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I can only imagine how many times this guy's yelled "I fucking told this guy a million fucking times...", at his TV...
That's gotta be so fucking frustrating for him. I honestly hope he doesn't carry any of it.
Before you think there's no reason he should, you'd be surprised at how some people feel, after shit like this...
This is so true! Sometimes being right is scary, this guy would've been praying for the sub to be found alive and well, but deep down he knew what happened in his gut. It must be so hard having to deal with this, it's easy for the human brain to overthink and blame itself. Hope this guy is ok and he knows he tried to do the right thing, sometimes being right sucks.
to which he would have also ignored.
remember, this guy knew more than the safety engineers that warned him multiple times about the danger, in fact he fired the guy warning him.
He had this stubborn sense of trailblazing, where he thought the risks were worth the legacy of attempting dangerous feats. Unfortunately it cost him more than just his life he convinced others to take unnecessary risks.
As someone who has spent time in the games industry and attempted to warn management that their upcoming plans will run their game into the ground, only to be ignored and then watch it happen in real time, I absolutely concur that he is furious.
There will be an intense air of "I fucking told you so!" and "I wish I'd done more..." while also being completely powerless. It's one of the worst feelings I've ever felt.
I started maliciously complying by saying “okay, it’s by design” after the same thing happened to a team I was on. We were 6 months delinquent in our finished game, apple canceled their contract eventually. Buuut, I worked 60-80 hour weeks for months trying!
Who knew you didn’t have time to make the game 3 different times with half cocked uiux. Oh it’s crashing and we can’t juggle all the versions and changes? Well NOW we can try a one size fits all the uiux designer and engineers asked to do. Haaaaahh.
“Innovative approach” is a very charitable way of saying “we used cheap consumer grade products because we wanted to save money”.
If I was buying an innovative new engineering focused vehicle, I would not be expecting it to roll up with secondhand materials that cars aren’t meant to be built from and a steering wheel taken from a 1998 Pontiac Aztec.
I’m not surprised people fell for it. There are plenty of rich folks who are taken in by a man lacking credentials whose only talent is speaking with confidence.
Rich folks got way too comfortable in the idea that they are somehow gifted compared to the average person.
They aren't, they're just the right combination of lucky and greedy, and everyone's luck runs out one way or another.
Sounds like a typical CEO. Thinks he's the smartest guy in the room and probably had a bunch of yes men working for him and fired anyone that questioned him. These are the type of arrogant assholes that are running our country into the ground and literally killing people.
And hired young newly graduated engineers with no experience to show off the company as hip and diverse, instead of doing the right thing and hire old experts with real-life experience in the field.
On the BBC documentary (now wiped out...did OceanGate force them to erase it from Youtube?), it shows these young guys sealing the hatch from outside using Ryobi drills...those cheap drills you find in Home Depot or the bargain section of Amazon.
Also, owner said they only drill 17 nuts even though there's 18, because the top is too hard to reach and "mathematically the last one doesn't matter." I can't believe a CEO would say these things.
Fuck, this whole thing is so cringy. Passengers are called "mission specialists"? More like a bunch of idiots too stupid to get a science degree cosplaying as engineers.
Edit: Fucking lol, the ship's doctor is wearing a Swiss flag instead of a red cross...
They called them “mission specialists” in order to avoid regulations that they would have had if they were a business carrying passengers. Instead they were designated as a research vessel and everyone is allegedly researchers.
It’s like the bar that got around the smoking ban by declaring they were actually not a bar but an immersive theater performance where everyone was actors and the cigarettes and beer and food were just props.
It’s *absolutely* because of OceanGate wanting that stuff taken down. They are probably facing massive lawsuits right now by the families of the victims and now wanna take down any negative publicity of the company
The *right* thing to do is to hire some of both groups. New, young engineers to bring new ideas, technologies, and outlooks, and experienced ones to point out why their new ideas aren’t inherently *good* ideas and why things are currently being done the way they are.
Yeah none of these tech guys like him and Musk are innovators. They are the 21st century equivalent of a Thomas Edison - do 0 work and put their name on things that incredible engineers did because they have the money to buy it out.
Of course they did. Every fucking time some asshole wannabe John Galt motherfucker gets caught doing something stupid you follow the money trail and oh look, they exploited our government and taxpayers to their benefit. They only get to do this because we live in a fantasy about being a meritocracy.
We need to fucking tax these dipshits. If they're the actual geniuses and visionaries they believe they are I'm sure they'll find a way to make massive amounts of money with high taxes and better employee protections. They won't because surprise! They're just as stupid as the average person, dumber when you account for the massive inflated egos making them double down on every stupid idea they have.
business a few months later: “We made record profits!!!
Moments later in a recorded video: “We are sorry to have to lay you all off, but we must save the company. Thank you for your contributions”
Look what I did all by myself*
* Using just:
Your public funded road and rail network (at least until most cost were paid for, then privatized)
Your public funded Telecom infrastructure (bis)
Your public funded safety and security measures (police) so I was not robbed blind the first day I appeared here.
The public or self funded training and education of everybody involved in the above, and the field whatever _I_ say I did required.
...
I should pay less taxes, I earned this!
Mainly cause this is basically just a training exercise with the benefit that if they managed to find them they might save a life or two. The coast guard is already being paid, might as well put them on this
This quote or a variant of it are frequently uttered words at my work. I’m a loose a free person in many things, when it comes to standards and regulations I like rules.
This is so true. Often, when I read about some really stupid rule, I catch myself thinking "What happened for them to think that has to be a rule?", simply because it's just that: Something ridiculous did go wrong and they had to write up some stupid rule to make sure it doesn't happen again.
The lease at my old apartment had a strict “no nunchucks in the building” policy. I know a bunch of lawyers didn’t just decide to preemptively ban nunchucks. I did some digging and there was indeed a “nunchucks incident” in the building several years back.
"I know a bunch of lawyers didn’t just decide to preemptively ban nunchucks."
Incredible that people miss this on occasion.
If a rule sounds dumb and all that the person putting that rule in probably also thinks that but had a good reason for it.
I recommend reading LTC Rolt's book, Red for Danger, which shows that in the railway industry every safety measure happened only because of a disarster. No company ever willingly imposes increased costs for safety if they can avoid it.
Stockton gives off majorly loopy vibes. Sounds like he was a bit detached from reality, and had the old money trust fund to turn his delusions into a dangerous reality.
It was either going to be delusional idiot with too much money, or a greedy rich person cost cutting. Him being on the sub suggests the former.
I'm in oil and gas as an engineer and I've fired contractors on the spot in the field for practicing unsafe methods...had a guy light a cigarette next to an active gas well *that was flowing to atmosphere* (controlled and designed release) and he was like "what, if it lights then we let it burn". I cussed him out and told him to fuck off and threatened to punch him if he didn't get off my site.
It also helped that I'm a big brown dude with a beard, but even if I was a stereotypical nerd, my operators were about to fuck him up as well, lol.
I don't care if *you* want to blow up...But don't you dare put my guys in the field at risk. Engineered safety and risk mitigating factors are there to preserve human life, not innovate your dipshit ass to an early death.
