6 ms·

RIP to these guys, yes it was a risky trip. But it was into international waters and they were AFAIC explorers. Stuff like this can not be done without risk.

RIP to these guys, yes it was a risky trip. But it was into international waters and they were AFAIC explorers. Stuff like this can not be done without risk. Hopefully future subs will have more safety features.

bandrami 3y ago
This wasn't boldly going where nobody has gone before. Getting that deep safely has been a solved problem for decades.
- psychphysic 3y ago
  I agree but not at 250k a head. It should be safer, but everything is done to a price point and I'm sure those on board recognised the risk of such an expedition.
  - danso 3y ago
    I seriously doubt the victims knew how risky this trip was, even though they signed the waivers. Why would you bring along your 19-year-old son if you thought the chance of death was 1/100 or even 1/1000. The CEO, who obviously overestimated the safety of his cost-cutting design, had raised $20M in venture capital, it's not as if he had a death wish either.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      > Why would you bring along your 19-year-old son if you thought the chance of death was 1/100 or even 1/1000. Optimist.
      - danso 3y ago
        Mike Reiss took the sub trip to the Titanic in the summer of 2022, and in his podcast he says his wife didn't go with him because she failed a Covid test right before. It's unclear whether it was her decision or OceanGate's decision to play it safe. Reiss notes that during Covid, his wife had traveled to every continent without catching it until now, so she wasn't extremely paranoid. If OceanGate denied her, then it means they were worried more about the health risk of Covid in late 2022 than having to (partially) refund her $250k ticket. I don't think Covid is by any means "just the flu", but I definitely think the risk of dying from it is significantly less than a visit to the Titanic. https://twitter.com/MikeReissWriter/status/1545092529971818498 https://twitter.com/MikeReissWriter/status/15450925299718184... https://bleav.com/shows/what-am-i-doing-here-with-mike-reiss/episodes/episode-40-the-titanic/ https://bleav.com/shows/what-am-i-doing-here-with-mike-reiss...
        jacquesm 3y ago
        I would estimate the chances of that sub not making it back to the surface at least 10%. The carbon fiber hull concept has me seriously worried, especially if the goal is repeated use of the same hull. Everybody seems to be focusing on the electronics and the UI, I don't see those as particularly problematic if the hull stays in one piece. But if it doesn't then none of the rest matters. Given the debris field the chances are better than even that the sub did implode. Repeatedly cycling carbon fiber in compression is a bad idea, and a CEO that throws out the rulebook and shows a very cavalier attitude to safety is fine if it is just you on board but with paying passengers it is utterly irresponsible.
    - mym1990 3y ago
      Might have been the 19 year old's idea, and risk assessment is not a strong point of youth.
      - watwut 3y ago
        Family member claims he was terrified and did it because it was important for his titanic obsessed father. So, it is more of 19 years old overcomes fear to get fathers validation and make father happy. Then both him and dad dies and there, I blame the dad.
        mym1990 3y ago
        Saw this earlier today, that is so much worse.
    - sho_hn 3y ago
      > I seriously doubt the victims knew how risky this trip was I'm quite curious about this, too. I'm not so sure. I think even if you are not an engineer, it should be quite easy to understand how under-tested this vehicle is compared to, say, a commercial jet airliner, and how much more difficult the application is at the same time. These were business men running companies of some size. It should come with basic work experience to reason about how proven processes or articles are. I think it's more likely that the threshold for "you know what? let's take our chances" works differently for different people. For example: I would never get LASIK eye surgery, safety statistic be damned, because the consequences in the unlikely event of failure are too large for me. And yet many other people know the data just as well and make a different call.
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        As Dave Barry assured us, LASIK eye surgery is perfectly safe, as long as the doctor remembers to change the laser setting to "delicate" from "vaporize bulldozer".
      - civilitty 3y ago
