remember that weird little Titan submersible that imploded, killing some billionaires last year? well, the US Coast Guard released more documentation, including photos, so let's take a look! 🧵
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Jfc this looks like something I made in my late teens or early 20s, working with hand tools and some basic machining equipment in a basement that had standing water in half of it.
Made my first [redacted so I'm not put on a watchlist] down there.
You remember that part of the movie where Bill Paxton's character talks about the submersible they're in and says that if the 2-inch-thick windows go, or another part of the hull, "it's sayonara in two microseconds"? That's accurate. There's a reason there are very few subs that can get there.
Yes. What really creeped me out was the interview, right at the end, which I mentioned.
Also, it started out as a film about this wacky rich sub guy who was hiring impressionable youngsters for his project. But his personality kind of jumped out at you from the start. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11394296/
And the Scots guy who was a safety whistleblower git sued and had to go into protection because the CEO was such a monumental Musk wannabe egotistical prick
What I don’t get is that billionaires have money. Why be cheap?! If I wanted to go to titanic, I’d have to build a piece of crap held together with duct tape. If I had a billion, I’d do it right.
He wanted to prove you could make a submarine out of carbon fiber so he could “disrupt the industry” and either start a company selling cheap submarines or sell the patents. He talked about this extensively, this was the proof of concept for a business plan.
You probably can make a safe carbon fiber submersible for less than current steel ones as long as your plan is to tour around coral reefs and ship wrecks in relatively shallow coastal waters. Building it safely would have helped to, but going that deep was an extremely foolish move.
An interesting counterpoint is James Cameron and the sub he commissioned to visit challenger deep. Spent the money to get it properly engineered, became the second successful mission there after a bunch of testing/training, then donated it to science.
think it literally comes down to "how dare you poors tell me what to do", he had a weird axe to grind about safety, which i really think did just stem from that notion
If you ever get a chance to look around a rich person's home, you'll find tons of this shit. Hack solutions holding expensive materials in place, etc. this is a bit exceptional bc it's shitty through and through...
It's because being born rich does NOT correlate to being smart / intelligent. These are two completely independent parameters, and without any relationship. That's simply it.
And if you made it, it's because you're obsessed with that thing, and ignorant of literally everything else. If you think it means you know everything, you're deeply wrong.
omg they reused the titanium domes and rings from the prototype!? also they covered the outside of the hull so there was no way to visually inspect it.
I think it was Wired that had a report on the sub and quoted various safety experts whose eyebrows got stuck to the ceiling about reusing the domes and rings, hoping they got all the old epoxy off.
Was it even really a prototype? The engineer kept calling it "serial number one" and described Rush and Spencer being pretty adamant about moving forward with that craft until they reached a point where the damage from the lightning strike was undeniable.
I'm not even a trained engineer, I design firearms as a hobby project, and I assumed a 1.5 safety margin on the pressure capacity of my designs. 1.09 is unfathomably weak to me.
the end sections of the hull, after being machined down to length, left these pieces behind, which show evidence of delamination. on the right, they put a bright light behind it and you can see it all the way through. very bad!
the O rings on the titanium end rings weren't properly designed, the one on the left sits too deep because the groove wasn't machined correctly. There's also a plunge hole (presumably to get the undercutting tool in) that is a serious weak point.
Not sure if it’s worth pointing out that these were identified by Lochridge as having originated from the original/“prototype” hull. Evidence of why it started to fail after a handful of dives (and like only one near operating depth), not because of the lighting strike.
That is the equivalent of tying the lumber you got at Lowes to the roof of your camry with kite string, then giving it a gentle shake and saying "That's not going anywhere."
That's more a Factory Acceptance Test type limit to check a particular assembly hasn't got an issue, and even the 1.25 factor only appears in the more otherwise arduous code sections.
they're not really meant for this material anyway. real subs use much wider margins (like maybe 10x or 20x if the material properties aren't well understood)
Clutching my head and going aaa. This has got to be the same mentality as the anti vax stuff: “nothing bad has ever happened to me or my friends so I can ignore these health and safety standards”
I think this is an age-old repeating pattern parable.
Beware the foolishness of a rich man who always knows better than everyone else and confidently places themselves (and others) in the path of almost certain destruction.
[As a risk professional] this pattern leads to swift & spectacular failure
"How hard can it be? we will survive the next trip because we survived the last trip, also we're very very smart and we had this idea that instead of making a strong hull, we'll just listen to the hull and if we hear it cracking, just hit the 'go up' button quickly"
No, we have clear evidence that Intuitive Machines do not understand how to successfully implement unmanned platforms either. The problem is the mentality. And the bigger problem is that the mentality lacks any understanding of its own limitations: This is why it's deadly and destructive.
This is encapsulated in OceanGate's consistent rejection, and eventual legal silencing, of expert advice that what they were doing was unsafe and going to lead to loss of life.
It does, though. Nasa has got the privatisation brainworms. Supposedly this will usher in a new era of safe, efficient, cheap space. (It won't, because every premise is wrong.)
Well yeah, the "privatisation" fraud relies on public funding sweating the details; then the idea is that they skim the profit off a base of everybody else's difficult and thorough work.
When it all goes wrong, Intuitive Machines C-suite starts yelling for help from the institutions they disparage.
As a kayaker I’m held to the standard of knowing everything about every watercraft incident and expected to field a lot of crazy questions. To my credit, I like watercraft and read a lot about them, I do ok. My knowledge is (probably?) laughable compared to your average random Navy veteran.
Didn’t one of them force their kid to go down with them? I swear I recall the kid didn’t want to go. That’s all I really remember and honestly the only person I feel bad for is that kid.
Yes.
I'm angry about the actual Titanic expert. He should have *known* better. How hard did he get played to think that thing was safe? His family is suing.
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These things tend to be small metal spheres for a reason, but the idiot billionaire thought he knew better than everyone else.
Made my first [redacted so I'm not put on a watchlist] down there.
Also, it started out as a film about this wacky rich sub guy who was hiring impressionable youngsters for his project. But his personality kind of jumped out at you from the start.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11394296/
Would have worked if he’d stayed shallow
Also, they've got great big egos
That's in the error band for some crappy pressure gauges.
Wow...
This is a margin of .09 on catastrophic failure. The craziest fucking thing I've ever heard.
it was delaminating, lucky escape there
Passenger: Why does this have a 1st Armor Division patch?
Beware the foolishness of a rich man who always knows better than everyone else and confidently places themselves (and others) in the path of almost certain destruction.
[As a risk professional] this pattern leads to swift & spectacular failure
We know the psychology already! it's tech guys! …
When it all goes wrong, Intuitive Machines C-suite starts yelling for help from the institutions they disparage.
I'm angry about the actual Titanic expert. He should have *known* better. How hard did he get played to think that thing was safe? His family is suing.