6 ms·

> During the descent [of the Trieste to the Challenger Deep], one of the window panes cracked and shook the entire vessel. ... and still they did not abort the

by p-e-w 3y ago

> During the descent [of the Trieste to the Challenger Deep], one of the window panes cracked and shook the entire vessel. ... and still they did not abort the dive. In fact, they continued to go even deeper. Think about that for a second. That's the stuff those explorers (and the people backing them) were made of. No wonder nobody has been to the Moon in 50 years. I can't even imagine where you would find an institution willing to let its employees take such risks today.

jb1991 3y ago
> I can't even imagine where you would find an institution willing to let its employees take such risks today. Uhm, OceansGate?
- klysm 3y ago
  That seems to be driven more by naivety than anything else
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    If they survive it's bravery, if they die it's naïvity.
    - runesofdoom 3y ago
      Maxim 43: "If it's stupid and it works, it's still stupid and you're lucky."[1] [1]From Schlock Mercenary's "Seventy Maxims of Maximially Effective Mercenaries". https://www.ovalkwiki.com/index.php/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Maximally_Effective_Mercenaries https://www.ovalkwiki.com/index.php/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Ma...
  - jb1991 3y ago
    No, it wasn't naivety.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  I very strongly doubt that they would have continued a dive with a cracked window. Their risk was abstract, and caused by ignorance. The crew of the Trieste continued to descend knowing full well that their vessel was damaged. That's not the same thing in my mind.
  - Hamuko 3y ago
    They dove the Titan to the Titanic for 10+ times with a viewport that was rated for 1300-metre depth when the Titanic is at 4000 metres. I feel like OceanGate did not really pay that much attention to window safety.
    - tjpnz 3y ago
      Not just window safety. The CEO effectively said he didn't care for safety in general.
    - edizms 3y ago
      I believe this to be the elephant in the room, I wouldn't be surprised if the viewport gave way before the hull.
  - jb1991 3y ago
    > Their risk was abstract, and caused by ignorance. There was nothing abstract whatsoever about the lack of adequate preparation and responsibility taken: they did not certify, and they used components that were not rated for the depths of their dives, among many other things. This was not ignorance. This was boldly deciding not to care about safety. They ignored very vocal and direct outspoken concerns from all their peers in the industry for years, specific concerns about what they were doing that was not safe, and they ignored that too. Not abstract.
    - kdmccormick 3y ago
      Stockton assured passengers that it was totally safe. Either he was lying, or he deluded himself enough that he found the risk to be abstract. A reckless teenager driving at 120mph on the highway with no seatbelt is obviously in serious danger, but to their young, impulsive mind the danger may feel completely abstract.
klysm 3y ago
Reading that for the first time blew my mind. How did it not fail after cracking? I don’t understand how it wasn’t structurally compromised. The guts it takes to not abort the dive seems just clinically insane to me
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Another comment quotes something that it was only an outer pane, probably more functional than structural.
tjpnz 3y ago
And it's because of those early pioneers that submarining is now a mature art. At least when practised by those prepared to learn.
meigwilym 3y ago
I read that their logic was "If it was going to catastrophically fail, it would have. So no need to stop."
AlexandrB 3y ago
I was also amazed to read that the window was made of plexiglass: > Observation of the sea outside the craft was conducted directly by eye, via a single, very tapered, cone-shaped block of Plexiglas, the only transparent substance identified which would withstand the external pressure. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trieste_(bathyscaphe)#Design https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trieste_(bathyscaphe)#Design
EdwardCoffin 3y ago
I found this interesting enough to look into it a little more: > At 30,000 ft. a sharp crack rang through the ship, shaking it violently. The water pressure outside wasmore than 6 tons per sqare inch., and even a slight fracture in the hull would have meant certain death. It proved to be only an outer Plexiglas windowpane which had splintered under the pressure. The inner hull remained watertight. "A pretty hairy, experience," admitted Walsh. https://web.archive.org/web/20070202144233/http://bjsonline.com/watches/articles/0022_3.shtml https://web.archive.org/web/20070202144233/http://bjsonline....
lucideer 3y ago
Was this comment written by Stockton Rush's ghost?
komali2 3y ago
> That's the stuff those explorers (and the people backing them) were made of. They died all the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_expeditions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_expeditions I don't know why that's laudable: if you die before you make it back, for most of these locations, that means whatever you've learned is lost as well, and someone has to take identical risk to learn it for humanity again. Seems to be better to see the cracked pane, return to the surface with your lives, write a letter to your submarine enthusiast magazine group or whatever the equivalent of a web forum was back then noting that such and such glass installed in such and such way cracked at N depth, try a new method, and dive again. > No wonder nobody has been to the Moon in 50 years. Why bother when the ocean is infinitely more interesting?
world2vec 3y ago
In the "Deepsea Challenge" documentary (2014), Don Walsh (one of the two men that made the dive with Trieste) tells James Cameron that "if you can hear a crack it means you're still alive, might as well keep on with the dive" (paraphrasing). So when Cameron is doing a test dive he hears a loud noise and indeed just keeps going. Personally, I'd wet my pants right there and cry for my mother. These gentlemen are built different I guess.
JackFr 3y ago
It's possible that consciously or unconsciously they reasoned that a failure which compromised the vessels integrity would have been instantaneous and catastrophic, and thus the crack most likely was not compromising the vessels integrity. At least that's what I'd tell myself.
bufordtwain 3y ago
Continuing after a window cracked seems bad. Why not figure out why it cracked and fix it, then try again?
- rpeden 3y ago
  It was a window in the non-watertight entrance tunnel, not the window in the hull. This article describes it in more detail: https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/don-walsh-describes-the-trip-to-the-bottom-of-the-mariana-trench-2650257923 https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/don-walsh-describes-the-trip-t...
  - _yb2s 3y ago
    This is the answer... nobody is going to go deeper if the window to the pressure vessel cracks
saiojd 3y ago
Not to dismiss the guts of these explorers, but we have not been to the Moon in 50 years because it costs a fortune to get to when it's not much more than a floating rock (I'm being hyperbolic but the point is that there is no economic incentive to offset the cost). If we could get to it cheaply, but with a high risk of death, I'm sure many would be doing it right now.