        The average human is more likely to die driving to the supermarket than in a commercial jet airliner crash, so I don't know how useful any of these comparisons are, especially for laymen. We're comparing technology where safety is measured in incidents per hundred million miles traveled to one where the total number of annual travelers can fit into a single jumbo jet.
        danso 3y ago
        Right. I wonder if the layperson passenger's assessment was that the Titanic sub was as extremely catastrophic as flying in a helicopter, in the sense that if something goes wrong, you're obviously going to die. But most helicopter passengers probably assume that the trip will be safe and uneventful, 999 out of 1000 times.
        civilitty 3y ago
        > But most helicopter passengers probably assume that the trip will be safe and uneventful, 999 out of 1000 times. Even helicopters have a fatal accident rate that's at most 1 per 100,000 flight hours (in the US at least). This sub seems to have a fatal accident rate of 1 per 1,000 hours at best
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      Further evidence that being a billionaire isn't well correlated with being a genius.
    - stickfigure 3y ago
      The Space Shuttle had a 2 in 135 failure rate. Challenger's disaster was the 25th shuttle flight. Columbia's disaster was the 113th shuttle flight. I'm pretty sure you could find large numbers of people who would happily climb on board a shuttle mission today, even knowing that history.
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        The Space Shuttle was terrible, but not because it was dangerous. For policy purposes, killing people has a cost that can be estimated by the statistical value of a human life (especially if the people are volunteers with full knowledge of the risk.) The value of a human life is about $9 M (which comes from estimates of how much government spending is needed to save 1 life, for example by medical care, installing guard rails on roads, etc.). If there was a 2% risk of death of the seven crew on a flight, this would have added $1.26M to the expected cost of a launch. This was small compared to the actual cost of a launch. Viewed another way: a $900 M (say) shuttle launch would be killing 100 statistical people each and every launch (in the sense that the money spent on the launch, if spent elsewhere, could avoid 100 deaths). If the results of the launch are worth that many statistical deaths, why not .14 more?
      - bandrami 3y ago
        This is a whole other can of worms, but the requirement that space exploration be manned was made for political rather than scientific reasons and has held back the progress of space exploration for decades. We could have done so much more if we hadn't had to worry about getting a robot back.
      - guax 3y ago
        The purpose was wildy different. What about those odds for Bezos space tourism? Those shuttles were actually used to expand human knowledge. Both titan or blue origin only expand the reach of capitalist tourism.
      - saberdancer 3y ago
        I've seen that point brought up during a conference tech talk and when asked, most of the audience raised their hands up saying they would fly on a Space Shuttle regardless.
  - mym1990 3y ago
    Do you think there will be a 125k refund since it was a one way trip?
  - timeon 3y ago
    There was marriage at Titanic wreck for 36k a head 20 years ago. [0] [0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1461368.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1461368.stm But I still hope that this will bring some innovation - in form of stricter regulation for tourism.
    - meepmorp 3y ago
      36k to 250k in 20 years is some very steep inflation.
dylan604 3y ago
I might feel this way to the first people to land on Mars or something. This was not a "mission" to advance human knowledge. To me, it's one step away from "hold my beer"
- somenameforme 3y ago
  Each and every mission had scientific objective and research being carried out, precisely to help combine entertainment/adventure with technological and scientific progress. The same will be true on Mars. The earliest guys going over, as colonists, are going to be quite well to do - which I'm sure the news will frame in a completely fair and reasonable way.
- vanattab 3y ago