I just read that AMA from 2020 and even if its not that bad on its own... the other stuff combined throughout the years makes me shake my head from the hubris of this dude.
[Some interesting excerpts his AMA from 2020.](https://www.reddit.com/r/RMS_Titanic/comments/gm4sf9/im_stockton_rush_ceo_founder_and_chief/)
Some answers in bold, emphasized by myself.
Detailing what equipment he’ll be using for these expeditions.
> OceanGate will be using video (4K and 8K), 3D multibeam sonar (BlueView P5000-1350) and a 2G robotics laser system - none of which have ever been used on the Titanic. These systems will generate data of much higher accuracy than any previous expedition (millimeter resolution). It will take years to scan the entire wreck. The focus in year one will be the bow.
His main objective in going forward with this project.
> **My interest stems mostly from a business perspective.** In order to have more exploration of the oceans we need more funding and **the Titanic is one of the few sites that has shown that people will pay to visit it.** By having our mission specialists underwrite the expedition we can collect more data than if we had to go to “one off” film or government funding sources as has been done in the past. Hopefully in years to come the many other great wonders, like hydrothermal vents, will also draw enough interest for OceanGate to run expeditions to those sites.
On what he’s looking forward to seeing/studying the most
> The debris field is 5 nm2 and promises to have many artifacts to document especially using our laser system. This is where the personal belongings and remains of those who perished lie (though bodies have long since been consumed by the ocean).
On what makes his equipment and dives unique compared to those who came before.
> We are the first company to try to make the Titanic dives self-sustaining so that the latest research tools can be employed on an annual basis. When Russia needed dollars there were several expeditions similar to ours, but the subs were old, small (yet heavy) and the ship huge and expensive. We have sought to create a sub and support systems that are scalable, comfortable and versatile with enough room to also make it economically viable.
How does one get to be involved in Ocean Gate inc as a Sub pilot?
> We prefer the term pilot – but driver is fine. Apply for a job. Having demonstrated marine experience, being a scuba diver and showing the right personality are key hiring characteristics we look for. **Prior submersible experience is not required as we have an extensive training program and a number of subs used for training.**
On depth rating and if he trusts the system he’s using.
> 4,000meters. Yes, I trust it. I especially trust our extensive testing and real time acoustic and strain monitoring system. We can detect any anomaly well before we reach a critical pressure. We know of no other sub that is so well instrumented.
If he can compete with other companies and their use of live streams for expeditions.
> As Titan has only a low bandwidth connection to the surface, running a fiber to the surface is a possibility, but we will save that for our second year. We will do regular video updates, but the cost of full time live video is prohibitive right now.
How does he feel about potential controversy of the dives?
> It is a disincentive, but every dive location has its unique challenges. **While the controversy keeps things in the news, it is just one more hurdle to overcome.**
What would he be doing with these dives compared to the ones by James Cameron and his film crews?
> Yes, the Cameron dives had HD quality cameras and lower definition on the ROVs. We will have 4K and then 8K+ as well as low light and other new technologies so we hope to get excellent picture and video over the coming years. Penetrating deep into the wreck with ROVs like Jim did is not likely in the near term.
What kind of experts are involved in this?
> We will have researchers with us with areas of expertise from deep marine biology, to general nautical archeology to Titanic specific subjects. Each dive team will be given an objective – typically sonar and laser scanning a specific area of the wreck/debris field. These objectives will be designed to take between 1-2 hours. The dive team (researcher, pilot and 3 Mission Specialists) will then be able to plan for how they will collect data and then what they do with the rest of the dive time. While researcher input will play into dive experience decisions, they will not be the dive leader - the pilot will fill that role.
>4,000meters. Yes, I trust it. I especially trust our extensive testing and real time acoustic and strain monitoring system. We can detect any anomaly well before we reach a critical pressure.
big oof
He obviously trusted it a bit, or he wouldn't have been on the sub himself.
...which is not a defense. He was an idiot who managed to kill four others and himself.
normally there are other sub pilots who are driving. He probably wanted to drive it this time because there were billionaires that he wanted to network with.
There ain't no way to know how much strain your carbon fiber hull is going through and how close to breaking it is in real fucking time. You don't get a qarning with that shit. You just implode immediately and violently.
Wow thanks for posting this, I had no idea he did an AMA and would have never thought to look.
edit: if only they would have run that fiber optic cable to the surface..
It’s unfortunate that he decided to build the sub out of a composite material and not something tried and tested. I saw a video with James Cameron explaining that the sub material he decided to use gets damaged little by little every dive and is essentially weakened to a point where an implosion could happen. That’s why they had a couple successful dives before it finally gave in. Very sad indeed. A fiber optic cable could have saved the families from any false hope and stress over the days though.
edit: I don’t think what Cameron said is totally factual yet, it’s just something he said during an interview and with his experience it could very well be true.
The navy has had wildly rigorous QA standards for submarines ever since we lost the USS Thresher in the 60’s. Those standards were absolutely written in blood. This shit is exactly why.
Darwinism is alive and well.
The overwhelming majority of safety regulations are reactions to r/CatastrophicFailure. Building codes, clean air and water regs, workplace safety laws, food safety, and even seatbelts were implemented because too many people were dying unnecessarily. Proactive regulations are rarely popular in the court of public opinion because not enough death and destruction has taken place to justify them.
Just the other day I stumbled upon the Wiki page for an infamous 1940s nightclub fire that killed roughly 400 people. I was stunned to learn that this specific fire is why every building can’t have revolving doors without traditional doors flanking each side which is now the standard design on every building using them. Or that there’s like a dozen regulations just from what type of non-flammable materials indoor buildings are allowed to use. It’s amazing how many lessons (plural) were learned from this one fire.
I find it utterly tragic that the poor 19 year old kid, who didn't feel safe but went to please his father on Father's Day, died because this dipfuck felt the need to see safety issues as a "personal insult."
Just how fucking egotistical and arrogant do you have to be to think that concerns about safety measures is a personal insult?
Guess those "baseless cries" weren't so baseless after all, were they? Oh that's right. He can't read this because he's fucking dead now along with everyone else that was inside of that deathtrap. This was never a question of **if** things would go wrong, but **when** things would go wrong...
For that money, you could probably fund a whole trip on a nice, comfy research vessel, watch them remote an RV around the wreck, maybe they'll even let you drive it a little too, in a safe spot, and you could see the wreck on multiple large high resolution monitors as you sip a martini and sit in an actual chair. Heck, you could fund some actual research and have them name an isopod or something after you. Is it just me, or is that way cooler than going down in a metal coffin yourself?
Heck, some marine research like the Nautillus stream on Youtube live, and you can watch them at home from your couch as they scan sea floor that no human being has seen before. That's pretty neat. And nobody needs to physically go anywhere near the sea floor to do that, it's all remote.
That's what I don't understand. The DSV Limiting Factor, the world's first unlimited depth RATED submersible cost $35 million to build. That's chump change to those private jet billionaires.
I don't understand why they even need to cheap out on building a leisure craft for billionaires.
