Posted on 06/22/2023 5:23:54 AM PDT by ChicagoConservative27
The Titanic tourist submersible that vanished on a trip to the 111-year-old shipwreck at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean is believed to have run out of oxygen — but authorities pushed ahead with the search operation Thursday morning.
OceanGate Expeditions, which operates the Titan sub and whose CEO, Stockton Rush, is aboard the missing vessel, told the Coast Guard on Sunday evening that the vehicle was equipped with only 96 hours of oxygen, with the timer running out around 7:08 a.m. Thursday.
The status of the five passengers aboard the ill-fated trip remains unclear as US and Canadian officials work around the clock to attempt to locate the missing Titan sub 900 miles east of Cape Cod.
The Coast Guard on Thursday morning confirmed that a remote-operated vehicle “has reached the sea floor” and started searching for the missing sub.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Estrada, whose trip on the sub was paid for by sponsors, says it was originally scheduled for July 2021, but pushed back by a year due to unspecified ‘difficulties’ with the Titan.
Estrada spoke after CBS Sunday Morning reporter David Pogue revealed Monday his troublesome experience on the Titan - which saw it suffer yet more communications issues.
The difficulties caused the submarine to be reported missing for two and a half hours - a similar amount of time to the blackout suffered during Estrada’s expedition.
And German adventurer Arthur Loibl said that his August 2021 trip to the Titanic on Titan was a ‘suicide mission’ after it suffered a host of electrical problems, with parts even falling off the doomed sub.
“The average person doesn’t have the money to do things like this even if they wanted to.”
OTOH, it doesn’t cost very much for the, “Hold my beer, Bubba, and watch this!” type of (hopefully) death-defying stunt ...
That’s the classic V-tail Bonanza “doctor killer” scenario. The typical doctor “god complex” combined with a high-performance aircraft that they have the money to buy, but not the experience to safely handle. Extra points if they’re a flat lander who decides to fly the family to somewhere like Telluride on a hot day.
Can anyone here even access OceanGate’s webpage? Appears they’ve taken access away.
http://oceangateexpeditions.com
People die climbing Mt. Everest every year. So far,, there's been over 300 deaths.
It comes up eventually...unlike the sub.
The whole thing sounds like it wasn’t thought through at all.
People are pissed because the details are coming out about the stupidity of the CEO that ultimately killed everyone, and forced the US taxpayer to pay for it.
utterly insane design: GLUING titanium end rings onto a 5” thick carbon fiber tube to act as attachment points for the titanium end domes ... carbon fiber, glue, and titanium: utterly dissimilar materials with massively different deformation and fracture behavior at their junctions when under extreme pressure ...
REAL engineers would have started with computer simulations of the stresses at those junctions with those materials, and then, assuming simulations showed it might work, would have proceeded to pressure test an actual vessel at its maximum depth with dozens of attached telemetric stress gauges ... assuming THAT testing didn’t fail, then they would have proceeded to cycle a vessel between maximum pressure depth and atmospheric pressure until the vessel failed (or not) ... and no doubt, Stockton Rush did none of the above standard materials engineering and testing ... [it also blows my mind that locator beacons were apparently not included ... btw, Stockton deliberately eschewed voice communications because he didn’t want to be annoyed by constant requests for updates from the mother ship]
Stockton proudly hired only neophyte DEI children for his engineers, instead of experienced submarine engineers, eschewing experienced sub engineers as fuddy duddy “old white men” ... after all, he said, fuddy duddys engineers wouldn’t “appreciate” (rubber-stamp) his “revolutionary designs” [where have we heard that before? oh yeah, from Elizabeth Holmes, who just started an eleven year Federal prison sentence related to her “revolutionary” medical testing scam ... ]
Stockton Rush rushed to join the ranks of true revolutionaries, Musk and Bezos ... instead, Stockton Rush joined the Elizabeth Holmes sociopath category: he killed customers with a bogus submarine, while she killed customers with bogus medical tests ...
“Billionaires or not and regardless of ticket price, I would have done my due diligence in checking this out before going on that ride. I hate being stuck in a plane for four hours and I’m being paid to do that. Not a chance I’d get in that thing and go 2.5 miles underwater with >2 tons psi trying to smoosh the cramped vehicle I’m in, much less for 8-12 hours.”
Agreed. I’m not a claustrophobic guy - but there’s no way I could picture myself getting in that thing at all.
No matter what the cause, 5 people are likely dead now, and it was completely preventable. That box was a death trap for a dozen reasons - crappy systems, questionable design, lack of testing.
