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So apparently this OceanGate company is a VC-funded startup or some such founded "to make underwater exploration cheaper and accessible to private citizens" (Wi
by idop 3y ago
So apparently this OceanGate company is a VC-funded startup or some such founded "to make underwater exploration cheaper and accessible to private citizens" (Wikipedia quote). Tells me everything I need to know about how this all came to be.
- mysterydip 3y ago"move fast and break things" may not be the best mantra for such an operation.
- euroderf 3y agoThe next test dive to max depth is reserved for the board of directors.
- bleepblop 3y agoAh yes, the life insurance scheme.
- class3shock 3y agohttps://www.ussvirginiabase.org/sea-trials.html https://www.ussvirginiabase.org/sea-trials.html Last paragraph: "This ship is exactly what the Navy needs, when it needs it," agreed EB President John P. Casey, who was on board during the trials. "There is no substitute for the Virginia-class submarine." Testing included its first dive to max depth.
- klabb3 3y agoI don’t think this is (was) a money maker at all. There’s a clip on YouTube where they invited a CBS journalist to join. The CEO, to me, seems like a passionate dreamer who definitely 100% ate his own dog food (ie took huge personal risk). He was onboard this likely final voyage. They didn’t make any profit, at least back then. It’s obviously incredibly expensive and near-impossible to scale such an operation. Look, I despise VCs as much as the next guy, but this doesn’t smell like a typical cynical VC money grab, like at all. To me it smells like an ultra-extreme sport. To ordinary people, it’s extraordinarily stupid, they’re certainly in over their heads, but nobody casually signs up to go to 4000m depth without being well aware of the risks.
- jazzyjackson 3y agoVCs are all about finding someone with a genuine passion and pushing enormous expectations of profit onto them.
- klabb3 3y agoThe enormous profiteering of deep ocean exploration is certainly an interesting angle, but I highly doubt it. If you want money from that, I think you’d want to be a military contractor instead, or consult for offshore oil. A $250k “leisure” trip to titanic would be an… unusual anniversary gift.
- cratermoon 3y agoHow is it all that different from companies selling seats on spacecraft to visit ISS? Or just to be in orbit or above the Kármán line and experiencing microgravity?
- vkou 3y agoSpace is sexier, there's a lot more space sci-fi that people can get excited about, than there is deep-ocean sci-fi.
- jacurtis 3y agoYeah my understanding is that it was not profitable either. The founder claimed he was losing money and to his credit, he ate the cost on the previous failed missions (of which there are a shockingly high number of). There was one article I read last year (don't have it here) where he claimed his hard costs were $1M per voyage to cover fuel and consumables. So the $250k buy-in was literally a break-even on his expenses (he carries 4 passengers paying the fee, plus himself in the sub). None of that covers any R&D and he had some very respectable people working for him, including engineers from Boeing, NASA, and Northdrop Grumman. So we can assume those were hefty salaries for his R&D team. I'm sure they were scrappy too, hence the "cobbled" together nature of things. But it does seem like this was a true startup in ever sense of the word. Unfortunately it might be leaning closer to the Theranos type of startup where he might have oversold his capabilities to keep the ball rolling and investors happy.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]