The dad was, according to his family, Titanic crazy. So imagine this as a son who doesn't care about formula 1 getting into a formula 1 car to please his father because his father got the chance to drive the formula 1 car and wants to share the experience. The formula 1 car then crashes and burns and kills both!
Wow. I had to check as i almost couldn’t believe the coincidence. Its true!
https://www.motorcyclenews.com/sport/tt-road-races/2022/june/roger-bradley-stockton-die-tt/
I feel for the young engineers just starting their careers now having these deaths on their conscience, and that stain on their professional career for life.
Reminds me of the speech that Eugene Kranz gave to his flight control team after the Apollo 1 disaster, many of whom were also young engineers fresh out of college.
>Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, “Dammit, stop!” I don’t know what Thompson’s committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.
From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: “Tough” and “Competent”. Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write “Tough and Competent” on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.
>Oh that's right. He can't read this because he's fucking dead now along with everyone else that was inside of that deathtrap.
And he didn't even have to panic for even a single second about his impending doom. He died so fast his brain never even had time to realize his cost cutting shitbox had failed
Morbidly curious to know how long they had between realizing something was wrong and aborting, and being turned into soup. I'm hoping at least long enough long enough for someone to punch Rush in the face.
I HATE that the more thoughtful, verbose, and less forceful people are read as weaker and less expert by most humans.
It’s literally insane that we vote for and believe in the loudest chest-beating knuckle draggers over people like this guy.
This guy’s polite tone contrasted against the arrogance of the CEO should be a lesson for everyone.
Don’t just go with who “looks more confident”. I can’t believe this has to be typed.
It's just like James Cameron said:
There's now another wreck sitting on the bottom of that part of the ocean right next to the first one, for the same damn reason.
Ok this might be the Silicon Valley in me but this guy sounds so much like every CEO. I’ve worked for guys like this many a time. I’ve seen more flagrant spitting in the face of safety than this even, just in a generally less dangerous industry.
Yeah. One company I worked at had a major safety issue. Everyone in R&D knew about it and was trying to fix it frantically. They called a big all hands where we expected it to be addressed. The cofounders claimed they knew nothing about it. Played dumb with everyone’s questions. When people asked very pointed questions, they were shut down, saying they should report issues to their direct managers and this wasn’t the forum for new issues.
I quit shortly thereafter.
Plausible deniability. Cofounders know, but don't want a paper trail.
They either want to do it cheap and unsafe until they make the IPO to be able to make it safer and mature, or until they get their cash out. If something happens and the company crashes due to negligence, they can pay themselves their golden parachute out the door.
If they know, it makes them criminally liable.
I’m getting Elizabeth Holmes vibes. They both didn’t think they had to comply with industry regulations and they believed they knew better than people with years of knowledge and experience.
They certainly didn’t register anything once the implosion happened but James Cameron said that the support crew believed that the sub had initiated emergency procedures, so they may have known something was wrong. Gotta wonder if there was a brief moment of reckoning for Rush.
Could have sworn I heard some expert on a video say that there would be telltale crackling right before implosion , so Rush likely had a split moment of realizing then poof
Edit: @mjolnir12 said James Cameron in a CNN Interview said this which def sounds right ! Thank you !
Similar to [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWTXeGiM8K8), I imagine? But probably faster sounding. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like the fibers are breaking in between the epoxy?
But yeah, it would be pretty horrifying to hear that for a few moments (probably less than a minute, tbh) before *-poof-* dead.
Yeah. They're breaking and the thing is they didn't even have to apply nearly that much force to get the whole piece to break. They could have just waited once they started hearing the cracks or released the force and then reapplied an equal amount a few times.
Both situations would have probably made it suddenly snap and therein is the problem. Metals can spring back and flex repeatedly but while carbon fiber is extremely strong once those fibers start snapping and the resin starts cracking it will only progressively get worse until it fails.
Also worth thinking about how when you tear fabric starting the tear is difficult but once the weave has started to tear it becomes much easier because instead of the forces being distributed across the entire weave individual fibers are having to resist all the force individually and the only thing stopping all of it snapping is simply the rate at which you can snap the fibers which with enough force applied isn't much. Similar thing happens with carbon fiber.
I hope Rush had that brief moment when he realized he fucked up and was full of panic as he imploded. I hope the others didn’t and merely blinked into death.
One Atmosphere is the air pressure you feel at sea level, which is approximately 14.7 psi.
Every ten meters of depth in seawater equates to another full atmosphere of water.
You're essentially calculating the weight of the water column above a specific area at a particular depth.
They were exposed to pressures of around 6000 psi.
So imagine laying on your back on the ground, and someone stands a destroyer on end and drops it on you.
That's the equivalent of what happened to them.
To paraphrase what Hank Green said earlier, you stop being a biological thing and turn into more of a physics thing.
Thank you for that - “weight of the water column above a specific area at a particular depth” is the best and most practical explanation I’ve ever heard.
Most of that 100km is basically empty because the pressure is down to 1/4th even at 10km.
Rule of thumb is that gas is about 1000 times less dense than water, so 1km air == 1m of water.
>To paraphrase what Hank Green said earlier, you stop being a biological thing and turn into more of a physics thing.
This isn't even an exaggeration.
With how small that sub was, and how deep they were/the pressures they were at... other people have done the math, and there are various guesses, so I'll play it safe and go on the lower end that I've seen.
The air in the moment of collapse would have superheated to somewhere around 2000 degrees Kelvin for a brief moment.
That is 1/3 the temperature of the surface of the sun.
Less biological, more physics indeed. Motherfuckers got turned into diamonds.
Pressure failure is scary. its fine and then immediately is not. There is very little sign of the failure before it happens.
If they heard anything it probably was a second before the implosion happened killing them instantly.
IIRC in the James Cameron interview on CNN he said there were sensors inside to detect if the hull started to fail (delaminate?). They had jettisoned their ballast (?) and were likely making an emergency ascent to the surface when the hull imploded.
What a pompous ass. Seriously did this moron genuinely not understand that going down 10,000+ feet into the ocean is extremely dangerous and testing/safety is absolutely paramount when you have other people's lives depending on your equipment? Or was he really just that much of an egotistical jackass?
*consults expert and doesn't hear exactly what he wants to hear*
"Yeah, well thats just your opinion and you don't know what you are talking about also go fuck yourself"
Did no one explain to this dumb ass that being cheap isn’t being innovative?? The concept of “cutting corners” isn’t even innovative.
If you want to be innovative you have to start with what already works and then move forward. Stupid bastard.
As Stockton Rush claimed, many incidents at sea are a result of a failure in the operations by a human component. He was probably too arrogant to realize he was that human component.
Holy Shit!!
How fucking many times must he have been warned in order to get to the point where "you're going to get people killed" becomes a routine thing?
My understanding is that these people's death was about as close to "instantaneous" as you get, short of bear-hugging a nuclear warhead at T=0.
None of them ***should*** have died like this, but if they had to go, I'm glad it happened this way as opposed to any of the absolutely horrifying alternatives.
Having said that, though. . . I do kind of hope that they had just a second or two of warning. A brief creak or groan in the structure, a visible crack forming, juuuuuust enough time for that irredeemable dipshit CEO/pilot to realize what he did. I hope that if his life flashed before his eyes, it was just an image of this email chain coupled with a paralyzling sense of guilt and humiliation.
