Originally published at: Those on Titan submersible support ship felt shudder of implosion - Boing Boing
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Sounds like the innovative acoustic monitoring system working as designed to me.
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Bribery vs physics. Guess which win. /S
Again, these people are so privileged they’re blind to reality at their own peril. Money always let them ignore the problem until it doesn’t. Same with climate change deniers. Same with Project 2025 plan to defund NOAA with the hurricane going on, e.t.c…
As long as they can keep some hope of money will buy them some made-to-order “utopia” like escaping to Mars, floating cities, … away from “unwashed” mass in case of a apocalypse, they will keep driving this train off the cliff.
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The amazing part is that it did work - the acoustic and strain sensors did pick up evidence that the hull had suffered serious damage several dives prior to catastrophic failure.
At the end of one of the dives in 2022 they heard a loud bang after surfacing, and there was a corresponding jump in the strain sensor readouts showing a change in the hull’s physical properties, possibly some kind of crack or delamination. Stockton Rush handwaved this away, claiming that it was just the hull settling or some such nonsense, and proceeded to make three more deep dives that year, where the strain data showed “non-linear behavior and reduced apparent stiffness” to quote the NTSB forensic investigation. But apparently nobody at OceanGate was actually competent enough to interpret the data that they had, and nobody thought to seek outside opinions or to do a physical inspection in the year-long gap between expeditions, so as they went down on the first deep dive in 2023 with the squishy hull it went boom.
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Fixed one minor detail.
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That too, I guess. But the Coast Guard hearings gave the impression that by the time of the disaster there was nobody left at the company to worry about things like that. People who had leading engineering and operations roles during the design and construction of the sub had been fired years prior for caring too much about safety. For a while, the director of engineering for the whole project was an electrical and software engineer, with no background in materials or submersibles. That left Rush, an engineer by education and one of very few people who had been around from the start, the most competent person around. So when he said that everything’s fine and kept piloting the sub himself, people just believed him.
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Some interesting discussion of that data is towards the end of this video:
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I like the way the video presentation is filled with “It’s not that simple…” It’s done a good job shaking loose some of my own preconceived notions.
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To paraphrase Paul (The Pressure-Fed Astronaut), people like this aren’t just detached from reality - they are contemptuous of it.
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