Titanic tourist sub missing

Interesting video from ten years ago, unexpectedly relevant. The video title is "Collapse of Composite Submarine Pressure Hulls".

 
Axxman300 said:
My education is in Marine Geology, so the benthic world, and how we get down there to do research is something I have basic functional knowledge of. And I'm a Titanic-phile from way back, and just completed a ridiculously large model kit of the boat a few months back. I follow OceanGate on Youtube as they're the best source for new HD images of the wreck.

In short, this whole affair sucks.

Paul-Henri Nargeolet is a goddamn legend. I can't believe he blew off every deepsea exploration safety rule in the book. I will never understand this one.

I get it. Deep exploration is expensive, so if you feel like having some rich people paying big cash to look over your shoulder while surveying Titanic it seems like a fair trade off. I wish more marine and biological researchers were open to this idea. And this is something they do in archeology, where you can pay to help out on digs in the Middle East, and Holy Land.

But you NEVER compromise safety. Ever. Period.

Modern marine research is carried out by DSROVs, remote submercables with HD, 4K cameras, and robotic arms. Right now Woods Hole, Scipps, MBARI, and other marine organizations are conduction deepsea surveys around the world, and some of these you can watch live on Youtube, or on their websites - for free (great way to kill an hour if this is your thing). DSROVs are cheaper, safer, and better than manned submersibles. They allow scientists access to amazing places while sitting in comfortable chairs, in an airconditioned room, near restrooms, and you can bring your big bag of Cheetos. The entire dive is viewed on big flatscreen TVs, and recorded.

There is little reason to send humans down these days. With Titanic, a submersible makes sense only if the plan is to penetrate the interior of the wreck, in which case you'd be launching small ROVs from the sub(s).

And I admit that if I had that kind of money I'd be on OceanGate's waiting list. I can't be the only one here who's done a few crazy and stupid things in their lives - for free. And I can only imaging what that list would look like if I'd been rich.

I doubt the deep-sea research community will learn anything of value from the investigation. More like this will reinforce everything we already knew, and Titan will become an adjective for taking dangerous shortcuts, and not having enough redundant and manual safety features onboard.

Like I said, this sucks.
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It's hard to see any particular value in sending people down to the Titanic especially, considering how exhaustively it has already been studied.

I can't see how these risky missions had any practical value besides as a tourist experience or as a needlessly risky way to test the econo-sub design, which again is really only interesting if you're trying to make tourism trips to the deep ocean cheaper.
 
I've said before that I think on a subconscious level a lot of people's problem with the hyperrich (not well off, not rich, not even superrich but that obscene level where numerical values attached to how much money you have no longer actually can register on an emotional level) is how... boring they are. That nagging feeling we all have at the base of brainstems that is telling us that THEY don't really know what to do with all their money.

Even the most fervent anticapitalist among us, I imagine, can at least "get" the base concept of buying more stuff because you have more money. You can think it's stupid or morally wrong but "I had a car, I made more money, now I have two cars" is at least a basic mental cause and effect if-then statement we can all compile without the code crashing.

These people are doing the equivalent of just burning piles of money to feel alive again.
 
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Incredible how they went out.

It's the closest thing to being deleted from existence between one moment and the next.
 
Anyone remember William Beebe? In the 1920s he sketched plans for a deep - dive vehicle, cylindrical like a submarine. Then he met Otis Barton, who persuaded him that a sphere would be safer. The result was was the Bathysphere, in which Beebe set a good many dive records between 1930 and 1939, the deepest about 3300 feet, small potatoes now but stupendous back in the day. The Bathysphere was unpowered and had to be raised/lowered from the mothership by a cable. I read Beebe's book Half Mile Down as a kid and loved it. He admits his fear, but he was a biologist driven by the prospect of viewing deep-sea creatures in their environment, took precautions - and updated his will each year before each diving season.
 
TurkeysGhost said:
It's hard to see any particular value in sending people down to the Titanic especially, considering how exhaustively it has already been studied.

I can't see how these risky missions had any practical value besides as a tourist experience or as a needlessly risky way to test the econo-sub design, which again is really only interesting if you're trying to make tourism trips to the deep ocean cheaper.
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There are a handful of reasons why people should occasionally survey the wreck in person. The main one being the study of the metal-eating bacteria that is consuming the ship. Since her discovery in 1985, science has been able to chart the erosion of the ship, and while we can certainly monitor this activity with ROVs, right now we need to send submersibles with smaller ROVs to inspect the interior sections. The reason this is important is there are thousands of shipwrecks younger than Titanic will fuel tanks that are rusting away, and present an ecological threat to the landscape where they lay. By charting the degradation of Titanic science can set up time-tables for younger wrecks in order to prioritize salvage efforts for the fuel oils stored in those other wrecks.

