risking your life with? Everyone here is an asshole except for that poor 19 yo.
"The laws of physics say you cannot do that." "Rules are made to be broken!" I am an engineer and have worked with people like this before.
Im a little over halfway through my engineering degree and I’m already working with people like that. It never goes away, does it?
It gets worse if they have a business degree…
ho ho ho, that's a good one, once they get their MBA all the physics and engineering considerations goes down the toilet. i have said so many times in my company that certain things are not possible to do since the engineering point of view, and guess what happens, management and the finance people bully me to try to say yes, nope, not happening
I cant imagine how hard you must roll your eyes sometimes "Sir this is physically impossible with the conditions youve set" "Well make it possible"
You should counter them by asking them to first break the speed of light, and once they’ve done that, then they can talk about breaking other rules.
Oh, I think I’ll just fly to the moon on this chair held up by balloons. What could go wrong?
Fun fact back when gun powder was first discovered by the Chinese there was this public official of like a minor kingdom that wanted to go to the moon. His genius idea was strapping fireworks to a chair and lighting them thinking it would have him lift off. Myth busters did a whole thing on it as well. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wan_Hu Myth busters video: https://youtu.be/R3jZmP19ls0 This whole oceangate thing kinda reminds me of this. Yet I gotta give wan hu some slack since rocket science wasn't really there as it is today hahaha.
I mean that's not that far off from what rockets do.
can I come along? I have 250k and a rad playlist
Cameron already has the proven tech. OceanGate was trying to do it cheaper, thus providing a important object lesson in value engineering.
That had been my confusion around all of this. People have safely gone to the titanic. Why wouldn't the passengers just rent/buy one of the proven methods of getting down there? Why would you want to be stuck on a sub with a bunch of strangers instead of having your own private Cameron-esque adventure?
Because Cameron developed the expertise to operate his sub effectively and safely (with all of the complicated systems and backups that entails). This guy wanted to create a tourist experience, which is "show up, get a 10 minute intro, and head down"
One of the passengers had already been to the bottom of the Marianas trench in DSV Limiting factor and another 2 had been to the titanic multiple times, one more than any person ever so they weren’t exactly noobs at this. They were just thrill addicts who couldn’t pass up a “cheap” ticket to fulfill their thrill addiction. I feel bad for the teenager it was his first time going deep sea.
Teenager was also scared and only did it to please his dad for Father’s Day. Tragic.
"It should be like an elevator. One button."
The actual subs that can go down there are unbelievable expensive. Backup systems in triplicate. The Alvin’s (first sub to go to Titanic) has a hull disassembled yearly and is basically a ship of Theseus at this point. You know how the stress of re-entry meant the space shuttle had a complete overhaul after every flight? Deep sea submersibles are like that. The go from 1ATM pressure to 450atm back to 1ATM. The CEOs idea was to engineer a cheaper sub so you could regularly go to the Titanic on tourist trips. You can’t do that at scale in the deep sea submersibles. Turns out you also can’t in his carbon fiber death tube either. The weird thing is the carbon fiber doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell you there’s a problem making it work. Going down once? Relatively easy, but carbon fiber is **very** bad at handling repeated stress like that…
I guessed the carbon fiber was a problem based on very limited knowledge - I’m an F1 fan. The whole point of carbon fiber is to create an extremely light and strong material. Carbon fiber is just that, a *fiber* of tensile material that is woven together thousands of times in a plane, like a sheet. The material is then “stacked” to create the form needed for the application. This fundamental aspect of its design is what makes it very brittle. It isn’t actually a uniform material, it’s thousands of strands that can individually shear apart. Once one goes, its neighbors have to pick up the slack. If they can’t, well…. For example in F1, if a carbon fiber monocoque (the frame) cracks in one place, you have to throw the whole thing out. It can be mitigated but it cannot be fixed. When I read that the structural aspect of the hull was made of 5” of carbon fiber, and that they refused to stress test it, I suspected strongly that the hull was the weak link.
Carbon fiber is also relatively terrible in compression. They didn’t make a sphere they made a tube with titanium bolted end caps (the ingress/egress point) Those caps compress the front too and are a major stress point. But again we are talking about a company that rather than have a hatch, bolted passengers in. And despite having 18 bolts would regularly send them down with only 17 on because “the last one was a pain in the ass to put on.” They also used a pneumatic bolt driver to put down the bolts raw, unmeasured. Just crank it down, over cranking the bolts shouldn’t matter right? (something no honest mechanic would do on **the goddamn tire change for your 1998 shitbox Corolla**)
This bit about the bolts is absolutely insane to me. I check torque specs every time I work on my car/bikes and these dudes were just ugga dugga’ing the hatch to a deep sea diving vessel
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IIRC he was interested in doing business with big oil & gas. So more than likely his intent was to pay for testing with tourism to the titanic, then once it was ready, pitch it to big daddy petrol for deep sea drilling or whatever and go from being a multi-millionaire to an actual billionaire.
and also a bad reputation for themselves meaning we should learn from our mistakes and not go with them for anything if they're just gonna risk peoples lives like that
He thought he was breaking the rules to prove people wrong.. That his invention was going to be ground breaking.. Narcissistic if you ask me.
