I see it as Oceangate didn't have the resources to do the job right. This left them with several choices: Get some venture capital help and lose a certain amount of control over the company, scale down their goals and expectations, quit, or take on a high degree of risk. They chose the last option. We all take risks in life - you want to overcook that corner and end up in the barrier? That's your decision. But when you fill up your car with tourists and do the same thing.....
In reply to Kreb (Forum Supporter) :
I don't think it was just resources, though. Their design (a composite hull) was fundamentally flawed. No amount of resources would have fixed that. But they kept going with it despite all of the clear indications and advice that it was the wrong idea.
They had an egomaniac at the helm who simply wouldn't admit that he was wrong. That was their basic problem.
Keith Tanner said:I don't think it was just resources, though. Their design (a composite hull) was fundamentally flawed. No amount of resources would have fixed that. But they kept going with it despite all of the clear indications and advice that it was the wrong idea.
I didn't get the impression from the article that it was impossible to build a carbon fiber hull that would do what they wanted, just that they weren't willing to take the time and spend the money to do it properly.
TheRyGuy said:In reply to alfadriver :
I agree, and I hate how the media likes to add "gate" to seemingly every scandal story. I thought that too but I found that the name of the company actually IS OceanGate.
TIL. Had no idea, as I'm not really interested in what happened.
But it's not a bad idea that you look into companies that pre-add the controversial ending to their base name.
codrus (Forum Supporter) said:Keith Tanner said:I don't think it was just resources, though. Their design (a composite hull) was fundamentally flawed. No amount of resources would have fixed that. But they kept going with it despite all of the clear indications and advice that it was the wrong idea.
I didn't get the impression from the article that it was impossible to build a carbon fiber hull that would do what they wanted, just that they weren't willing to take the time and spend the money to do it properly.
I think you can make it work once or twice, but it will fatigue and fail with multiple cycles. That's the nature of the material under compression. And you can't really check it, you have to decide on a lifespan and throw it away at the end.
There's a reason nobody does it.
Toyman! said:Meh. I'm neither amazed, shocked, or surprised.
If you push the limits with the best engineering they sometimes bite back.
If you do it with your eyes shut they are almost guaranteed to.
The googles says "There have been 18 fatal accidents involving submersibles since 1915, resulting in 835 deaths."
That's an average of 7.6 people per year. Using that metric, 2023 was better than average.
Submarines. All those deaths were in submarines, not submersibles.
I wouldn't expect Google to know the difference, though.
In reply to dr_strangeland :
It's not Google, it's a random guy answering a question on Quora that gets pulled up as a Google search result.
I mean, I get it's limited at accidents, butt...
Keith Tanner said:codrus (Forum Supporter) said:Keith Tanner said:I don't think it was just resources, though. Their design (a composite hull) was fundamentally flawed. No amount of resources would have fixed that. But they kept going with it despite all of the clear indications and advice that it was the wrong idea.
I didn't get the impression from the article that it was impossible to build a carbon fiber hull that would do what they wanted, just that they weren't willing to take the time and spend the money to do it properly.
I think you can make it work once or twice, but it will fatigue and fail with multiple cycles. That's the nature of the material under compression. And you can't really check it, you have to decide on a lifespan and throw it away at the end.
There's a reason nobody does it.
That's what NDI is for....
In reply to DirtyBird222 :
Non Destructive Inspection. i.e. ultrasonic to look for voids in the Carbon fiber layers.
However, cited in the article, they had difficulty in getting sufficient penetration to do ultrasonic NDI through all layers. Their system was too have a system that, to paraphrase "listened for the crackle" and if it got worse, surface. I have to wonder (I doubt from the context) if that system was ever tested to be diagnostically useful. Would you necessarily get a warning increase in crackle of failing strands with sufficient time warning to safely surface, or would you have a sudden "zipper" progression? The problem is that failure effects are CUMULATIVE. Modeling a homogenious material for stress/strain effects over N* cycles is orders of magnitude simpler than a composite system where you have multiple materials in multiple layers with numerous interfaces with varying geometries to take into account (and the complexity consideration isnt adding them on, its multiplying or exponential!). You would have to NDI the entire structure to ensure QC in manufacturing and they establish a service life (N* cycles), safety factor it and STILL monitor through NDI of some sort for outlier damage...
My education is in MatSci engineering and professionally I work in safety, reading that article makes me a bit heady-explody.
I just don't get what the monitoring system was supposed to help with. You'll be able to tell that the hull is failing by the 6500 psi of water that has turned you into paste. Like, what are they going to do with that information? How will it help them? Is the hull supposed to conveniently partially fail and allow them hours to surface? Let's note the failure mode that it showed in destructive testing: instantaneous failure of the entire hull wall without any kind of warning.
I literally don't understand how it helps them in any way. The acoustic engineer they consulted said basically the same thing: the sounds you are listening for are the ones the hull will make right before it breaks into a million little pieces.
Yeah, even before this reporting the audio monitoring seemed dubious at best. My carbon-fiber experience is limited to race cars, but even on car parts it's pretty obvious that it's really strong right up until it isn't and it catastrophically fails.
I mean, they probably heard BEEP right before they imploded. Okay, maybe not the whole BEEP but at least BE....
This entire story is one of play stupid games win stupid prizes. People (which ones I am not sure but many people) fully understood the risk. The CEO is a jack wagon, he was told the risk and refused to understand (or acknowledge) it. The passengers haven't really been talked about. I suspect they had to have some knowledge of the risk with this system?