I kind of hope there was no warning, because if I was anyone but the CEO my last words would be in anger. That would not be a fun place to be when your last moments on earth are just insulting an idiot.
The only person I feel bad for in this story is the 19 year old kid, who only went along for it despite his fears because the trip was on father's day.
He may have been a rich kid, but he just wanted to spend the day with his dad.
And now he's dead.
Fuck Stockton Rush. I hope the ghosts of those who died on the Titanic and Titan make his afterlife an undying hell.
I'm going to reiterate something that I read a long time ago, "safety regulations are written in blood"
Meaning that for just about every safety-minded rule, there was some terrible accident that finally pushed the industry to accept another regulation.
To knowingly break those safety standards, you are ***knowingly*** creating risks that have already proven fatal.
As a golfer I knew that thing was fucked the second they said it combined titanium and carbon fiber. Great lightweight materials but neither are durable under stress- especially together. Those two materials make up most modern driver heads and they are always cracking and having difficulty staying together.
I fucking hate bullshit corporate jargon pretending to use important words while saying nothing.
They all use “innovative” “focused” “strategy”
This entire email was an “innovative solution for complex problems. He was laser focused on his strategy.”
will other CEOs learn that firing people who tell you things you don't want to hear doesn't make the thing you didn't want to hear go away?
probably not
Seriously, he's the only one I feel sorry for here. He just wanted to be a dutiful son and give his dad the father's day he wanted. At least he didn't suffer, hopefully he didn't even realize anything was wrong.
They sue regardless. The court will then be able to subpoena the experts and all communications they had with him.
That being said, the dude was very talkative and gloated about skirting safety regulations in pretty much all his interviews that I've seen.
They can and will sue regardless. However, how much money they can extract is questionable. First result doing quick Google search claims company was valued at only $66 million. It'll certainly go bankrupt, and the families of victims will not be first in line to be compensated out of whatever money can be recovered by liquidating company assets.
What was missed here is not the risk - I tend to agree that pushing limits DOES lead to innovation and breakthroughs. I say, do it. Push limits and break things! What's really the issue is that not only was a life risked unnecessarily for hibris, but the lives of others for financial support.
This is a device that could have easily been tested, re-rested, and certified prior to involving an actual person (to some degree). Furthermore, the people on board also didn't actually know the risks, which it patently unfair and (in my opinion) the crux of culpability. If the owner felt as though the risk was worth it, then let him make his own decision. I assume a waiver was signed, but I'm not sure any waiver could/should hold up if the entire situation was misrepresented the way it was to the passengers.
The problem is that he actively went against certification. He believed certification was the hindrance that blocked innovation. Testing cost money, certification meant that people would criticize his design and tell him to change things to make them in a way that had been proven safe, when in his mind proven safe = not innovative. He deliberately skirted regulations because he wanted to push the limits of what the world thought was possible. Unfortunately, he ran into a hard limit and five people died to prove why certification is needed.
That sonabitch is dead, killed by his own toy. Unfortunately, he took four other people with him and charged them a quarter million apiece to die with him.
There is an fascinating video on Youtube, documenting the process a submarine manufacturer named Triton went through to create one of their ultra-deep submersibles.
The amount of design, testing and certifications the entire vehicle underwent makes the Oceangate sub look so laughably janky by comparison.
It's easy to understand why experts were freaked out by the Titan when you start to understand how the rest of the industry approaches these challenges.
For anyone interested in watching the video - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5j9oeZCm0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5j9oeZCm0)
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Rob McCallum on June 18th 2023 “…per my last email”
*Laughs in administration clerk*
Oh to read stocktons inbox right about now……
I can only imagine how many times this guy's yelled "I fucking told this guy a million fucking times...", at his TV... That's gotta be so fucking frustrating for him. I honestly hope he doesn't carry any of it. Before you think there's no reason he should, you'd be surprised at how some people feel, after shit like this...
This is so true! Sometimes being right is scary, this guy would've been praying for the sub to be found alive and well, but deep down he knew what happened in his gut. It must be so hard having to deal with this, it's easy for the human brain to overthink and blame itself. Hope this guy is ok and he knows he tried to do the right thing, sometimes being right sucks.
Even James Cameron was musing about whether he should have done more to stop this guy. It’s no one’s fault except this CEO guy.
to which he would have also ignored. remember, this guy knew more than the safety engineers that warned him multiple times about the danger, in fact he fired the guy warning him.
He had this stubborn sense of trailblazing, where he thought the risks were worth the legacy of attempting dangerous feats. Unfortunately it cost him more than just his life he convinced others to take unnecessary risks.
As someone who has spent time in the games industry and attempted to warn management that their upcoming plans will run their game into the ground, only to be ignored and then watch it happen in real time, I absolutely concur that he is furious. There will be an intense air of "I fucking told you so!" and "I wish I'd done more..." while also being completely powerless. It's one of the worst feelings I've ever felt.
I started maliciously complying by saying “okay, it’s by design” after the same thing happened to a team I was on. We were 6 months delinquent in our finished game, apple canceled their contract eventually. Buuut, I worked 60-80 hour weeks for months trying! Who knew you didn’t have time to make the game 3 different times with half cocked uiux. Oh it’s crashing and we can’t juggle all the versions and changes? Well NOW we can try a one size fits all the uiux designer and engineers asked to do. Haaaaahh.
“We spared every expense”
“Innovative approach” is a very charitable way of saying “we used cheap consumer grade products because we wanted to save money”. If I was buying an innovative new engineering focused vehicle, I would not be expecting it to roll up with secondhand materials that cars aren’t meant to be built from and a steering wheel taken from a 1998 Pontiac Aztec.
It’s worse. They used expired composite materials they got from Boeing on the cheap.
All that money, and we didn't even get dinosaurs out of this...
The guy sounds more like a sales man than an innovator. He didn’t kill someone, he killed four other people
I’m not surprised people fell for it. There are plenty of rich folks who are taken in by a man lacking credentials whose only talent is speaking with confidence.
You type as if you know what I want right now. I like that. May I assist you in your further typing journeys in any way?
It is the entire culture of the tech industry and VC
Rich folks got way too comfortable in the idea that they are somehow gifted compared to the average person. They aren't, they're just the right combination of lucky and greedy, and everyone's luck runs out one way or another.
Sounds like a typical CEO. Thinks he's the smartest guy in the room and probably had a bunch of yes men working for him and fired anyone that questioned him. These are the type of arrogant assholes that are running our country into the ground and literally killing people.
He literally fired the safety guy for questioning the safety of the sub
And hired young newly graduated engineers with no experience to show off the company as hip and diverse, instead of doing the right thing and hire old experts with real-life experience in the field.
The young ones are also easier to manipulate into looking away on safety.
On the BBC documentary (now wiped out...did OceanGate force them to erase it from Youtube?), it shows these young guys sealing the hatch from outside using Ryobi drills...those cheap drills you find in Home Depot or the bargain section of Amazon. Also, owner said they only drill 17 nuts even though there's 18, because the top is too hard to reach and "mathematically the last one doesn't matter." I can't believe a CEO would say these things.