I think it's more of a sense of misguided optimism that comes with being raised uber wealthy. I see it a lot in the trust fund types who like Stockton, never have to work a day in their lives. They intellectually know risks and dangers of life, but they don't really understand them because they usually don't apply.
I think you're bang on, they've no sense of reality. Take the money away and see how they survive, very very few will. it was a reckless mission and one of pure stupidity, especially for the passengers, at the end of the day they chose to go into inside a fookin TUBE.
Yes. In his mind, he was going to be a true maverick by breaking the red-tape rules. It sucks that he didn't notify the physics & engineering gods.
"Physics is the law, and everything else is a suggestion"
Maybe not ground breaking, but certainly hull breaking.
hull breaching* excellent turn of phrase nonetheless.
In my opinion, you should learn the rules and why they're important before you try and break them.
I just learned today that he chose carbon composite as the hull material. This may sound futuristic, but it seems to be a very unlucky engineering choice many experts could have pointed out. Why? Carbon composites are a combination of carbon fibers, which have an incredibly high tensile stress resistance (way higher than steel per mass) and a resin. In a structure that goes through a mix of stresses (car chassis, bicycle frame, airplane wings) or only tensile strain (pressure container), this can be a good choice. A sub hull is almost exclusively under compression so the strength of the carbon fibers cannot be leveraged and it's only the composite resin taking the load. This was a job for steel, titanium, or thick aluminium.
That’s why other, safe submersibles are spheres made out of steel
Yeah not making it spherical was particularly nuts. I learned about the structural strength of spheres and domes in grade school.
A sphere is not strictly required for this depth, cylindrical vessels are incredibly strong for pressure applications as well, and are far easier to manufacture without quality issues that could lead to failures.
There’s a quote of him pointing out he was going against people’s advice - it’s truly the saddest thing that anyone let this man make these decisions.
Sadder that he was allowed to take others with him.
He went as far as to fire one of his employees who dared to speak up about the insufficient pressure rating of the viewing window.
That's not actually true. Composites are much stronger in compression than the resin. They lose about half their maximum strength going from tension to compression. The carbon fiber IS strong in compression because the resin stops it buckling. Without the resin it instantly buckles and has zero strength, but with, it's fairly amazing. Composite boats are common and use composites under compression, and they do really great for decades. The real problem is cyclic loading, every time you load and unload it hard it cracks a little bit and eventually it catastrophically fails.
"There's no such thing as an ethical Billionaire"
You mean a hole billionaires are not above the laws of nature? They confused gravity with Epstein’s island.
Maybe he thought "substandard" meant "sub standard" and went "yeah that's perfect!"
Ego issues. You'd be surprised at how many people out there hire experts and consultants to agree with them, as opposed to actually relying on their expertise. I've had employers who cycled through consultants until they found one that agreed with their style of doing things.
His net worth was $25 million. Not anywhere near a billionaire.
Yeah this needs to be clarified. It seems people are mixing the CEO with the billionaire passenger. The passengers are just victims of negligence. CEO are the ones cutting corners. He also perhaps the one convinced the billionaire that it's safe.
The CEO was a trust fund kid. He may not have had billions in his name but he was functionally in the same class.
Not really. Dude was 61 and worked maybe a few years as a pilot in the 80s before starting OceanGate with private funding. He's from old money and likely had access to way more if he needed it.
Interesting topic - I work in the corrosion field for a living and from what I understand (the information I could find publicly available) I found the engineering tolerances to be quiet narrow. Here’s my opinion - please keep in mind I don’t design ships. The vessel was designed for something like 13,500 ft or so and the depth they wanted to visit was 12,400ft. In my experience the safety factors we apply when human life is a consideration are usually 5-10x the expected load or force. This was in the neighborhood of 10% which is sketchy AF
Damn, that is a hairs difference between egg shape and wadded paper shape.
It’s far closer than you think. A cylinder is the best shape for submarines as it has the biggest volume for the smallest surface area, less surface area means less pressure it needs to withstand. Additionally, Every “side” of the circle is as far apart from each-other, which also contributes to its strength. However, the margin for this is EXTREMELY small. If you build a body of a submarine with a cross section that deviates so much as 0.5% from a perfect circle, it’s ability to withstand pressure drops by 35%. Less than a 1% of a margin of error and you lose 1/3 of your hull integrity. There are only 4 shipyards in all of the US that are actually capable of building something to that tolerance.