In a decade or more the DSROV population should evolve to the point where we don't need to send people deep at all, but progress is slow because there isn't much free money floating around to fund the next generation in a timely manner. But even then, there will be people who will pay to see Titanic in person.
 
employee backgrounds

This is a link to a Zoom interview that Stockton Rush did and is now available on YouTube. About 27 minutes into the interview, he talked about wanting employees who are inspirational, who are trainable, and who come from different backgrounds.
 
A sexually incontinent ex-politician weighs in with a load of ill-informed bollocks.

I know there will be many who will say that Harding and his fellow adventurers were foolish, and that we need regulation against such experimental technology. Even before the news of the implosion, the Leftie Twittersphere was awash with criticism: that these people had more money than sense, and that we should not be wasting huge quantities of taxpayer cash trying to rescue them.
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The reason so few people have done it is because it takes such nerve; and it is precisely because the market is so small, and undeveloped, and populated only by risk-hungry billionaires, that the machines are still a bit experimental. Unless and until we master this form of navigation, humanity will continue to live in ignorance.
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That is why this mission was so important, and should be valued by Left-wingers as well as everyone else. Yes, there were risks, and warnings. But every great advance must inevitably involve experiment, and equipment that can seem, in retrospect, dangerously inadequate.
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When I think about how this thing was constructed, I'm actually surprised it lasted as long as it did. Again, after Branson and company tested the one that they had acquired of a similar design and which was made by the very same people, they apparently chose not to use theirs at all.
 
A minor divert but still fairly on topic:

How is it people can basically loot The Titanic without issue?
 
This is a quote from an article published in the Smithsonian Magazine four years ago. Stockton Rush's idea was to get 'tourists' to pay for the dives using a submersible that was cheaper to build.
Rush wants to do for deep ocean exploration what Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are doing for space travel. By taking well-heeled tourists to the deep—at first, each seat cost $105,129, the inflation-adjusted price of a first-class ticket on the Titanic, though the rate has increased to a cool $125,000—Rush hopes to use private enterprise to spur advances in the long-neglected field of underwater exploratory technology, and reveal some of the secrets of the great blue unknown.

OceanGate will begin taking paying customers to visit the fabled wreckage of the Titanic, which lies some two and a half miles beneath the North Atlantic. The experimental submersible for those trips, named Titan, closely resembles its sibling Cyclops 1. But Titan is the first deep-sea submersible constructed from a carbon-fiber composite, which allows the vessel to withstand enormous pressure at great depths while being far cheaper to build and operate than more traditional subs of equal abilities. Smithsonian Magazine link
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This reminds me of some of the comments you find from innovators, looking back at their earlier exploits. Comments like, 'I get the shakes when I look back at what we were doing. We didn't know...we're lucky we're still alive.' Stockton Rush is the poster boy for, 'Don't try doing what we did!'
 
Azrael 5 said:
A minor divert but still fairly on topic:

How is it people can basically loot The Titanic without issue?
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There have been problems just recently with looting from the wrecks of Prince of Wales and Repulse, both designated war graves
 
Chris_Halkides said:
This is a link to a Zoom interview that Stockton Rush did and is now available on YouTube. About 27 minutes into the interview, he talked about wanting employees who are inspirational, who are trainable, and who come from different backgrounds.
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What he actually wanted was young employees who were cheap, inexperienced and unlikely to complain when he did risky stuff. The rest of it was guff for PR consumption.
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
And exactly how were they doing that by looking through a small window while locked inside a "tin can"? You forgot "loonie" in your list of attributes. :boggled:
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BoJo the Clown is of the opinion that what he doesn't know, nobody knows. And as he knows nothing, everything is pushing the boundaries of knowledge.
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
And exactly how were they doing that by looking through a small window while locked inside a "tin can"? You forgot "loonie" in your list of attributes. :boggled:
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They were pushing the frontiers of human knowledge concerning whether you could build a deep ocean submersible cheaply enough to meet the threshold where rich tourists could make it commercially viable.

Turns out the answer is no, not yet.
 
8enotto said:
Of all I seen it was a total of four tours. The last being fatal.
Solid information from the former owner and CEO isn't going to be easy to get anymore. He was equally open about problems with it before this too.
Didn't want to hurt sales probably.

Expect a bit of conflicted information as they have a little incident to cover for now.
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I wonder if any of the passengers figured it must be safe if the CEO himself is willing to go in it.
 
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