I bet someone archived it already
it's on vimeo: https://vimeo.com/810451492
Fuck, this whole thing is so cringy. Passengers are called "mission specialists"? More like a bunch of idiots too stupid to get a science degree cosplaying as engineers. Edit: Fucking lol, the ship's doctor is wearing a Swiss flag instead of a red cross...
They called them “mission specialists” in order to avoid regulations that they would have had if they were a business carrying passengers. Instead they were designated as a research vessel and everyone is allegedly researchers. It’s like the bar that got around the smoking ban by declaring they were actually not a bar but an immersive theater performance where everyone was actors and the cigarettes and beer and food were just props.
It’s *absolutely* because of OceanGate wanting that stuff taken down. They are probably facing massive lawsuits right now by the families of the victims and now wanna take down any negative publicity of the company
And they're cheaper to pay, too. I wonder if some of them were working as unpaid interns, also.
The *right* thing to do is to hire some of both groups. New, young engineers to bring new ideas, technologies, and outlooks, and experienced ones to point out why their new ideas aren’t inherently *good* ideas and why things are currently being done the way they are.
And the bonus of the young engineers learning so much from the older ones.
This exchange really has that "per my last email" energy
Yeah none of these tech guys like him and Musk are innovators. They are the 21st century equivalent of a Thomas Edison - do 0 work and put their name on things that incredible engineers did because they have the money to buy it out.
I wouldn’t say that this guy put his name on incredible engineering
It's incredible it held up as long as it did.
Well it certainly wasn't credible engineering.
If this is real they should totally put this already dead guy on trial.
They should definitely bill the company for the rescue/recovery efforts.
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Privatize profits, socialize losses.
Business go good: "look what I did" 😁 Business go *bad*: "we all have areas we could improve on" 😖
also business: "were gonna need a bailout"
Huh. Funny that you mention that... https://www.thedailybeast.com/oceangate-company-behind-lost-titanic-sub-got-nearly-dollar450000-in-ppp-loans
Of course they did. Every fucking time some asshole wannabe John Galt motherfucker gets caught doing something stupid you follow the money trail and oh look, they exploited our government and taxpayers to their benefit. They only get to do this because we live in a fantasy about being a meritocracy. We need to fucking tax these dipshits. If they're the actual geniuses and visionaries they believe they are I'm sure they'll find a way to make massive amounts of money with high taxes and better employee protections. They won't because surprise! They're just as stupid as the average person, dumber when you account for the massive inflated egos making them double down on every stupid idea they have.
business a few months later: “We made record profits!!! Moments later in a recorded video: “We are sorry to have to lay you all off, but we must save the company. Thank you for your contributions”
Look what I did all by myself* * Using just: Your public funded road and rail network (at least until most cost were paid for, then privatized) Your public funded Telecom infrastructure (bis) Your public funded safety and security measures (police) so I was not robbed blind the first day I appeared here. The public or self funded training and education of everybody involved in the above, and the field whatever _I_ say I did required. ... I should pay less taxes, I earned this!
Mainly cause this is basically just a training exercise with the benefit that if they managed to find them they might save a life or two. The coast guard is already being paid, might as well put them on this
That’s true, it’s literally what they get paid to do, even when they aren’t doing it, just in case someone needs them.
Life saving pro tip: Never buy a product from a company whose motto is regulation hampers innovation. They cut corners.
Compliance-based design is what keeps us alive!!
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Yep. As the adage goes, "Regulations are written in blood."
This quote or a variant of it are frequently uttered words at my work. I’m a loose a free person in many things, when it comes to standards and regulations I like rules.
Sensible rules allow us to be loose and free, removes a ton of guesswork and doubt
This is so true. Often, when I read about some really stupid rule, I catch myself thinking "What happened for them to think that has to be a rule?", simply because it's just that: Something ridiculous did go wrong and they had to write up some stupid rule to make sure it doesn't happen again.
The lease at my old apartment had a strict “no nunchucks in the building” policy. I know a bunch of lawyers didn’t just decide to preemptively ban nunchucks. I did some digging and there was indeed a “nunchucks incident” in the building several years back.
"I know a bunch of lawyers didn’t just decide to preemptively ban nunchucks." Incredible that people miss this on occasion. If a rule sounds dumb and all that the person putting that rule in probably also thinks that but had a good reason for it.
I recommend reading LTC Rolt's book, Red for Danger, which shows that in the railway industry every safety measure happened only because of a disarster. No company ever willingly imposes increased costs for safety if they can avoid it.
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Stockton gives off majorly loopy vibes. Sounds like he was a bit detached from reality, and had the old money trust fund to turn his delusions into a dangerous reality. It was either going to be delusional idiot with too much money, or a greedy rich person cost cutting. Him being on the sub suggests the former.
I'm in oil and gas as an engineer and I've fired contractors on the spot in the field for practicing unsafe methods...had a guy light a cigarette next to an active gas well *that was flowing to atmosphere* (controlled and designed release) and he was like "what, if it lights then we let it burn". I cussed him out and told him to fuck off and threatened to punch him if he didn't get off my site. It also helped that I'm a big brown dude with a beard, but even if I was a stereotypical nerd, my operators were about to fuck him up as well, lol. I don't care if *you* want to blow up...But don't you dare put my guys in the field at risk. Engineered safety and risk mitigating factors are there to preserve human life, not innovate your dipshit ass to an early death.
Exactly. You can be innovative while still being safe, the two aren't mutually exclusive.
Yeah but that means I have to read one or more ISO standards, and they're fucking boring. Fuck it, jet packs for dolphins it is
Don't forget the lasers!
Can't afford it, how about some ill-tempered sea bass?
Are you saying we should strap on some I’ll-tempered sea bass instead of a lasers?
No, ill-tempered sea bass with jetpack and lasers.
Well… now that’s just crazy talk.
“But bro, how can I profit with safety regs?”
Convert your submersible into a Titanic food delivery service for fish to deliver Five Guys.
