The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing

<i>David Lochridge, who oversaw marine operations at the company and who needed to sign off on the transfer, became convinced that Titan was unsafe. In January 2018, Lochridge sent Rush a quality-control inspection report detailing 27 issues with the vehicle, from questionable O-ring seals on the domes and missing bolts to flammable materials and more concerns about its carbon-fiber hull. Rush fired him the next day. (Although Lochridge later made a whistleblower report to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about Titan, Rush sued him for breach of contract. The settlement of that lawsuit resulted in Lochridge dropping his complaint, paying OceanGate nearly $10,000, and signing an NDA. Lochridge did not respond to WIRED.)</i><p>How is that legal in the US? It is insane that someone who clearly was acting in the interest of the public (albeit the rich, fee-paying public...) should be found at fault for doing something that is <i>clearly</i> morally correct.<p>I don&#x27;t normally read Wired, bu this article is both morbidly fascinating and a great tale of human hubris.

One interesting thing about this saga is we learned just how much of a badass James Cameron is.<p>James Cameron put together the team that designed the DeepSea Challenger, which he took to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, far deeper than Titanic. One interesting tidbid (IIRC) is that they spent 3 years just designing the pressure vessel in software before they ever built anything, so precise the engineering had to be. And even then they did have some system failures on that dive but nothing catastrophic.<p>OceanGate was an exercise in hubris from people who didn&#x27;t know better and didn&#x27;t <i>want</i> to know better. It was pure ego from the uninformed. I personally found the general reaction to be fascinating too: it&#x27;s like a whole bunch of people discovered class awareness and solidarity.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20240611124534&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;titan-submersible-disaster-inside-story-oceangate-files&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20240611124534&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired....</a>

The whole idea was&#x2F;is weird. I can understand undertaking a certain level of risk to get an amazing view of the Titanic, or some other wreck or reef, but that wasn&#x27;t even what was offered. Regardless of who offered this dive and how it was managed, there would always have been some risk. That risk had to be stupid low for what was offered, a tiny window, offering a really poor viewing experience. It not even like the was a massive glass dome and you could pan around the wreck for hours just looking at it from a multitude of angels. Notice how all the videos and photos are always taken from the outside of the submersible.<p>The cost and risk, as compared to what was on offer never matched up.

As an product designer &#x2F; inventor, I know that feeling well... that point when so many prototypes have failed, but you feel you are so close. You feel you&#x27;ve run out of time and that it will be too expensive to test another one, so you convince yourself to go into production with what *should* work, it has to right?!?... (well it almost never does, and it&#x27;s 100% not worth the stress).<p>But to put your own life and others at risk making that move... whoooooooweeeeee, that&#x27;s fully into batshit crazy land.

Tale as old as time: lack of safety culture due to reality denying executives causes people to die.

Respect the ocean, Space is somewhat mild in comparison.

&quot;Move fast and crush people&quot;

Is it &quot;more disturbing,&quot; though, really?<p>I mean, privileged rich dude who thinks he knows better than experts wins Darwin award, and some people dumb enough to trust him got to go along for the (one way) ride.<p>I&#x27;m not any more disturbed by it now than I was a year ago, and a year ago it barely moved the needle. And then it was only about the 19 year old son of one of the passengers -- even at that age, a child ought to be able to trust his father to keep him safe, and Shahzada Dawood utterly failed on that count.

Reminds me of Vonnegut&#x27;s line from Jailbird (without the stuttering of the character who uttered it), on the principal cause of a massacre:<p>&quot;American amateurism in matters of life and death&quot;<p>I&#x27;m a Canadian. As a Millenial of the &quot;just watch a Youtube video and figure it out&quot; generation, and somebody who has watched some things (like housing) get strangled by regulation, I can see the appeal of American libertarianism on a lot of subjects.<p>But as Vonnegut said: matters of life and death.

<i>Deep-sea experts criticized OceanGate’s choices, from Titan’s carbon-fiber construction to Rush’s [CEO] public disdain for industry regulations, which he believed stifled innovation</i><p>Seems a remarkably similar sentiment to the e&#x2F;acc types currently loudly influencing tech and business discourse on various media.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Effective_accelerationism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Effective_accelerationism</a>

&quot;For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.&quot; - Richard Feynman, commenting on the Challenger disaster

The &#x27;Inside&#x27; Story Is More Disturbing<p>Is this a tasteless pun ?

The Wired article clearly paints Rush as someone who was irresponsible and cavalier about even the basics of good engineering <i>before</i> testing a complex thing with real human lives that trusted him too much.<p>In the essence of that argument at least, they&#x27;re right. His using a prototype he knew to be a failure to then explore the ocean with customers aboard, under the same conditions as those that caused its test failure, is criminally negligent.<p>However, pointing to all sorts of mistakes and gambles small or large as narratives towards a full blown condemnation of extremely dangerous efforts is mistaken I think:<p>In the world of exploring extremely harsh environments, some heavy risk is inevitable even if you do everything you know of right. In such contexts, something could go catastrophically wrong just as easily as it could all end successfully and a narrative will be constructed for why either was the case even if either outcome was interchangeably plausible..<p>Pushing immediate blame on someone for something going wrong in an inherently risky activity is to fall into this above narrative trap. It also implies the idea that people who do dangerous but potentially worthy things are wrong for doing so because they didn&#x27;t have perfect foresight.

He already got punished by life, no need to blame him posthumous.<p>He is like one of the inventors of the parachute (Franz Karl Reichelt), still wanted to try because he believed in it.<p>Unfortunately believing is not enough when it comes to reliability.<p>Effort was good though, as apparently it worked at some point.<p>&gt; This submersible design, later renamed Titan, eventually made it down to the Titanic in 2021. It even returned to the site for expeditions the next two years. But nearly one year ago, on June 18, 2023, Titan dove to the infamous wreck and imploded, instantly killing all five people onboard, including Rush himself<p>which could explain why they sell tickets.<p>I&#x27;m sure SpaceX already knows the rockets won&#x27;t make it back intact, but they still launch anyway (despite the losses).