Titanic tourist sub missing

Skeptical Greg said:
I must be really expensive to drill through titanium. They saved a lot of money with only four bolts.
Click to expand...

You misunderstand, Greg. They had more than four bolt holes. They just used only four bolts. Not to save money, but to save time.

Yeah, stupid.
 
Ziggurat said:
You misunderstand, Greg. They had more than four bolt holes. They just used only four bolts. Not to save money, but to save time.

Yeah, stupid.
Click to expand...


Yeah I should have explained that better. Furthermore, in the fatal dive they did use seventeen bolts out of eighteen holes. No one seems to know why not eighteen bolts. And eighteen is still fewer holes than I would expect to see, compared with other submersibles. ("Well, if it's good enough for a golf course...")

But they had used fewer bolts (possibly as few as two) back in 2021. I wonder if that, and/or the switching back and forth between fewer and more bolts, contributed to fatigue in the coupling ring.
 
Okay, gang. First, here's the link to the US Coast Guard's Titan Submersible page, it's is your one-stop for all the relative documents and videos:

https://www.news.uscg.mil/News-by-Region/Headquarters/Titan-Submersible/smdsort35576/title/

Since folks seem to be arguing about where the failure occurred this NTSB Titan Material Analysis has the carbon-fiber stuff covered down to the microscopic level:

https://media.defense.gov/2024/Sep/...NTSB TITAN MATERIAL ANALYSIS.PDF_REDACTED.PDF

This NTSB has all kinds of images of the hull construction, and has a number of wreckage photos that had been unseen before Thursday. Seems the hull split into three layers like an onion, and you can see larger segments of the hull lying further away. The wreckage was spread out over 150 meters.

My personal take on this, being someone with a marine geology background but zero engineering qualifications is that the Titan was designed by some very smart people in an environment where safety was at the bottom of the list, or not a factor at all. Rush was told the Titan would fail and he ignored his own experts. The only person I mourn is Paul-Henri Nargeolet. He should have known better.

One thing I find disturbing are the Rush/Musk/Billionaire Adventure-Capitalist cheerleaders who wave away the lack of safety as being necessary to advance technology. We saw this in person during the hearing when one of Oceangate's people compared Rush to the Wright Brothers, which is a poor analogy. DSV technology is established, even carbon fiber submersibles have been built before. There were no airplanes before Kitty Hawk, and while airplane crashes have killed many people, and will continue to do so I doubt any of these daring billionaire cowboys would willingly board a plane flown by people with zero regard for safety at any level of operation.

Yes, science learns from failure, and science does have a body-count. But science also calculates risk, and this slows progress because technology must evolve to mitigate risk to an acceptable level. That means testing, sometimes years of testing. And it has to be done this way or else you end up as a ground meat and carbon goop at the bottom of the ocean.
 
Axxman300 said:
One thing I find disturbing are the Rush/Musk/Billionaire Adventure-Capitalist cheerleaders who wave away the lack of safety as being necessary to advance technology. We saw this in person during the hearing when one of Oceangate's people compared Rush to the Wright Brothers, which is a poor analogy. DSV technology is established, even carbon fiber submersibles have been built before. There were no airplanes before Kitty Hawk, and while airplane crashes have killed many people, and will continue to do so I doubt any of these daring billionaire cowboys would willingly board a plane flown by people with zero regard for safety at any level of operation.

Yes, science learns from failure, and science does have a body-count. But science also calculates risk, and this slows progress because technology must evolve to mitigate risk to an acceptable level. That means testing, sometimes years of testing. And it has to be done this way or else you end up as a ground meat and carbon goop at the bottom of the ocean.
Click to expand...

I disagree with your inclusion of Musk in this comparison.