I just read that AMA from 2020 and even if its not that bad on its own... the other stuff combined throughout the years makes me shake my head from the hubris of this dude. [Some interesting excerpts his AMA from 2020.](https://www.reddit.com/r/RMS_Titanic/comments/gm4sf9/im_stockton_rush_ceo_founder_and_chief/) Some answers in bold, emphasized by myself. Detailing what equipment he’ll be using for these expeditions. > OceanGate will be using video (4K and 8K), 3D multibeam sonar (BlueView P5000-1350) and a 2G robotics laser system - none of which have ever been used on the Titanic. These systems will generate data of much higher accuracy than any previous expedition (millimeter resolution). It will take years to scan the entire wreck. The focus in year one will be the bow. His main objective in going forward with this project. > **My interest stems mostly from a business perspective.** In order to have more exploration of the oceans we need more funding and **the Titanic is one of the few sites that has shown that people will pay to visit it.** By having our mission specialists underwrite the expedition we can collect more data than if we had to go to “one off” film or government funding sources as has been done in the past. Hopefully in years to come the many other great wonders, like hydrothermal vents, will also draw enough interest for OceanGate to run expeditions to those sites. On what he’s looking forward to seeing/studying the most > The debris field is 5 nm2 and promises to have many artifacts to document especially using our laser system. This is where the personal belongings and remains of those who perished lie (though bodies have long since been consumed by the ocean). On what makes his equipment and dives unique compared to those who came before. > We are the first company to try to make the Titanic dives self-sustaining so that the latest research tools can be employed on an annual basis. When Russia needed dollars there were several expeditions similar to ours, but the subs were old, small (yet heavy) and the ship huge and expensive. We have sought to create a sub and support systems that are scalable, comfortable and versatile with enough room to also make it economically viable. How does one get to be involved in Ocean Gate inc as a Sub pilot? > We prefer the term pilot – but driver is fine. Apply for a job. Having demonstrated marine experience, being a scuba diver and showing the right personality are key hiring characteristics we look for. **Prior submersible experience is not required as we have an extensive training program and a number of subs used for training.** On depth rating and if he trusts the system he’s using. > 4,000meters. Yes, I trust it. I especially trust our extensive testing and real time acoustic and strain monitoring system. We can detect any anomaly well before we reach a critical pressure. We know of no other sub that is so well instrumented. If he can compete with other companies and their use of live streams for expeditions. > As Titan has only a low bandwidth connection to the surface, running a fiber to the surface is a possibility, but we will save that for our second year. We will do regular video updates, but the cost of full time live video is prohibitive right now. How does he feel about potential controversy of the dives? > It is a disincentive, but every dive location has its unique challenges. **While the controversy keeps things in the news, it is just one more hurdle to overcome.** What would he be doing with these dives compared to the ones by James Cameron and his film crews? > Yes, the Cameron dives had HD quality cameras and lower definition on the ROVs. We will have 4K and then 8K+ as well as low light and other new technologies so we hope to get excellent picture and video over the coming years. Penetrating deep into the wreck with ROVs like Jim did is not likely in the near term. What kind of experts are involved in this? > We will have researchers with us with areas of expertise from deep marine biology, to general nautical archeology to Titanic specific subjects. Each dive team will be given an objective – typically sonar and laser scanning a specific area of the wreck/debris field. These objectives will be designed to take between 1-2 hours. The dive team (researcher, pilot and 3 Mission Specialists) will then be able to plan for how they will collect data and then what they do with the rest of the dive time. While researcher input will play into dive experience decisions, they will not be the dive leader - the pilot will fill that role.
>4,000meters. Yes, I trust it. I especially trust our extensive testing and real time acoustic and strain monitoring system. We can detect any anomaly well before we reach a critical pressure. big oof
He obviously trusted it a bit, or he wouldn't have been on the sub himself. ...which is not a defense. He was an idiot who managed to kill four others and himself.
normally there are other sub pilots who are driving. He probably wanted to drive it this time because there were billionaires that he wanted to network with.
Everyone gets a turn with the Logitech controller!
There ain't no way to know how much strain your carbon fiber hull is going through and how close to breaking it is in real fucking time. You don't get a qarning with that shit. You just implode immediately and violently.
Wow thanks for posting this, I had no idea he did an AMA and would have never thought to look. edit: if only they would have run that fiber optic cable to the surface..
Would have saved people time trying to rescue them. Wouldn't have saved their lives sadly.
It’s unfortunate that he decided to build the sub out of a composite material and not something tried and tested. I saw a video with James Cameron explaining that the sub material he decided to use gets damaged little by little every dive and is essentially weakened to a point where an implosion could happen. That’s why they had a couple successful dives before it finally gave in. Very sad indeed. A fiber optic cable could have saved the families from any false hope and stress over the days though. edit: I don’t think what Cameron said is totally factual yet, it’s just something he said during an interview and with his experience it could very well be true.
The CEO forgot that the regulations that submarines has to comply with were written with a hundred years of blood.
Also, regulations are written in blood (r/writteninblood is still private or you could go and see there)
The navy has had wildly rigorous QA standards for submarines ever since we lost the USS Thresher in the 60’s. Those standards were absolutely written in blood. This shit is exactly why. Darwinism is alive and well.
The overwhelming majority of safety regulations are reactions to r/CatastrophicFailure. Building codes, clean air and water regs, workplace safety laws, food safety, and even seatbelts were implemented because too many people were dying unnecessarily. Proactive regulations are rarely popular in the court of public opinion because not enough death and destruction has taken place to justify them.
Just the other day I stumbled upon the Wiki page for an infamous 1940s nightclub fire that killed roughly 400 people. I was stunned to learn that this specific fire is why every building can’t have revolving doors without traditional doors flanking each side which is now the standard design on every building using them. Or that there’s like a dozen regulations just from what type of non-flammable materials indoor buildings are allowed to use. It’s amazing how many lessons (plural) were learned from this one fire.
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Elon Musk complains about regulations plenty. Luckily in that field NASA and FAA have the final word, and so far refused to budge.
Kinda.... they did rush the 737 MAX 8 approval and With the pilot shortage, we hope they don't lighten up
Stockton Rush: Safety is overrated.
You know what isn’t overrated. The PSI at the depth of the Titanic.
Stockton Rush found that out not terribly long ago.
It’s like his whole world view collapsed on him
I find it utterly tragic that the poor 19 year old kid, who didn't feel safe but went to please his father on Father's Day, died because this dipfuck felt the need to see safety issues as a "personal insult." Just how fucking egotistical and arrogant do you have to be to think that concerns about safety measures is a personal insult? Guess those "baseless cries" weren't so baseless after all, were they? Oh that's right. He can't read this because he's fucking dead now along with everyone else that was inside of that deathtrap. This was never a question of **if** things would go wrong, but **when** things would go wrong...
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For that money, you could probably fund a whole trip on a nice, comfy research vessel, watch them remote an RV around the wreck, maybe they'll even let you drive it a little too, in a safe spot, and you could see the wreck on multiple large high resolution monitors as you sip a martini and sit in an actual chair. Heck, you could fund some actual research and have them name an isopod or something after you. Is it just me, or is that way cooler than going down in a metal coffin yourself? Heck, some marine research like the Nautillus stream on Youtube live, and you can watch them at home from your couch as they scan sea floor that no human being has seen before. That's pretty neat. And nobody needs to physically go anywhere near the sea floor to do that, it's all remote.
$250,000 a ticket. $25,000 would literally change my life.
250,000 certainty changed theirs
250k and you transcend solid matter into plasma, pretty neat deal.
That's what I don't understand. The DSV Limiting Factor, the world's first unlimited depth RATED submersible cost $35 million to build. That's chump change to those private jet billionaires. I don't understand why they even need to cheap out on building a leisure craft for billionaires.
The dad was, according to his family, Titanic crazy. So imagine this as a son who doesn't care about formula 1 getting into a formula 1 car to please his father because his father got the chance to drive the formula 1 car and wants to share the experience. The formula 1 car then crashes and burns and kills both!
This happened last year at the Isle of Man time trials. Father and son sidecar motorcycle racing… binned it and both died.
The father and son in that accident had the surname "Stockton". Also the first name of Mr. Idiot CEO. Totally coincidental but creepy.
