You got me wondering and I did some digging around. It seems like this might be the deepest deaths, yah. There have been lots of submarine disasters, but interestingly those are almost all equipment failures that kill the crew, not failure by implosion. Air scrubbers failing, diesel fires, torpedos exploding in storage, that sort of thing. A number of submarines have sunk to the bottom, but they mostly operate in waters shallower than their capabilities, so plenty of subs with dead crews are sitting fully intact on the bottom (or rather, were recovered from that state)
To actually get deep enough to die by implosion, you pretty much have to be in areas like the NW Atlantic or the Mariana Trench. Parts of the ocean that are particularly deep. In those areas, the safety record is outstanding because people who aren’t moron techbros take the engineering extremely seriously. Human dives in these places are super rare, too. It’s 99.9% robots. A handful of people have done the Challenger Deep but nobody has died there.
The closest I found was the Nereus accident, in which a robot was crushed to death from the pressure. Oceanographers were actually a little misty about it, because apparently it was a very battle-tested and reliable little guy.
So to put an even finer point on it, the Titan single-handedly obliterated a nearly-100-year flawless safety record for crewed extreme deep sea submersibles. AFAIK there have been five total deaths for this type of activity and Titan is all of them.
when I read that the hull was carbon fiber was when I figured the most likely outcome was they had been crushed. obviously my opinion was just a guess, but: I’m on bike forums a lot. carbon fiber has an unshakable negative history even though today it is much more robust than the early days when they hadn’t worked out the bugs yet for bikes. but the hard truth is that, while all bike materials fail, the others seldom fail catastrophically. the metals may crush or bend but there’s still something there. when carbon fiber breaks, the part supporting you just instantly vanishes. there’s no struggling with the steering to get to the roadside, you hear a loud crack and you eat asphalt.
I don’t remember the specific Futurama episode, is that Jupiter?
I’d assume a gaseous giant, given pressure and elevation values.
Still, I find it a quite confusing graph, I mean: the correlation between T and P is a strange one to highlight, if that’s even what it’s showing.
I would have probably had elevation in the Y axis, linear, and marked values for P rather than the opposite.
Are the clouds above or below 0 elevation?
In racing cars and sailboats, there’s a lot of parts made with it, too - because like bikes, but very much unlike subs, weight is an issue. I’ve seen a number of stories that included something along the lines of, “And then the mast literally exploded…” It’s such a well-known phenomenon.
Yes that is Jupiter. It becomes somewhat obvious that a specialized atmospheric descent vehicle would be needed and that like the comparison between sub and airplane there is unlikely to be a spacecraft that can multi task.
Also that a manned Jupiter atmospheric diving vehicle would probably be a really bad idea.
Pressure coordinates are usually what’s used in atmospheric science, rather than elevation, to prevent a lot of interesting physics from being squished low on the graph or in the model.
I’ll have to listen today. Real Engineering is a great channel, though. I don’t catch all his stuff any more - but still an excellent science youtuber.
I just don’t understand how no one called them out on this loudly enough to stop the eventual disaster from happening. No reputable mechanical engineer would ever think that carbon fiber would make for a reliable pressure vessel large enough to carry passengers. The very idea is laughable on its face. I’m all for innovation, but there are reasons certain ideas have never actually been built, and that’s because sometimes, theory is enough.
They fired the non team player for being a total drag about that; and were operating in a context where regulatory approval was more or less optional.
Perhaps more importantly people seem to pretty aggressively discount risks if they exist in the future and are subject to some uncertainty: The actual risk (which was indeed lunacy) was “build carbon fiber pressure vessel; just keep fatigue cycling it until something bad happens or the magic microphones warn us!”; but it’s a pretty easy handwave to change the subject to “haha, legacy old-sub said it couldn’t be built; but I’m a disruptive innovator who built it!”; which was entirely true the first 14 times.
There’s a long, long list of things that anyone even slightly familiar with them could tell you are a disaster waiting to happen(and some professionals closer to them are probably writing plaintive memos about how they are a disaster waiting to happen); but which there’s not much urgency about because it sure looks like it’s working right now.
The entire industry begged him not to dive that thing. They wrote open letters. They wrote to governments. They wrote to him. They wrote and published scientific papers pointing out how unsafe it was. Members of his own staff warned him and were fired for it.
How much more loudly do you think people can say it? He was never going to listen to anyone but his own hubris.
It’s not that no one was calling the company out on its terrible and dangerous practices. It’s just that there is very little anyone can do to stop a bunch of well-funded dipshits from endangering their own lives in international waters. Governments just aren’t set up to prevent that kind of thing.