  I don't think this is fair to say. The sub hull was built by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center as part of a program to help commercial companies develop technologies that could be used for space exploration. Just in our solar system, we have found evidence of oceans on Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus; Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto; Neptune’s moon Triton; and on Pluto. If we want to explore these oceans we will need to understand how to build lightweight subs that can tolerate extream pressures. This tragedy will help humanity explore the solar system. I for one salute the explorers who died they have helped push us all forward.
  - code_duck 3y ago
    The pressure vessel is the only part that was designed or fabricated with sound theory by experts.
ssnistfajen 3y ago
I feel bad for the 19yo who had a whole (well-funded) life ahead of him. He was probably trusting the older adults to know what they were doing.
- psychphysic 3y ago
  Good point he was with his dad right? That age you still feel invincible
  - ssnistfajen 3y ago
    Yeah. Being legally adult only means something when you are 19yo yourself. If I was in the same shoes I would've followed my dad on a cool adventure without question and definitely could not have spotted any of the glaring red flags that presented themselves before the dive.
    - LogoEthoPatho 3y ago
      Yeah, legally adult is several years off minimum from neurologically developed prefrontal cortex... I'm sad for everyone that died TBH. The website for OceanGate was taken down, but when I took a look yesterday it was full of stuff about how their pedigree and NASA/MIT tech, etc. I can see myself buying that, I'm not exactly a marine expert. Not to mention it went down there something like 40 times already? It's not really fair to assume the passengers would have known the things that have come out since the submersible went missing. Most damning to me, is that the sub's design was derived from Virgin's DeepFlight Challenger, which was scrapped because they could only be sure it was safe for a single dive due to the carbon composite hull. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepFlight_Challenger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepFlight_Challenger As a final point, one of the victims was a seasoned explorer (Paul-Henri Nargeolet) and Titanic expert, having gone on multiple prior expeditions. Kind of arrogant to assume we'd all know better and somehow have all this knowledge that has come out since the sub disappeared.
RIMR 3y ago
>Hopefully future subs will have more safety features. From an engineering standpoint, Titan didn't have any safety features at all. What any sane engineer would recommend as a last-ditch backup system Oceangate relied on as a single-point-of-failure. No phone. No beacon. Budget bluetooth controller and touchscreens. Electronics you'd expect to find in an RV. All from a CEO who flaunted his corner-cutting and apathy towards safety. We should never do this again. After this, anyone boarding a future tourist sub to the Abyssal Zone or deeper is asking for it.
- sho_hn 3y ago
  > From an engineering standpoint, Titan didn't have any safety features at all. This isn't quite true. It had multiple redundant ways to drop ballast, for example. What I would say from what I was able to find out (and with some familiarity of safety engineering processes from work; I make cars) is that it's safety-concept was very spotty. It had solutions to some problems, but also large gaps in the safety concept. Safety was not addressed in holistic fashion. It's interesting to compare this with solutions found in other subs. For example, Titan had four different ways to drop ballast, but from the list I saw, all of them required manual intervention by a non-incapacitated crew and electronics to be working. On Cameron's Deepsea Challenger--by another rich guy who funded a vanity dive, and relying on homebrew innovations in material science--ballast was held by corrosible wire that would be corroded by seawater in a set time, so the sub would eventually surface automatically. Ballast drop was also triggerable remotely by an acoustic signal, more reliable than radio. The available info is pretty bad, but Titan may not have had those solutions in place. I'm very much out of my depth (no pun intended) on naval/submarine engineering, and I'm hoping for someone with better knowledge to extend that comparison somewhere.
  - jonah 3y ago
    There were apparently timed-release (bags of lead shot on dissolvable links) and manual-release (rock the sub to tip lengths of steel pipe off their racks on the sides) ways of jettisoning ballast as well.
- TT-392 3y ago
paulpauper 3y ago
feel horrible about this too . the 19 year old especially.