As much as I hate to see the waste of money and resources on a “recovery” effort, I think we should do it - if, for no other reason, to educate everyone on why you shouldn’t cut corners in engineering something that will have humans inside of it. I don’t care about the Logitech (it wasn’t a PS5) controller - it’s the idea that it requires bluetooth, which requires electricity to operate. If the batteries failed unexpectedly, how do you control the submersible? An influencer on a earlier journey said the trip was cut short because they rapidly depleted the battery after 1 hour and needed to use the remaining charge to head to the surface.
They say that they were using Starlink for communication - how? Satellite signals don’t penetrate very far under water, if at all (depending on the frequency). The US Navy and other navies spend tons of money on long antenna systems(30 miles+) to communicate with submerged submarines (ELF/SLF) and those only penetrate to the operating depths of the subs (the exact figures for crush depths are secrets, but they’re nowhere close to the depth of the journey - low thousands of feet). The “ping” that marks the communication to the mother-ship must use some other technology.
They supposedly have 96 hours of air on-board - is that for 5 people? How do they vent the CO2 or scrub it? 96 hours of air seemed reasonable, but what about food and water?
If it was so safe, why did the CEO refuse to submit it for independent testing?
I can go on and on but I’m hard-pressed to think that this contraption was or is ready for commercial use. It’s borderline criminal to sell tickets to ride in it.
Based on the limited information available, here are my theories:
1. Catastrophic physical failure: The carbon fiber developed a crack that expounded under pressure. They’re immediately killed. A crack in the viewport (which was not rated for a depth anywhere near what they’re heading toward) could cause a similar issue, flooding the compartment with no means to remove the water.
2. Catastrophic electrical failure: the batteries depleted and they sunk with no means to bring themselves back up. There are plenty of other subsystems in the electrical system that could have also failed (a bus, the exposed wiring that controls the thrusters and possibly the other systems that can raise the ship) causing the same outcome.
3. Collision/Entanglement - what if the descent wasn’t as controlled as it should be and they crashed into something (like the titanic itself or something in the debris field)? If they “landed” inside the ship unintentionally, they could have damaged the submersible and no longer have the capability to return - or there could be too much debris on top of them to navigate. Same for a rough landing on the sea floor.
Then there are the giant squids ;)
This project was doomed from the moment it hit the water - it was only a question of when. They weren’t prepared for most, if any, emergencies while underway. The limited means of communication only make the situation worse. The more I think about it, the more I you can easily see that are wrong. What if the pilot had a medical episode? Can anyone else operate the submersible?
The entire incident is a case study in incomplete engineering. I hope for the best outcome but the odds are against anything other than maybe recovering this tomb and trying to figure out which of the myriad of bad decisions caused the death of 5 people.
MJ
Wow, a totally excellent and true post.
Style over substance when the only thing that actually matters is substance. Look at that sub, they cram 5 people with no seats in there. Looks like their only view is through the circular window and computer screens. So why take a trip on that kooky craft when there are whole documentaries available that have actually made extensive video and photos of the whole thing?
You know it is just more exciting going on a kewl guy sub using Xbox controllers than it is getting on a tried and true old white guy sub that really is based on science and testing. /s
They all market to that wokester mob that believes they are so modern and enlightened when they are actually indoctrinated sheep.
“This is so upsetting. People are social media are disgusting with the comments that made against these people in the sub because they are billionaires. Our society is demented.”
Yes, some of it envy, but a lot of it is also directed at the owner for his comments about not wanting “50 yr old white males” in his company and about how worrying too mush about safety is a waste of money.
I just tried and was able to get onto their site. Man, it’s filled with now-ironic statements, such as (paraphrasing slightly) “Step beyond everyday life…” (yeah, or life completely). They also had a statement at the bottom of the page to the effect, “As seen at…” followed by several TV network logos. Yep, your company is certainly being seen on every network on the planet now.
Gee, what a snazzy logo.
Same here. One of the physical requirements was apparently the ability to sit cross-legged for 12 hours, jowl-to-jowl with four other people in a space so small that you had to go on a special diet beforehand so you wouldn't need to have a bowel movement.
I couldn't do it.
What's worse than losing power and trapped on the bottom, and dying of lack of water and air?
Losing power, bobbing to the surface and dying of lack of water and air because you can't get the hatch open...
“I’m sure everybody in that sub feels better knowing they achieved a high DEI score prior to their death at the bottom of the ocean.”
👍👍
It didn’t take this event to tell me that our society is demented.
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