You will struggle to find any space organization or launch company more risk-averse than SpaceX. The company has a reputation for scrubbing flights for the smallest of reasons and in circumstances where the risk is very small. Crew Dragon, for example, was built upon the most stringent and rigorous test regime before it ever flew with people on board. While both Rush and Musk have used the philosophy of "iterate fast and break stuff" to learn, Rush and Oceangate put lives at risk - Musk and SpaceX never did. Booster landings, Cargo and Crew Dragon were built (and Starship is being built) on sound engineering principles with no shortcuts. The same cannot be said for Titan - it always was a poorly designed, shoddily built vessel put together by amateurs using cheap workarounds. It was always a disaster waiting to happen - most everyone in the deep dive community knew it, they tried to tell him, and he refused to listen.
 
Axxman300 said:
For the past week Musk has been whining at the FAA and what he considers to be unnecessary regulations and paperwork.
Click to expand...

First of all, its not regulations he considers unnecessary its the delays.

Spoiler because the following is off topic
As he correctly points out, it should not take more time to move paperwork from one desk to the next desk than it takes to build and ready massive rocket for flight. The FAA is simply far too bureaucratically cumbersome to deal with space flight. It was fine when there were maybe five or six launches per year, but this year alone, SpaceX alone have launched 94 times out of a target of 144 for 2024. The FAA is not equipped to cope with this level of activity, and it will be even more under the pump when Rocketlab's facility at Wallops comes fully online and starts launching their new "Neutron" reusable rocket with a planned cadence of 20 to 50+ launches per year, and Blue Origin starts launching "New Glenn" over a 10 times a year.

Meanwhile, while SpaceX efforts in the US are marking time waiting for the FAA to get of their bureaucratic backsides, China is forging ahead, and have already surpassed where SpaceX was over the same time period....

https://spaceanddefense.io/china-advances-reusable-space-technology/

LandSpace’s WeChat account documented the short flight from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northern China. The engine shut down 113 seconds into the flight, after which the rocket cruised to its peak altitude of 10,002 metres. On the descent, after about 40 seconds of unpowered gliding and at an altitude of 4,640 metres, the engine restarted for deceleration purposes, and the rocket landed less than two metres from the landing pad’s centre.​

The US needs to carve off the FAA's Space Division to a regulatory body that specializes in the rocket launch industry, in order to get things done much, much quicker
But to relate this back to deep submersibles, the US has regulations, but since Oceangate operated in international waters, it was outside US jurisdiction. There were NO regulations governing what Rush could or could not do. What the authorities can do about that, I don't know. Perhaps some sort of country of registration should be mandatory for submersibles, but there would need to be a lot of loophole-closing to stop the type of regulation work-arounds that oil shipping companies use to do by registering their tankers in Liberia.

Gulliver Foyle said:
Why, the only difference between the twain is that Galaxy Brain has, so far, been luckier.
Click to expand...

You are simply clueless. You have absolutely no ******* idea what you are talking about.
 
Darat said:
That is a terrifying thought.
Click to expand...


Much as I think Musk is a ******* lunatic who's deeply drunk on his own electric cool-aid, the number of deaths attributable to SpaceX is zero.

It's likely that this is not due to Elon but due to the really smart people working for him, but SpaceX's record for deaths during human spaceflight is perfect. I'm not sure there's any other programme that can claim that (Gemini?).
 
smartcooky said:
First of all, its not regulations he considers unnecessary its the delays.

Spoiler because the following is off topic
As he correctly points out, it should not take more time to move paperwork from one desk to the next desk than it takes to build and ready massive rocket for flight. The FAA is simply far too bureaucratically cumbersome to deal with space flight. It was fine when there were maybe five or six launches per year, but this year alone, SpaceX alone have launched 94 times out of a target of 144 for 2024. The FAA is not equipped to cope with this level of activity, and it will be even more under the pump when Rocketlab's facility at Wallops comes fully online and starts launching their new "Neutron" reusable rocket with a planned cadence of 20 to 50+ launches per year, and Blue Origin starts launching "New Glenn" over a 10 times a year.

