Posted on 06/22/2023 6:39:42 AM PDT by Red Badger
Stockton Rush, who is one of five people aboard his own company’s lost and likely doomed submersible which lost contact with the surface while diving to see the Titanic, said in 2022 that “safety just is pure waste.”
Rush, the CEO and founder of OceanGate Expeditions, spoke with CBS News reporter David Pogue on his podcast “Unsung Science” about a prospective trip to see the legendary shipwreck some 12,500 feet below the Atlantic surface off of Newfoundland.
“My whole life I wanted to be an astronaut,” Rush stated. “I went and got an aerospace engineering degree. I wanted to be a fighter pilot but my eyesight wasn’t good enough for that. That was when I had this epiphany that it wasn’t about going into space; it was about exploring. It was about finding new life forms.”
“I realized that the ocean is the universe,” he continued. “That is where life is, and it fit very well. It turns out that an aerospace engineering degree actually has helped me do things in the submersible world that people who don’t understand compressible fluid flow didn’t quite figure out.”
“Once you’re certain it’s not gonna collapse on everybody, everything else can fail. It doesn’t matter. Your thrusters can go; your lights can go; all these things can fail, you’re still gonna be safe,” he said. “You just have to be very careful that the life-support systems, the sub itself, the oxygen system, carbon dioxide scrubbing, all that stuff, that needs to be buttoned down.”
Rush spoke of the dangers involved in his work, saying, “There’s a limit. At some point, safety just is pure waste. If you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed, don’t get into your car, don’t do anything. At some point, you’re gonna take some risk and it really is a risk-reward question. … I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”
He said what worried him was not going underwater with the submersible but the trip on the ship getting to the area of the dive, saying, “What worries us is not once you’re underwater; what worries me is when I’m getting you there.”
“What I worry about most are things that will stop me from being able to get to the surface,” he said. “Overhangs, fish nets, entanglement hazards. And, that’s just a technique, piloting technique. It’s pretty clear — if it’s an overhang, don’t go under it. If there’s a net, don’t go near it. So, you can avoid those if you are just slow and steady.”
Pogue wound up staying on the mothership while another team submerged but didn’t find the Titanic, ultimately surfacing but never losing contact with the surface.
Taking people's comments out of context to make them look stupid or foolish is a form of false witness, which it is written "thou shalt not bear".
Mr. Rush had enough real problems in the way he ran his operation; creating fake problems does not help understand events leading to the present catastrophic failure.
That example wasn’t a safety rule. You obviously do not work in and never have worked in safety critical system.
Some rules are written in stupidity.
Some rules are written in blood.
Smart and EXPERIENCED engineers know the difference.
Mr. Rush deliberately excluded EXPERIENCED engineers from his team.
And now we have some more blood-red rules.
I agree.
However, Rush’s understanding of where that point was is a significant problem, as we all now know!
I keep seeing people make a big deal out of the “game controller”. Bomb squads, military drone operators, and others use these because they work as a simple input device.
They are cheap and effective and not any different than a computer mouse. I am surprised the military does not pay $1000 for the same thing labeled as “mil-spec”.
Just my .02
There is a lot of speculation and a laundry list of things that could have gone wrong and they had a history of many problems ending dives to include the batteries. From what I can tell, the game controller was probably one of the most reliable things on the vessel.
Hoisted on his own petard
It may well be.
We have a lot of ignorance at present. We do not know what happened, or why.
It may be Mr. Rush was at fault. As owner of the concern, his is the ultimate responsibility.
Our society is suffocating under risk-aversion. We make rules for "safety" where the risk is incredibly low and the costs are incredibly high.
The EPA CO2 rules are an excellent example.
Not just some dude but the truly great GL Chesterton himself
Rush wanted to be a deep ocean explorer ‘pioneer’ of sorts. He took his calculated risks with the Titan. By some miracle now we hope they survive. Rush could learn much from this endeavor but more likely he’s posthumously passing that baton on to others.
He will become a footnote in history..................
the U.S.N only tales the top 5%-10% of its sailors for sub duty and a significant portion of those never get thru sub school.. No one ever washed out of the surface fleet to subs.
I saw 60% of my nuc school class fail out. they never even made it thru the book work.
It was a foolish mindset to think, “I can do this without all those rules”. Those “rules” come from experiences from others. Use them.
I’m all for an adventurous spirit to promote new findings, but this guy arrogantly ignored many important safety concerns because he thought he knew better.
We can all criticize or admire his endeavors. Perhaps both at the same time but he dared to do a challenging cutting edge objective. History is replete with such examples. World explorer Ferdinand Magellan comes to mind.
Magellan ventured into the unknown.
Rush ventured into the known...........
ABC reporter says on his trip they almost got stuck trapped by the propeller due to the currents. See video.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/06/22/the-missing-titanic-submersible-has-run-out-of-oxygen-n2624839
Yes, I saw that.
Never venture too close. Another worry was drifting, abandoned fishing nets.................
#25 My usb mouse would get sticky or stop working until I found a buried setting in Device Manager. The bluetooth mouse I tried as a replacement would not stay connected reliably.
These are items made by the millions in use with Windows software and they still fail.
I bet he saw that wireless device and thought it would be cool to use it on his homemade sub.
It was a foolish mindset to think, “I can do this without all those rules”. Those “rules” come from experiences from others. Use them.
I find this to be a quite weird interpretation of what he said.
He never said “I can do this without all those rules”. He said, essentially, life is risk. Rules can become so restrictive as to prevent any action. You cannot eliminate all risk.
I would use a corded one and carry a second as a spare, but overall they are highly reliable input devices. There was not a lot of room for redundancy on this submersible because it is so small.
I would not go on it for a host of reasons but the one that would concern me the most is the batteries. I won’t bet my life on lithium-ion batteries and if one of the hundreds of little cells on this thing has a bad day it either shuts down power (best case) or it catches fire or vents toxic gases (worst case).
Trust but verify.
The same people in charge of the rescue/recovery and the vast majority of the people reporting on it are proven liars.
We take their word for anything at our peril.
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