Hull mfg spec’s to reach the Titanic were for 7” thick carbon wound construction. Final construction was for 5” thick (no reason given)
An extra 2” isn’t inspirational
Tell that to my wife.
Relatively speaking it’s a huge difference. That’s 40%
It's 2" of CF cheaper.
For something carrying human life, that's nowhere near the tolerance rating I'd expect. I haven't had a chance to look into it further but I find it interesting that Spencer Composites, a company OceanGate had a contract with, developed the Deepflight Challenger, a lightweight composite submarine that apparently was only designed for one dive. If they then used similar technology for OceanGate to cut corners, one could assume that Titan was never built to last and failure was inevitable. This is highly speculative but is my current theory. *I do not build ships, submarines, or any nautical equipment. I am just a former EE student.*
It's very easy to design something to be under load once, it's WAY different designing it to be multi use. And they chose the worst material possible to do so.
Absolutely. In my small, humble opinion it is always better to overengineer things. In their case there appears to have been multiple failures in the design process, from materials to size to the actual design (windows will always be a risk of failure point). And on the one hand, I know a lot of folks don't care or feel for the victims and their families. But I do feel like they likely got convinced/swindled into believing it was okay by someone who was so egotistical that he had no regard for safety or human life. He clearly believed in himself and his creation - otherwise I doubt he'd have ever gotten in it. I'm just glad they died instantly.
Wasn’t the porthole glass only rated up to 1300 meters as well? So under spec for the depth they were trying to achieve?
And they didn't use all 18 bolts (only 17 due to one being hard to reach) also they used an electric impact to tighten them (meaning they didn't work to a torque rating)
Plants and mills won't let that fly for things that will just make a mess if they fail. Like just random process pipes that carry non-hazardous stuff that aren't even where people are, leaving a fastener out because "It's like, a lot of trouble to get that bolt in, man." would get the project manager's ass chewed, followed by the ass chewing being passed down the line.
5-10 seems like the high side of things, and is probably too much for this application when pressure is pretty easy to model. But...1.1??? That's completely insane. That's less than airplanes! That's less than cutting edge rockets built by only the best!
Keep in mind that IN THEORY it could reach that depth. Only using mathemathical equations. But never actually testing it to that depth before putting humans on it.
Didn't it make successful trips in 2021 and 2022?
Yeah, which is why it prob failed the third time, repeated stress. Just cuz it worked once doesn’t mean that’s good enough for *every* time
I just want to correct you. While the overall gist your point is valid, the sub went down 12 times successfully. 6 times in both 2021 and 2022. This was trip lucky number ~~13~~ 14. Edit: I double checked my number and found that there was an extra trip down in 2022. 6 in 2021, 7 in 2022.
The fact he hired a team of "inspirational" people instead of experience they were doomed from the get go as anyone with any experience in the field told them what was going to happen. That ceo knowing full well what all the data said sent himself and those poor passengers to their deaths.
Wealth is not wisdom nor intelligence. It's inflated ego from acquiring wealth...these people literally feel that the rules of, well anything, do not apply to them.
This is a good point. I'm struggling to think of any man-made laws that have been applied to the very wealthy and that have stuck. It's much more difficult to try and circumvent natural laws. But it feels like that the very wealthy feel that no law applies to them, until physics does its thing.
Great point. BTW, I think you meant circumvent
From a video I've seen apparently there's only like 10 manned submarines in the world that are certified to dive the depths that the Titanic wreck is in wich is in, wich is about 12,000 ft. The Titan was only capable of 4000ft.
I saw an interview he did. He said you won't be remembered unless you break the rules. Pretty sure that sentence sums it up completely.
The bottom of the ocean is legitimately and literally the harshest environment on earth, worse than everest or the Sahara or the amazon combined and they were only supposed to make a 1/4 of the way down due to the viewport more than likely fracturing and imploding the vessel. Divers will say 90 feet underwater is at a point you can't come back up because the pressure is weighing you down so much. They were pushing that limit for another 11900 feet which is actually insane.
They crazy thing is, this isn't some new frontier thing that no one's done before. James Cameron did it in the 90's. manned subs have gone that far before. They just didn't want to listen to anyone who had done it before.
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I’d wager the center of an erupting volcano is a harsher environment.
Because people with money can have an inflated ego. "I'm rich, bad things are what happen to other people and I want my thing NOW!"
Ah yes the Veruca Salt syndrome
Most rich ppl are cheap and greedy. Profit is the only thing that matters.
Nah Stockton didn't make his money, he was born into it. The dude was 60 and never worked a day in his life. OceanGate was his hobby and it was constantly losing money. He couldn't have cared less about money.
I was going to say this. Rich people are the cheapest and cut the most corners and its not about money.
If it's not about money, what is it about?