Meanwhile, while SpaceX efforts in the US are marking time waiting for the FAA to get of their bureaucratic backsides, China is forging ahead, and have already surpassed where SpaceX was over the same time period....

https://spaceanddefense.io/china-advances-reusable-space-technology/

LandSpace’s WeChat account documented the short flight from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northern China. The engine shut down 113 seconds into the flight, after which the rocket cruised to its peak altitude of 10,002 metres. On the descent, after about 40 seconds of unpowered gliding and at an altitude of 4,640 metres, the engine restarted for deceleration purposes, and the rocket landed less than two metres from the landing pad’s centre.​

The US needs to carve off the FAA's Space Division to a regulatory body that specializes in the rocket launch industry, in order to get things done much, much quicker
But to relate this back to deep submersibles, the US has regulations, but since Oceangate operated in international waters, it was outside US jurisdiction. There were NO regulations governing what Rush could or could not do. What the authorities can do about that, I don't know. Perhaps some sort of country of registration should be mandatory for submersibles, but there would need to be a lot of loophole-closing to stop the type of regulation work-arounds that oil shipping companies use to do by registering their tankers in Liberia.



You are simply clueless. You have absolutely no ******* idea what you are talking about.
Click to expand...

I don't the problem. People wanting to sail out to international waters and drown themselves in expensive ways, why does anyone else need to care?
 
theprestige said:
I don't the problem. People wanting to sail out to international waters and drown themselves in expensive ways, why does anyone else need to care?
Click to expand...

It can be quite expensive in terms of rescue and recovery attempts.

I assume that's a taxpayer expense? Or does the US Coastguard (or whoever) get to bill that back to the estate?
 
theprestige said:
I don't the problem. People wanting to sail out to international waters and drown themselves in expensive ways, why does anyone else need to care?
Click to expand...

Because Oceangate ended up drowning other people who were not fully informed of the risks involved, the shortcuts taken, the warnings ignored. So they didn't just drown themselves, they drowned other people as well. That's why we should care.
 
smartcooky said:
I disagree with your inclusion of Musk in this comparison.

You will struggle to find any space organization or launch company more risk-averse than SpaceX. The company has a reputation for scrubbing flights for the smallest of reasons and in circumstances where the risk is very small. Crew Dragon, for example, was built upon the most stringent and rigorous test regime before it ever flew with people on board. While both Rush and Musk have used the philosophy of "iterate fast and break stuff" to learn, Rush and Oceangate put lives at risk - Musk and SpaceX never did. Booster landings, Cargo and Crew Dragon were built (and Starship is being built) on sound engineering principles with no shortcuts. The same cannot be said for Titan - it always was a poorly designed, shoddily built vessel put together by amateurs using cheap workarounds. It was always a disaster waiting to happen - most everyone in the deep dive community knew it, they tried to tell him, and he refused to listen.
Click to expand...

Axxman300 said:
For the past week Musk has been whining at the FAA and what he considers to be unnecessary regulations and paperwork.
Click to expand...

There is nothing contradictory between what smartcookie said and your reply. I'm not really seeing how your statement is a reply to him at all. Do you think that all regulation improves safety? Whether or not Musk's criticisms of the FAA are valid, they aren't related to putting anyone's life at risk.
 
Ziggurat said:
Because Oceangate ended up drowning other people who were not fully informed of the risks involved, the shortcuts taken, the warnings ignored. So they didn't just drown themselves, they drowned other people as well. That's why we should care.
Click to expand...
Several Oceangate people died but at least no passengers got hurt. Everyone was a trained mission specialist something something handwave, so they weren't passengers.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
Several Oceangate people died but at least no passengers got hurt. Everyone was a trained mission specialist something something handwave, so they weren't passengers.
Click to expand...

Even had they been actual employees rather than passengers masquerading as participants, if they weren't fully aware of the risks, that still wouldn't be OK. But yeah, the farce of "mission specialist" is shameful.
 