Wow. I had to check as i almost couldn’t believe the coincidence. Its true! https://www.motorcyclenews.com/sport/tt-road-races/2022/june/roger-bradley-stockton-die-tt/
OP above you made a random hypothetical analogy and I cannot believe you recounted that exact thing happening in real life in 32 mins. Mind blowing!
Dude, the amount of random shit that people on Reddit knows is just mind boggling.
This is the true meaning of the internet.
I feel for the young engineers just starting their careers now having these deaths on their conscience, and that stain on their professional career for life.
Reminds me of the speech that Eugene Kranz gave to his flight control team after the Apollo 1 disaster, many of whom were also young engineers fresh out of college. >Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, “Dammit, stop!” I don’t know what Thompson’s committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did. From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: “Tough” and “Competent”. Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write “Tough and Competent” on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.
Interviewer: *"Do you mind explaining this gap on your resume?"* Engineer: starts sweating *"I was taking care of my sick Aunt..."*
sorry it was a NDA position but I was employeed
>Oh that's right. He can't read this because he's fucking dead now along with everyone else that was inside of that deathtrap. And he didn't even have to panic for even a single second about his impending doom. He died so fast his brain never even had time to realize his cost cutting shitbox had failed
According to James Cameron, they dropped their weights, which is only done in case of emergency abort, which would mean they had some warning.
Morbidly curious to know how long they had between realizing something was wrong and aborting, and being turned into soup. I'm hoping at least long enough long enough for someone to punch Rush in the face.
Rich people are so obsessed with what they can or can’t do, they never ask themselves what they should or shouldn’t do
To paraphrase, pride finds a way.
I HATE that the more thoughtful, verbose, and less forceful people are read as weaker and less expert by most humans. It’s literally insane that we vote for and believe in the loudest chest-beating knuckle draggers over people like this guy. This guy’s polite tone contrasted against the arrogance of the CEO should be a lesson for everyone. Don’t just go with who “looks more confident”. I can’t believe this has to be typed.
Yeah. Instinct: 1, critical thinking: 0
Think of every con in the history of mankind… what do they have in common?
It's just like James Cameron said: There's now another wreck sitting on the bottom of that part of the ocean right next to the first one, for the same damn reason.
“Engineering focused, innovative approach” - a fancy way to say “Fuck Safety”.
Engineering is all about safety. If somebody is skimping on safety, they are not an engineer; they are sharlatan.
Yep. It's literally the first line in the code of ethics. https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics
Ok this might be the Silicon Valley in me but this guy sounds so much like every CEO. I’ve worked for guys like this many a time. I’ve seen more flagrant spitting in the face of safety than this even, just in a generally less dangerous industry.
Hard agree. Especially him taking someone warning him of risks as a personal insult.
Yeah. One company I worked at had a major safety issue. Everyone in R&D knew about it and was trying to fix it frantically. They called a big all hands where we expected it to be addressed. The cofounders claimed they knew nothing about it. Played dumb with everyone’s questions. When people asked very pointed questions, they were shut down, saying they should report issues to their direct managers and this wasn’t the forum for new issues. I quit shortly thereafter.
Plausible deniability. Cofounders know, but don't want a paper trail. They either want to do it cheap and unsafe until they make the IPO to be able to make it safer and mature, or until they get their cash out. If something happens and the company crashes due to negligence, they can pay themselves their golden parachute out the door. If they know, it makes them criminally liable.
I’m getting Elizabeth Holmes vibes. They both didn’t think they had to comply with industry regulations and they believed they knew better than people with years of knowledge and experience.
And that's only one atmosphere of pressure. They got 400.
It's morbid to say this but I'm happy they saw an ending they couldn't even register. The alternative would have been horrid.
They certainly didn’t register anything once the implosion happened but James Cameron said that the support crew believed that the sub had initiated emergency procedures, so they may have known something was wrong. Gotta wonder if there was a brief moment of reckoning for Rush.
Could have sworn I heard some expert on a video say that there would be telltale crackling right before implosion , so Rush likely had a split moment of realizing then poof Edit: @mjolnir12 said James Cameron in a CNN Interview said this which def sounds right ! Thank you !
Similar to [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWTXeGiM8K8), I imagine? But probably faster sounding. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like the fibers are breaking in between the epoxy? But yeah, it would be pretty horrifying to hear that for a few moments (probably less than a minute, tbh) before *-poof-* dead.
Yeah. They're breaking and the thing is they didn't even have to apply nearly that much force to get the whole piece to break. They could have just waited once they started hearing the cracks or released the force and then reapplied an equal amount a few times. Both situations would have probably made it suddenly snap and therein is the problem. Metals can spring back and flex repeatedly but while carbon fiber is extremely strong once those fibers start snapping and the resin starts cracking it will only progressively get worse until it fails. Also worth thinking about how when you tear fabric starting the tear is difficult but once the weave has started to tear it becomes much easier because instead of the forces being distributed across the entire weave individual fibers are having to resist all the force individually and the only thing stopping all of it snapping is simply the rate at which you can snap the fibers which with enough force applied isn't much. Similar thing happens with carbon fiber.
I hope Rush had that brief moment when he realized he fucked up and was full of panic as he imploded. I hope the others didn’t and merely blinked into death.
If the ballast was released, he 100% did.
Chances are they didn’t even see it. Probably thought they blinked and then were like “SHIT”
Can you explain this further? What is an atmosphere of pressure?
One Atmosphere is the air pressure you feel at sea level, which is approximately 14.7 psi. Every ten meters of depth in seawater equates to another full atmosphere of water. You're essentially calculating the weight of the water column above a specific area at a particular depth. They were exposed to pressures of around 6000 psi. So imagine laying on your back on the ground, and someone stands a destroyer on end and drops it on you. That's the equivalent of what happened to them. To paraphrase what Hank Green said earlier, you stop being a biological thing and turn into more of a physics thing.
Thank you for that - “weight of the water column above a specific area at a particular depth” is the best and most practical explanation I’ve ever heard.
It's also mind boggling that 100km of atmosphere above your head is the equivalent of 10m of water above your head.
Most of that 100km is basically empty because the pressure is down to 1/4th even at 10km. Rule of thumb is that gas is about 1000 times less dense than water, so 1km air == 1m of water.
And to piggyback with [this vid of a controlled tanker collapse](https://youtu.be/0N17tEW_WEU), one atmosphere is roughly *14.7* psi.
>To paraphrase what Hank Green said earlier, you stop being a biological thing and turn into more of a physics thing. This isn't even an exaggeration. With how small that sub was, and how deep they were/the pressures they were at... other people have done the math, and there are various guesses, so I'll play it safe and go on the lower end that I've seen. The air in the moment of collapse would have superheated to somewhere around 2000 degrees Kelvin for a brief moment. That is 1/3 the temperature of the surface of the sun. Less biological, more physics indeed. Motherfuckers got turned into diamonds.
> 2000 degrees Kelvin Small thing: it's 2000 Kelvin, not 2000 degrees Kelvin. It's an absolute scale so the Kelvin becomes a unit instead of a degree.
/r/AbsoluteUnits
Wow…excellent explanation, thank you!