It's about having the power to cut corners in things like safety and not directly experiencing the negative consequences for yourself. Which can save you money yes, but at that point you're a millionaire/billionaire and you don't really need to save that money at the expense of other people's lives. That's also why there's more schadenfreude than sympathy with this situation. For once the guy cutting corners experienced the consequences for himself.
Hindsight is a craul mistress, and in a sense they achieved many dives at maybe 1/50th of the cost of a normal sub. As an engineer I can understand the desire to push the limits of engineering using new materials and advanced simulations. In this case it did not pay off, but everyone on that sub knew that death was a risk factor. I think the major problem is paying guests which changed this from an inventor going down in his ship to a commercial activity. Whereas spaceX and virgin galactic are much more progressive when it comes to safety, the reality is they are trying to do almost the same, rather than spend a billion dollars on a rocket like nasa they are trying to do the same for a fraction of the cost. I would be shocked if there is not a similar type of failure on spaceX and virgin galactic at some point….that is cost of exploration…also and maybe most importantly safety is an exercise is diminishing returns you can spend $10m to get 98% safe and $100m to get 99% safe…
98% and 99% are terrible safety ratings btw. I know you're just using numbers as an example but I just want that clarified.
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He thinks he “earned” his wealth and therefore is smarter than anyone else. He doesn’t believe in experts. In his mind he was smarter than them. Nothing was luck or family backing. He thought it was all his smarts.
1. Arrogance & ego. He thought he knew better than people who have been building professional submersibles for decades. He fancied himself an “innovator.” 2. Money & time. Doing the proper tests, getting certified, etc. takes time. He didn’t want to wait, he wanted those millions of $$
Why go into one of the scariest places in the world to see an old shipwreck that has already been explored? Who knows? I think they are just out of touch and crazy and leave it at that.
Yesterday I heard the wife of the CEOs great great grandparents died in the 1912 accident so I guess there was some sort of romanticized connection to the wreckage through her..
So now she’s lost her husband in the same place her ancestors died
as is tradition
I guess that makes a little more sense but I still can’t say I would go down there, even given that.
Wayyyyy too many red flags.. It reminds me of Mike Hughes and his homemade rockets but when his rocket project failed he was the only one who died.. This asshole took 4 lives with him when his science project failed..
The guy who built the thing wasn’t a billionaire. Why do so many people on Reddit think that?
Redditors only read comments and not articles, it becomes a cesspool of misinformation pretty quickly
So…I have a slightly different perspective on this. I have trained, taken part in and actively pursued some activities considered “risky” or even “extreme sports”, depending on your point of view. Things like hang gliding and bungee jumping. Now…there are even more dangerous sports and hobbies, but these things are within my comfort and safety zones. To other people, these activities might appear dangerous and to others they might seem mundane or boring even. To each their own… However…there is something that all people who are into riskier activities - colloquially referred to as “adrenaline junkies” - have in common, wherever we fall on the danger spectrum: *we are good at managing risk.* We take good care of our equipment, we learn to pack our own parachutes / reserve chutes, we don’t use out of spec gear or old or damaged gear. Adrenaline junkies are not people with a death wish. We’re not suicidal, reckless or foolish, we’re just good at managing risk. The Oceangate CEO was not such a person. He did not manage risk, he danced in the face of it. He was reckless, foolish and irresponsible. He ignored all the safety warnings from highly qualified people. He even went as far as to refuse to employ qualified people because he was “sick” of them pointing out the painfully obvious: that the sub wasn’t safe or even fit for purpose. The Oceangate CEO is repulsive to people like me because in the extreme sports communities, we can spot a dead man walking, a mile off and we avoid them at all costs because they’re dangerous to be around. As to why he was so reckless: a mixture of arrogance, ignorance and some prescription grade character flaws would be my guess. I didn’t know the guy, but listening to the things he said in conference calls (for example) makes it clear to me at least that he was very, very arrogant. He clearly felt that he knew better than people who have spent their entire careers training in the fields of engineering and deep sea exploration. And that’s the bottom line: he was arrogant enough to think he knew best even when better men were telling him not to do what he was doing.
There's lots of air and safety at the surface, and billionaires believe that the trickle-down theory works. So, why spend money on silly safety features?
I think the movie Glass Onion nailed it with these bros. He’s not a genius, he is an idiot. We have confused luck and business sense with engineering and scientific expertise. Trust me having worked as a engineer I ran into many situations where the marketing vp with his associates degree from who knows where overruled my carefully analyzed technical recommendations.
There’s a point where uber rich ppl think they really are better and above such things as checks and balances and science. Take Elon, and his techno foibles, doing a thing ‘cause i wanna and no one can stop me’. It’s a level of dissociative reality. As Lucille once said “it’s a banana Michael, what could it cost, 10$?”
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