I have no objection to families of the deceased suing for fraud or negligence in the accused's home jurisdiction, for launching a dangerous expedition under false pretenses.

I just don't think there needs to be yet another enforcement agency to regulate what jackasses get up to in international waters.
 
Ziggurat said:
Even had they been actual employees rather than passengers masquerading as participants, if they weren't fully aware of the risks, that still wouldn't be OK. But yeah, the farce of "mission specialist" is shameful.
Click to expand...

And the fact that Rush required the signing of these documents meant he knew there were potential problems with the submersible. It was a way to hide his responsibility to provide a safe environment.
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
And the fact that Rush required the signing of these documents meant he knew there were potential problems with the submersible. It was a way to hide his responsibility to provide a safe environment.
Click to expand...

And the fact that the passengers signed these documents meant that they knew there were potential problems with the submersible. It was a way for them to accept responsibility for putting themselves on a fancy death voyage.
 
theprestige said:
And the fact that the passengers signed these documents meant that they knew there were potential problems with the submersible.
Click to expand...

Potential problems, yes. But that's not enough for informed consent. They had no idea that their own engineers were saying this was unsafe, that there were fundamental problems with the design. They didn't know about the coverups, the warning signs that were ignored. They didn't know that Oceangate was grossly negligent.

It was a way for them to accept responsibility for putting themselves on a fancy death voyage.
Click to expand...

Waivers can insulate companies from liability for some risks, but there's a reason courts don't let them insulate companies from gross negligence.
 
Ziggurat said:
Potential problems, yes. But that's not enough for informed consent. They had no idea that their own engineers were saying this was unsafe, that there were fundamental problems with the design. They didn't know about the coverups, the warning signs that were ignored. They didn't know that Oceangate was grossly negligent.



Waivers can insulate companies from liability for some risks, but there's a reason courts don't let them insulate companies from gross negligence.
Click to expand...
All of which can be addressed with civil suits in the accused's home jurisdiction. There doesn't need to be some sort of global authority to certify submersibles for use in international waters. There's consumer advocacy, and then there's the pernicious fantasy that government always should or even can be the right solution to individuals making stupid choices.
 
theprestige said:
All of which can be addressed with civil suits in the accused's home jurisdiction. There doesn't need to be some sort of global authority to certify submersibles for use in international waters. There's consumer advocacy, and then there's the pernicious fantasy that government always should or even can be the right solution to individuals making stupid choices.
Click to expand...

There is a global authority that sets standards and regulations for aviation safety, security. Its an agency of the UN called the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Do you object to their existence too?
 
smartcooky said:
There is a global authority that sets standards and regulations for aviation safety, security. Its an agency of the UN called the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Do you object to their existence too?
Click to expand...

The two are not analogous. The ICAO seeks to establish a common basis of standards and regulation for international air commerce. The Organization is concerned with what happens when an aircraft leaves one jurisdiction and enters another. They're agnostic about what planes get up to in international air space. They're also opt-in and non-enforcing. No country is required to get their passport standard certified by ICAO. Or their airplane. Or their flight plan. SpaceX isn't required to get their rocket designs approved by the ICAO, nor does the ICAO have any means of compelling such a thing. The ICAO is not a global authority. It is a UN consultancy.

The closest thing we have to an actual global authority of any kind is the UN Security Council. And that authority derives entirely from "might makes right".

So no, I wouldn't mind if the UN saw fit to put together an advisory body for standardization of deep-sea submersible safety features and designs. But I still don't see why the operation of such things in international waters is a priori a thing that requires government oversight or regulation as such.
 
Last edited:
Ziggurat said:
Because Oceangate ended up drowning other people who were not fully informed of the risks involved, the shortcuts taken, the warnings ignored. So they didn't just drown themselves, they drowned other people as well. That's why we should care.
Click to expand...