bandrami 3y ago

This wasn't boldly going where nobody has gone before. Getting that deep safely has been a solved problem for decades.

psychphysic 3y ago
I agree but not at 250k a head. It should be safer, but everything is done to a price point and I'm sure those on board recognised the risk of such an expedition.
- danso 3y ago
  I seriously doubt the victims knew how risky this trip was, even though they signed the waivers. Why would you bring along your 19-year-old son if you thought the chance of death was 1/100 or even 1/1000. The CEO, who obviously overestimated the safety of his cost-cutting design, had raised $20M in venture capital, it's not as if he had a death wish either.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    > Why would you bring along your 19-year-old son if you thought the chance of death was 1/100 or even 1/1000. Optimist.
    - danso 3y ago
      Mike Reiss took the sub trip to the Titanic in the summer of 2022, and in his podcast he says his wife didn't go with him because she failed a Covid test right before. It's unclear whether it was her decision or OceanGate's decision to play it safe. Reiss notes that during Covid, his wife had traveled to every continent without catching it until now, so she wasn't extremely paranoid. If OceanGate denied her, then it means they were worried more about the health risk of Covid in late 2022 than having to (partially) refund her $250k ticket. I don't think Covid is by any means "just the flu", but I definitely think the risk of dying from it is significantly less than a visit to the Titanic. https://twitter.com/MikeReissWriter/status/1545092529971818498 https://twitter.com/MikeReissWriter/status/15450925299718184... https://bleav.com/shows/what-am-i-doing-here-with-mike-reiss/episodes/episode-40-the-titanic/ https://bleav.com/shows/what-am-i-doing-here-with-mike-reiss...
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        I would estimate the chances of that sub not making it back to the surface at least 10%. The carbon fiber hull concept has me seriously worried, especially if the goal is repeated use of the same hull. Everybody seems to be focusing on the electronics and the UI, I don't see those as particularly problematic if the hull stays in one piece. But if it doesn't then none of the rest matters. Given the debris field the chances are better than even that the sub did implode. Repeatedly cycling carbon fiber in compression is a bad idea, and a CEO that throws out the rulebook and shows a very cavalier attitude to safety is fine if it is just you on board but with paying passengers it is utterly irresponsible.
  - mym1990 3y ago
    Might have been the 19 year old's idea, and risk assessment is not a strong point of youth.
    - watwut 3y ago
      Family member claims he was terrified and did it because it was important for his titanic obsessed father. So, it is more of 19 years old overcomes fear to get fathers validation and make father happy. Then both him and dad dies and there, I blame the dad.
      - mym1990 3y ago
        Saw this earlier today, that is so much worse.
  - sho_hn 3y ago
    > I seriously doubt the victims knew how risky this trip was I'm quite curious about this, too. I'm not so sure. I think even if you are not an engineer, it should be quite easy to understand how under-tested this vehicle is compared to, say, a commercial jet airliner, and how much more difficult the application is at the same time. These were business men running companies of some size. It should come with basic work experience to reason about how proven processes or articles are. I think it's more likely that the threshold for "you know what? let's take our chances" works differently for different people. For example: I would never get LASIK eye surgery, safety statistic be damned, because the consequences in the unlikely event of failure are too large for me. And yet many other people know the data just as well and make a different call.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      As Dave Barry assured us, LASIK eye surgery is perfectly safe, as long as the doctor remembers to change the laser setting to "delicate" from "vaporize bulldozer".
    - civilitty 3y ago
      The average human is more likely to die driving to the supermarket than in a commercial jet airliner crash, so I don't know how useful any of these comparisons are, especially for laymen. We're comparing technology where safety is measured in incidents per hundred million miles traveled to one where the total number of annual travelers can fit into a single jumbo jet.
      - danso 3y ago
        Right. I wonder if the layperson passenger's assessment was that the Titanic sub was as extremely catastrophic as flying in a helicopter, in the sense that if something goes wrong, you're obviously going to die. But most helicopter passengers probably assume that the trip will be safe and uneventful, 999 out of 1000 times.
        civilitty 3y ago
        > But most helicopter passengers probably assume that the trip will be safe and uneventful, 999 out of 1000 times. Even helicopters have a fatal accident rate that's at most 1 per 100,000 flight hours (in the US at least). This sub seems to have a fatal accident rate of 1 per 1,000 hours at best
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    Further evidence that being a billionaire isn't well correlated with being a genius.
  - stickfigure 3y ago
    The Space Shuttle had a 2 in 135 failure rate. Challenger's disaster was the 25th shuttle flight. Columbia's disaster was the 113th shuttle flight. I'm pretty sure you could find large numbers of people who would happily climb on board a shuttle mission today, even knowing that history.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      The Space Shuttle was terrible, but not because it was dangerous. For policy purposes, killing people has a cost that can be estimated by the statistical value of a human life (especially if the people are volunteers with full knowledge of the risk.) The value of a human life is about $9 M (which comes from estimates of how much government spending is needed to save 1 life, for example by medical care, installing guard rails on roads, etc.). If there was a 2% risk of death of the seven crew on a flight, this would have added $1.26M to the expected cost of a launch. This was small compared to the actual cost of a launch. Viewed another way: a $900 M (say) shuttle launch would be killing 100 statistical people each and every launch (in the sense that the money spent on the launch, if spent elsewhere, could avoid 100 deaths). If the results of the launch are worth that many statistical deaths, why not .14 more?
    - bandrami 3y ago
      This is a whole other can of worms, but the requirement that space exploration be manned was made for political rather than scientific reasons and has held back the progress of space exploration for decades. We could have done so much more if we hadn't had to worry about getting a robot back.
    - guax 3y ago
      The purpose was wildy different. What about those odds for Bezos space tourism? Those shuttles were actually used to expand human knowledge. Both titan or blue origin only expand the reach of capitalist tourism.
    - saberdancer 3y ago
      I've seen that point brought up during a conference tech talk and when asked, most of the audience raised their hands up saying they would fly on a Space Shuttle regardless.
- mym1990 3y ago
  Do you think there will be a 125k refund since it was a one way trip?
- timeon 3y ago
  There was marriage at Titanic wreck for 36k a head 20 years ago. [0] [0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1461368.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1461368.stm But I still hope that this will bring some innovation - in form of stricter regulation for tourism.
  - meepmorp 3y ago
    36k to 250k in 20 years is some very steep inflation.