I mean if I am a billionaire and I am looking at doing some experimental thing I have to think I would have someone that can asses risk on my behalf. Like if I wanted to take the space flight deal from Blue Origin, I would have an expert to look at the risk before I did it. Kind of like the space shuttle it had roughly a 2% failure rate, I am not sure I would sign up for that. So either this guy (and the company) put on an extraordinary front of professionalism or people didn't do their homework or they chose to ignore the risk.
Anyway you look at it games and prizes.
David Lochridge, who oversaw marine operations at the company and who needed to sign off on the transfer, became convinced that Titan was unsafe. In January 2018, Lochridge sent Rush a quality-control inspection report detailing 27 issues with the vehicle, from questionable O-ring seals on the domes and missing bolts to flammable materials and more concerns about its carbon-fiber hull. Rush fired him the next day.
Wow, then he got sued for whistleblowing and therefore breaking his NDA? Crazy
NY Nick said:This entire story is one of play stupid games win stupid prizes. People (which ones I am not sure but many people) fully understood the risk. The CEO is a jack wagon, he was told the risk and refused to understand (or acknowledge) it. The passengers haven't really been talked about. I suspect they had to have some knowledge of the risk with this system?
I mean if I am a billionaire and I am looking at doing some experimental thing I have to think I would have someone that can asses risk on my behalf. Like if I wanted to take the space flight deal from Blue Origin, I would have an expert to look at the risk before I did it. Kind of like the space shuttle it had roughly a 2% failure rate, I am not sure I would sign up for that. So either this guy (and the company) put on an extraordinary front of professionalism or people didn't do their homework or they chose to ignore the risk.
Anyway you look at it games and prizes.
Not as convinced as to the billionaires assessing risk.
Richest guy I know is friends with my brother in law. Rough worth of $250,000,000 last I talked about that with either of em. Completely different realm from a billionaire, but also I'd bet there are similarities.
He manages his money well, but also he doesnt cause he doesnt have to. He bought a million dollar yacht and couldnt bring it up the river to one of his homes cause the bridge was too low. Gonna sell it at probably a $375,000 loss.
It doesnt phase him.
Do that too often and... well, I can see not worrying about the risk of a certain thing.
This seems like a classic case of FAFO.
They definitely did both FA and FO.
I see a lot of you guys disrespecting Stockton Rush and I'm no going to stand for it. Mr. Rush was a visionary. A luminary. A hero for our times.
Not only did he implode a bunch of billionaires at the bottom of the ocean, he charged them for it. Based.
That is why I am proud to announce my new business venture: OceanCrate. Here at OceanCrate we offer you the once in a lifetime oppritunity to see the Ocean floor. For just $125,000 (just half the price of a seat on an oceangate submersible) I will personally weld you and up to 50 of your richest friends into a shipping container and punt you off an oil rig.
At OceanCrate there is no 'risk' of failure, I guarantee it.
NY Nick said:I mean if I am a billionaire and I am looking at doing some experimental thing I have to think I would have someone that can asses risk on my behalf. Like if I wanted to take the space flight deal from Blue Origin, I would have an expert to look at the risk before I did it.
People correlate wealth with intelligence and they shouldn't.
Nothing in that article is worse than I thought. I'm not sure if I heard it on the news, or just assumed that level of general incompetence
Peabody said:People correlate wealth with intelligence and they shouldn't.Nothing in that article is worse than I thought. I'm not sure if I heard it on the news, or just assumed that level of general incompetence
Repeating cause truth...
NY Nick said:I mean if I am a billionaire and I am looking at doing some experimental thing I...
... think that reinvesting the excess cash that I am about to piss away by creating educational resource programs, music programs, even sponsorships for Challenge builders that have ideas that need capital to help with execution would be far more exciting than becoming seafood for seafood or scattered across the milky way as the byproduct of some ill conceived dream to populate Uranus.
No, if I were a billionaire I wouldn't be for long but everyone around me would be positively affected.
lol on the responses to my rant. I have no basis to know how the brain of a billionaire works. It's easy for me (who will undoubtedly never be rich because I am too risk averse) to say they should have assessed risk after the fact.
I suspect I would care about money in proportion to what I do now. Knock a few zeros off the sailboat story. And I would buy some dumb E36 M3 and sell it at a $375 loss 🤣. I have a truck that will fit that story with an extra zero and just sold a golf cart that is that story. The truck bothers me and the golf cart is a funny story to tell.
Also attitudes about risk with money and bodily harm are totally different things. Billionaires would certainly take bigger risks with money (at least in absolute terms, maybe or maybe not in relative terms) but are definitely more risk-averse with bodily harm. See Roman Abramovich or Vladimir Putin for some prominent examples. Most of them buy luxury bug-out shelters (although rarely in smart places, but they're clearly interested in having them available). Most megayachts have a high-end medical bay on board and a hotshot doctor on staff. A lot of them buy into post-mortem cryopreservation even though the entire industry is one big vat of concentrated pseudoscience with a sci-fi rubber ducky floating on top. These are all totally understandable - if your life is an occasionally interrupted carousel of incredible pleasures instead of a miserable slog of nearly fruitless labor that might be sprinkled with occasional moments of enjoyment if you're lucky, it makes total sense to want to protect and extend it. Honestly I'm surprised the already elevated level of aversion to physical risk isn't higher on average with rich guys - I see some of them riding motorcycles or flying on small aircraft and think that with so much to lose, it seems like a lot of risk.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
Is there some sort of award that you can receive for the use of language in this post?
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