Exactly
 
theprestige said:
All of which can be addressed with civil suits in the accused's home jurisdiction.
Click to expand...

Not really. Rush is dead, he's beyond punishment, and Oceangate doesn't have the funds to cover what it will owe.

There doesn't need to be some sort of global authority to certify submersibles for use in international waters. There's consumer advocacy, and then there's the pernicious fantasy that government always should or even can be the right solution to individuals making stupid choices.
Click to expand...

You asked why we should care. You didn't ask what the appropriate solution is. I never said we needed any global authority over submersibles.

As for government solutions, well, it turns out there already was a government solution in place which might have prevented this tragedy, in the form of whistleblower protections. Only the process failed. It did not operate the way it was designed to operate. We don't necessarily need new solutions, but I'm very much in favor of getting the ones we have working properly.
 
The other problem is that the "consumer advocacy" solution is usually suing after something goes wrong - which doesn't help when someone is dead, as here. This disaster is the sort of thing is precisely what regulation is suited to address.
 
Ya know... Going through the NTSB stuff, I must say it's a bigger "WTH went through their head?!" moment than back when an ex-GF thought I was an actual magic-wielding warlock.

Starting with that instead of using a vacuum autoclave to cure it, they'd just machine off the wrinkles every 5th of the way. Thus masking the air bubbles instead of removing them, and still letting them be points where repeated stresses would cause delamination AND cutting through a few layers of fibres in places, thus having places where it's really the fibre ends pushing against the epoxy. And then using a different glue than the epoxy, with presumably different Young's modulus, since it was ground to dust in places in between the layers. To thinking it's good enough to apply it on a mirror-finish polished ring, instead of even trying to have some grooves or something, even though they obviously foresaw the need for an uneven surface for the glue elsewhere. To the design of the window.

I'm like... wow. It's like Rush listened to Weird Al's "Dare To Be Stupid" and mistook it for business and engineering advice.
 
Last edited:
grmcdorman said:
The other problem is that the "consumer advocacy" solution is usually suing after something goes wrong - which doesn't help when someone is dead, as here. This disaster is the sort of thing is precisely what regulation is suited to address.
Click to expand...

To add to your point, this is even small fish compared to other disasters that went on because of lack of regulation. Try for example this case that killed more than a hundred people, and left others with permanent damage: https://www.fda.gov/files/about fda/published/The-Sulfanilamide-Disaster.pdf

And it would have been an even bigger disaster if there wasn't an FDA to spring into action early and stop it. There were 2000 salesmen going around the country selling the poison as medicine.
 
Last edited:
3point14 said:
Much as I think Musk is a ******* lunatic who's deeply drunk on his own electric cool-aid, the number of deaths attributable to SpaceX is zero.

It's likely that this is not due to Elon but due to the really smart people working for him, but SpaceX's record for deaths during human spaceflight is perfect. I'm not sure there's any other programme that can claim that (Gemini?).
Click to expand...

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-musk-safety/

Reuters documented at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at Musk’s rocket company: crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds and one death. SpaceX employees say they’re paying the price for the billionaire’s push to colonize space at breakneck speed.
 
Darat said:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-musk-safety/

Reuters documented at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at Musk’s rocket company: crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds and one death. SpaceX employees say they’re paying the price for the billionaire’s push to colonize space at breakneck speed.
Click to expand...

A pedantic nitpick is that his actual spaceflights have an perfect safety record. Probably more because of the negative publicity that would occur rather than due to his moral concerns (i.e. none).

But I see your point and it is very well made.
 
Last edited:
Darat said:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-musk-safety/

Reuters documented at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at Musk’s rocket company: crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds and one death. SpaceX employees say they’re paying the price for the billionaire’s push to colonize space at breakneck speed.
Click to expand...

What does this have to do with Musk complaining about regulations?
Does he complain about safety regulations?
Are SpaceX employees indentured or otherwise forced to work there?
Were the injured employees not compensated or cared for?
 