by p-e-w 3y ago

jb1991 3y ago

> I can't even imagine where you would find an institution willing to let its employees take such risks today. Uhm, OceansGate?

klysm 3y ago
That seems to be driven more by naivety than anything else
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  If they survive it's bravery, if they die it's naïvity.
  - runesofdoom 3y ago
    Maxim 43: "If it's stupid and it works, it's still stupid and you're lucky."[1] [1]From Schlock Mercenary's "Seventy Maxims of Maximially Effective Mercenaries". https://www.ovalkwiki.com/index.php/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Maximally_Effective_Mercenaries https://www.ovalkwiki.com/index.php/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Ma...
- jb1991 3y ago
  No, it wasn't naivety.
p-e-w 3y ago
I very strongly doubt that they would have continued a dive with a cracked window. Their risk was abstract, and caused by ignorance. The crew of the Trieste continued to descend knowing full well that their vessel was damaged. That's not the same thing in my mind.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  They dove the Titan to the Titanic for 10+ times with a viewport that was rated for 1300-metre depth when the Titanic is at 4000 metres. I feel like OceanGate did not really pay that much attention to window safety.
  - tjpnz 3y ago
    Not just window safety. The CEO effectively said he didn't care for safety in general.
  - edizms 3y ago
    I believe this to be the elephant in the room, I wouldn't be surprised if the viewport gave way before the hull.
- jb1991 3y ago
  > Their risk was abstract, and caused by ignorance. There was nothing abstract whatsoever about the lack of adequate preparation and responsibility taken: they did not certify, and they used components that were not rated for the depths of their dives, among many other things. This was not ignorance. This was boldly deciding not to care about safety. They ignored very vocal and direct outspoken concerns from all their peers in the industry for years, specific concerns about what they were doing that was not safe, and they ignored that too. Not abstract.
  - kdmccormick 3y ago
    Stockton assured passengers that it was totally safe. Either he was lying, or he deluded himself enough that he found the risk to be abstract. A reckless teenager driving at 120mph on the highway with no seatbelt is obviously in serious danger, but to their young, impulsive mind the danger may feel completely abstract.

