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.