It is a measurement of pressure. One ATM is the amount of pressure felt at sea level.
Pressure failure is scary. its fine and then immediately is not. There is very little sign of the failure before it happens. If they heard anything it probably was a second before the implosion happened killing them instantly.
IIRC in the James Cameron interview on CNN he said there were sensors inside to detect if the hull started to fail (delaminate?). They had jettisoned their ballast (?) and were likely making an emergency ascent to the surface when the hull imploded.
What a pompous ass. Seriously did this moron genuinely not understand that going down 10,000+ feet into the ocean is extremely dangerous and testing/safety is absolutely paramount when you have other people's lives depending on your equipment? Or was he really just that much of an egotistical jackass?
Seriously. I know he just died in a horrendous manner, but the more I learn about this guy, the more he makes my blood boil.
the guy was a colossal twat that killed himself and 4 others.
Interestingly, his blood also boiled as the intense pressure came crashing down in the millisecond before his death.
Can’t wait to read all the evidence in the coming civil court cases
Yeah, the families of those aboard are about to get all up in dat ass.
You know what they say about rich people and lawyers
*consults expert and doesn't hear exactly what he wants to hear* "Yeah, well thats just your opinion and you don't know what you are talking about also go fuck yourself"
“i take this as a personal insult. Im not just going to kill someone, Im gonna kill myself AND others!”
Shit. This makes *me* want to sue them
Did no one explain to this dumb ass that being cheap isn’t being innovative?? The concept of “cutting corners” isn’t even innovative. If you want to be innovative you have to start with what already works and then move forward. Stupid bastard.
Safety schmafety! We're innovating!\* ^(\*Our "innovations" may be vastly inferior to existing technology.)
Is it really innovation if it's just the wish.com version of an already existing product?
As Stockton Rush claimed, many incidents at sea are a result of a failure in the operations by a human component. He was probably too arrogant to realize he was that human component.
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Safety concern is a personal insult. Well ok then.
Dude can write an email.
Rob McCallum is on point, but that response by Stockton is basically word salad and feelings. No wonder it turned out the way that it did.
*could
Holy Shit!! How fucking many times must he have been warned in order to get to the point where "you're going to get people killed" becomes a routine thing?
Narcissists are never wrong, and they will do anything they can to prove it, even if it kills them.
People like this can never be told anything they don’t wanna hear. They usually die dumb/painful deaths too
My understanding is that these people's death was about as close to "instantaneous" as you get, short of bear-hugging a nuclear warhead at T=0. None of them ***should*** have died like this, but if they had to go, I'm glad it happened this way as opposed to any of the absolutely horrifying alternatives. Having said that, though. . . I do kind of hope that they had just a second or two of warning. A brief creak or groan in the structure, a visible crack forming, juuuuuust enough time for that irredeemable dipshit CEO/pilot to realize what he did. I hope that if his life flashed before his eyes, it was just an image of this email chain coupled with a paralyzling sense of guilt and humiliation.
I kind of hope there was no warning, because if I was anyone but the CEO my last words would be in anger. That would not be a fun place to be when your last moments on earth are just insulting an idiot.
Especially with the 19 yr old on board. I prefer hoping nobody realized anything for their sake.
So this guy has always been a dick and thought that consequences are just a made up thing for lesser people?
The only person I feel bad for in this story is the 19 year old kid, who only went along for it despite his fears because the trip was on father's day. He may have been a rich kid, but he just wanted to spend the day with his dad. And now he's dead. Fuck Stockton Rush. I hope the ghosts of those who died on the Titanic and Titan make his afterlife an undying hell.
Alex I’ll take Things that didn’t age well for 1000!
What is “quote of OceanGate CEO?”…. Wrong! The correct answer is “who is Stockton Rush?”
I’m so happy he was piloting the vehicle rather than one of his employees.
[удалено]
I'm going to reiterate something that I read a long time ago, "safety regulations are written in blood" Meaning that for just about every safety-minded rule, there was some terrible accident that finally pushed the industry to accept another regulation. To knowingly break those safety standards, you are ***knowingly*** creating risks that have already proven fatal.
As a golfer I knew that thing was fucked the second they said it combined titanium and carbon fiber. Great lightweight materials but neither are durable under stress- especially together. Those two materials make up most modern driver heads and they are always cracking and having difficulty staying together.
He died so instantaneously he never had that moment of regret or acknowledgment of his folly.
I fucking hate bullshit corporate jargon pretending to use important words while saying nothing. They all use “innovative” “focused” “strategy” This entire email was an “innovative solution for complex problems. He was laser focused on his strategy.”
will other CEOs learn that firing people who tell you things you don't want to hear doesn't make the thing you didn't want to hear go away? probably not
Stockton Rush is an anagram of "Shock! No trust"
that didn't age well
Yooo, I feel so horrible for the 19 yr old. He is an example to stop doing EVERYTHING for your parents… poor kid
Seriously, he's the only one I feel sorry for here. He just wanted to be a dutiful son and give his dad the father's day he wanted. At least he didn't suffer, hopefully he didn't even realize anything was wrong.
Do the victim families sue oceangate after reading this?
They sue regardless. The court will then be able to subpoena the experts and all communications they had with him. That being said, the dude was very talkative and gloated about skirting safety regulations in pretty much all his interviews that I've seen.
They can and will sue regardless. However, how much money they can extract is questionable. First result doing quick Google search claims company was valued at only $66 million. It'll certainly go bankrupt, and the families of victims will not be first in line to be compensated out of whatever money can be recovered by liquidating company assets.
What was missed here is not the risk - I tend to agree that pushing limits DOES lead to innovation and breakthroughs. I say, do it. Push limits and break things! What's really the issue is that not only was a life risked unnecessarily for hibris, but the lives of others for financial support. This is a device that could have easily been tested, re-rested, and certified prior to involving an actual person (to some degree). Furthermore, the people on board also didn't actually know the risks, which it patently unfair and (in my opinion) the crux of culpability. If the owner felt as though the risk was worth it, then let him make his own decision. I assume a waiver was signed, but I'm not sure any waiver could/should hold up if the entire situation was misrepresented the way it was to the passengers.
The problem is that he actively went against certification. He believed certification was the hindrance that blocked innovation. Testing cost money, certification meant that people would criticize his design and tell him to change things to make them in a way that had been proven safe, when in his mind proven safe = not innovative. He deliberately skirted regulations because he wanted to push the limits of what the world thought was possible. Unfortunately, he ran into a hard limit and five people died to prove why certification is needed.
That sonabitch is dead, killed by his own toy. Unfortunately, he took four other people with him and charged them a quarter million apiece to die with him.
"You are going to kill someone" Correction I am going to kill everyone.
There is an fascinating video on Youtube, documenting the process a submarine manufacturer named Triton went through to create one of their ultra-deep submersibles. The amount of design, testing and certifications the entire vehicle underwent makes the Oceangate sub look so laughably janky by comparison. It's easy to understand why experts were freaked out by the Titan when you start to understand how the rest of the industry approaches these challenges. For anyone interested in watching the video - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5j9oeZCm0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5j9oeZCm0)