klysm 3y ago

Reading that for the first time blew my mind. How did it not fail after cracking? I don’t understand how it wasn’t structurally compromised. The guts it takes to not abort the dive seems just clinically insane to me

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Another comment quotes something that it was only an outer pane, probably more functional than structural.

tjpnz 3y ago

And it's because of those early pioneers that submarining is now a mature art. At least when practised by those prepared to learn.

meigwilym 3y ago

I read that their logic was "If it was going to catastrophically fail, it would have. So no need to stop."

AlexandrB 3y ago

I was also amazed to read that the window was made of plexiglass: > Observation of the sea outside the craft was conducted directly by eye, via a single, very tapered, cone-shaped block of Plexiglas, the only transparent substance identified which would withstand the external pressure. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trieste_(bathyscaphe)#Design https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trieste_(bathyscaphe)#Design

EdwardCoffin 3y ago

I found this interesting enough to look into it a little more: > At 30,000 ft. a sharp crack rang through the ship, shaking it violently. The water pressure outside wasmore than 6 tons per sqare inch., and even a slight fracture in the hull would have meant certain death. It proved to be only an outer Plexiglas windowpane which had splintered under the pressure. The inner hull remained watertight. "A pretty hairy, experience," admitted Walsh. https://web.archive.org/web/20070202144233/http://bjsonline.com/watches/articles/0022_3.shtml https://web.archive.org/web/20070202144233/http://bjsonline....

lucideer 3y ago

Was this comment written by Stockton Rush's ghost?

komali2 3y ago

> That's the stuff those explorers (and the people backing them) were made of. They died all the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_expeditions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_expeditions I don't know why that's laudable: if you die before you make it back, for most of these locations, that means whatever you've learned is lost as well, and someone has to take identical risk to learn it for humanity again. Seems to be better to see the cracked pane, return to the surface with your lives, write a letter to your submarine enthusiast magazine group or whatever the equivalent of a web forum was back then noting that such and such glass installed in such and such way cracked at N depth, try a new method, and dive again. > No wonder nobody has been to the Moon in 50 years. Why bother when the ocean is infinitely more interesting?

world2vec 3y ago

In the "Deepsea Challenge" documentary (2014), Don Walsh (one of the two men that made the dive with Trieste) tells James Cameron that "if you can hear a crack it means you're still alive, might as well keep on with the dive" (paraphrasing). So when Cameron is doing a test dive he hears a loud noise and indeed just keeps going. Personally, I'd wet my pants right there and cry for my mother. These gentlemen are built different I guess.

JackFr 3y ago

It's possible that consciously or unconsciously they reasoned that a failure which compromised the vessels integrity would have been instantaneous and catastrophic, and thus the crack most likely was not compromising the vessels integrity. At least that's what I'd tell myself.

bufordtwain 3y ago

Continuing after a window cracked seems bad. Why not figure out why it cracked and fix it, then try again?

rpeden 3y ago
It was a window in the non-watertight entrance tunnel, not the window in the hull. This article describes it in more detail: https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/don-walsh-describes-the-trip-to-the-bottom-of-the-mariana-trench-2650257923 https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/don-walsh-describes-the-trip-t...
- _yb2s 3y ago
  This is the answer... nobody is going to go deeper if the window to the pressure vessel cracks

saiojd 3y ago

Not to dismiss the guts of these explorers, but we have not been to the Moon in 50 years because it costs a fortune to get to when it's not much more than a floating rock (I'm being hyperbolic but the point is that there is no economic incentive to offset the cost). If we could get to it cheaply, but with a high risk of death, I'm sure many would be doing it right now.