dylan604 3y ago

I might feel this way to the first people to land on Mars or something. This was not a "mission" to advance human knowledge. To me, it's one step away from "hold my beer"

somenameforme 3y ago
Each and every mission had scientific objective and research being carried out, precisely to help combine entertainment/adventure with technological and scientific progress. The same will be true on Mars. The earliest guys going over, as colonists, are going to be quite well to do - which I'm sure the news will frame in a completely fair and reasonable way.
vanattab 3y ago
I don't think this is fair to say. The sub hull was built by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center as part of a program to help commercial companies develop technologies that could be used for space exploration. Just in our solar system, we have found evidence of oceans on Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus; Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto; Neptune’s moon Triton; and on Pluto. If we want to explore these oceans we will need to understand how to build lightweight subs that can tolerate extream pressures. This tragedy will help humanity explore the solar system. I for one salute the explorers who died they have helped push us all forward.
- code_duck 3y ago
  The pressure vessel is the only part that was designed or fabricated with sound theory by experts.

ssnistfajen 3y ago

I feel bad for the 19yo who had a whole (well-funded) life ahead of him. He was probably trusting the older adults to know what they were doing.

psychphysic 3y ago
Good point he was with his dad right? That age you still feel invincible
- ssnistfajen 3y ago
  Yeah. Being legally adult only means something when you are 19yo yourself. If I was in the same shoes I would've followed my dad on a cool adventure without question and definitely could not have spotted any of the glaring red flags that presented themselves before the dive.
  - LogoEthoPatho 3y ago
    Yeah, legally adult is several years off minimum from neurologically developed prefrontal cortex... I'm sad for everyone that died TBH. The website for OceanGate was taken down, but when I took a look yesterday it was full of stuff about how their pedigree and NASA/MIT tech, etc. I can see myself buying that, I'm not exactly a marine expert. Not to mention it went down there something like 40 times already? It's not really fair to assume the passengers would have known the things that have come out since the submersible went missing. Most damning to me, is that the sub's design was derived from Virgin's DeepFlight Challenger, which was scrapped because they could only be sure it was safe for a single dive due to the carbon composite hull. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepFlight_Challenger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepFlight_Challenger As a final point, one of the victims was a seasoned explorer (Paul-Henri Nargeolet) and Titanic expert, having gone on multiple prior expeditions. Kind of arrogant to assume we'd all know better and somehow have all this knowledge that has come out since the sub disappeared.

RIMR 3y ago

>Hopefully future subs will have more safety features. From an engineering standpoint, Titan didn't have any safety features at all. What any sane engineer would recommend as a last-ditch backup system Oceangate relied on as a single-point-of-failure. No phone. No beacon. Budget bluetooth controller and touchscreens. Electronics you'd expect to find in an RV. All from a CEO who flaunted his corner-cutting and apathy towards safety. We should never do this again. After this, anyone boarding a future tourist sub to the Abyssal Zone or deeper is asking for it.

sho_hn 3y ago
> From an engineering standpoint, Titan didn't have any safety features at all. This isn't quite true. It had multiple redundant ways to drop ballast, for example. What I would say from what I was able to find out (and with some familiarity of safety engineering processes from work; I make cars) is that it's safety-concept was very spotty. It had solutions to some problems, but also large gaps in the safety concept. Safety was not addressed in holistic fashion. It's interesting to compare this with solutions found in other subs. For example, Titan had four different ways to drop ballast, but from the list I saw, all of them required manual intervention by a non-incapacitated crew and electronics to be working. On Cameron's Deepsea Challenger--by another rich guy who funded a vanity dive, and relying on homebrew innovations in material science--ballast was held by corrosible wire that would be corroded by seawater in a set time, so the sub would eventually surface automatically. Ballast drop was also triggerable remotely by an acoustic signal, more reliable than radio. The available info is pretty bad, but Titan may not have had those solutions in place. I'm very much out of my depth (no pun intended) on naval/submarine engineering, and I'm hoping for someone with better knowledge to extend that comparison somewhere.
- jonah 3y ago
  There were apparently timed-release (bags of lead shot on dissolvable links) and manual-release (rock the sub to tip lengths of steel pipe off their racks on the sides) ways of jettisoning ballast as well.
TT-392 3y ago

paulpauper 3y ago

feel horrible about this too . the 19 year old especially.