Ziggurat said:
Potential problems, yes. But that's not enough for informed consent. They had no idea that their own engineers were saying this was unsafe, that there were fundamental problems with the design. They didn't know about the coverups, the warning signs that were ignored. They didn't know that Oceangate was grossly negligent.
Click to expand...

"They" meaning the passengers, just to be clear - I agree. The only thing any of them likely new about the submersible is what Rush personally told them. And I doubt he related any of the safety concerns that he himself had dismissed.
 
Skeptical Greg said:
What does this have to do with Musk complaining about regulations?
Does he complain about safety regulations?
Click to expand...

I don't think Darat's quote had anything to do with any expressed complaints, but more about Musk/the company's safety posture. Around 200 serious injuries over 10 years works out to one every three weeks or so.

From the article:

The 2022 injury rate at the company’s manufacturing-and-launch facility near Brownsville, Texas, was 4.8 injuries or illnesses per 100 workers – six times higher than the space-industry average of 0.8. Its rocket-testing facility in McGregor, Texas, where LeBlanc died, had a rate of 2.7, more than three times the average. The rate at its Hawthorne, California, manufacturing facility was more than double the average at 1.8 injuries per 100 workers. The company’s facility in Redmond, Washington, had a rate of 0.8, the same as the industry average.
Click to expand...

That not great. SpaceX has been around for over 20 years and is part of an industry that's been around for many times longer, it's not some startup that is having to learn how to navigate new and unprecedented workplace safety challenges.

Skeptical Greg said:
Are SpaceX employees indentured or otherwise forced to work there?
Click to expand...

Well there's one more for the late-stage-capitalism bingo card. These aren't slaves, they're free men freely willing to put their health and even lives on the line to move a truck load of insulating foam from one building to another for Space Daddy, so workplace safety regulators should mind their own business.
 
Skeptical Greg said:
What does this have to do with Musk complaining about regulations?
Does he complain about safety regulations?
Are SpaceX employees indentured or otherwise forced to work there?
Were the injured employees not compensated or cared for?
Click to expand...

No idea, however if they are the most risk adverse in their industry the rest must be pretty much killing employees week-in and week-out!
 
3point14 said:
A pedantic nitpick is that his actual spaceflights have an perfect safety record. Probably more because of the negative publicity that would occur rather than due to his moral concerns (i.e. none).
Click to expand...

I don't think it's a pedantic nitpick at all. The issue of worker safety is certainly an important one. I also think that hiding worker safety issues is even worse than just the fact of having them in the first place. If you're upfront about the risks of a job, at least workers can go in with their eyes open, but if you're hiding what's happening that changes things significantly*.

However, the issue of worker safety is separate from product safety. The original issue was one of whether or not their rockets had a good safety record. That's a separate issue from whether the process by which their build those rockets is safe.

If I'm buying a new car, I want to know if the car is safe. Yes, I may have moral issues about buying from a manufacturer with a poor worker safety record, but that will be a very different sort of concern, and is a different question from, whether or not they produce safe cars.

If Darat wants to argue that SpaceX's rockets have a bad safety record, pointing to worker safety is just a non-sequitur.

But I see your point and it is very well made.
Click to expand...

It's a good point about a separate topic. I guess it still fits in the "SpaceX is bad" bin, but I think we should be able to discuss individual issues individually. It's possible to believe that both "spaceX has a good safety record" and "spaceX has a poor worker safety record". And it's also important to distinguish them. The former is what NASA wants to know, the latter is what a potential new employee at spaceX should want to know.

(I didn't look closely enough at Darat's claim to have a solid opinion about that last, by the way. The reason I'd feel the need to research the claim is that I don't have the context for what sort of injury rate is reasonable given the sort of work that spaceX workers are doing.)

*In fact, companies being forced to be transparent about safety issues strongly incentives them to prevent them.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom