Originally Posted by :
A search and rescue operation is currently underway to locate a submarine that went missing during an expedition to the Titanic.
The U.S. Coast Guard was looking for the submarine Monday morning after it disappeared during the expedition from St. John's, N.L. The infamous 1912 wreck is located more than 600 kilometres southeast of the province in the North Atlantic Ocean.
The trip to the Titanic was being run by OceanGate Expeditions, a U.S.-based company. It uses a five-person submersible named Titan to reach the wreckage 3,800 metres below the surface. OceanGate's website advertises a seven-night voyage to the Titanic for US$250,000 per person, or approximately CA$330,000.
"We are exploring and mobilizing all options to bring the crew back safely," an OceanGate spokesperson said in an email to CTV News. "Our entire focus is on the crewmembers in the submersible and their families."
Those tours are a series of five eight-day missions to the Titanic with the money raised by tourists going towards Titanic research. Posts on social media show the ship launched from the St. John's area last week.
Did they really have 5 people in this?? Or do they have a larger version??
"Carbon fibre makes noise,” Rush told David Pogue, a CBS News correspondent, last summer, during one of the Titanic expeditions. “It crackles. The first time you pressurize it, if you think about it—of those million fibres, a couple of ’em are sorta weak. They shouldn’t have made the team.” He spoke of signs of hull breakage as if it were perfectly routine. “The first time we took it to full pressure, it made a bunch of noise. The second time, it made very little noise.” [Reply]
Originally Posted by Frazod:
Say what you will about the guy, but he paid the ultimate price for his carelessness and hubris. A true villain would have been snorting coke off a hooker's ass in a multi-million dollar penthouse when that thing imploded, not riding inside it along with everybody else.
Should he have known it was unsafe? Sure. But he obviously didn't think it was unsafe.
Yeah, agreed. And I've also noted over the years that the person who gets blamed for things is usually the person who's not in the room.
The fact that he died is proof that he believed in what he was doing. I'll give him points for that. And I'll give him points for trying to be innovative, which is a good thing. It appears that his fatal flaw (literally fatal) was a huge ego where he always thought he was the smartest guy in the room and wouldn't listen to anyone else. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Chief Pagan:
Like being in a steel can going down the road at 75 mph next to idiots doing the same thing?
I've always gotten the feeling that a hundred years from now they're going to look back at people driving as something wildly dangerous and crazy. Like, you're just trusting everyone not to pull the car into oncoming traffic for absolutely no reason? Without any kind of guidance system? What's to stop people from getting into head on collisions? And the answer will be uh, faith? [Reply]
Certainly a lot of hubris according to that New Yorker piece.
He's always chalking the problems up as part and parcel to being a "disruptor", comparing himself to great people, saying that people who really know what they're doing ignore all the rules. Well, no, you have to know enough about the relevant facts to know why those rules are there in the first place, and you have to know enough to rethink those rules intelligently.
Like that bit about the acrylic of the window being rated for approx 1/3 of the depth he was taking it to. He didn't understand the rating system, or thought it was overly cautious and ignored it. (Bought the carbon fiber it said from NASA, after it was too old for them to use?) Interns were doing the electrical system. It wasn't redundant. He thought he knew better than everyone else.
That's the guy's whole story in microcosm. Cutting corners, thinking these safety procedures and inspections are silly. Mistaking a force of will for capability.
He spent all his time in that area between unsafe and dangerous. But there's no way to live there permanently. [Reply]
Rush and his team started deep sea testing for the Titan submersible in the Bahamas back in April 2018, according to a post by OceanGate's Instagram account dated May 16, 2018. OceanGate said in the post that the submersible had "sustained lightning damage that affected over 70% of its internal systems."
But the setback did not seem to faze Rush, who said in the interview that OceanGate was able to replace the Titan's faulty components within a "couple of days."
"Fortunately, we are using commercial off-the-shelf and line-replaceable items. So in a matter of a couple of days, we were able to replace all those components," Rush said. [Reply]
Anyone else think that the "live failure tracking" system was showing a hull failure? It's also possible that the window started cracking, but I thought I saw a photo of it being recovered intact.
Alternately, they may have started hearing the hull cracking, as was described and deemed harmless in the testing, but recognized that it was getting louder or something. [Reply]