9 ms·

The thing that I find amazing about this sub, is that the final hull survived all those trips, and then before the final one let everyone know it was toast, and

The thing that I find amazing about this sub, is that the final hull survived all those trips, and then before the final one let everyone know it was toast, and Stockton ignored it. He was careless with peoples lives, but his sub actually did what he set out to do, and if he listened to the instruments, he'd still be alive, he could have made another hull, and he could be taking more trips down there for better of for worse. The porthole design was poor, the carbon fiber had tons of defects, the controller, everything was cobbled together, yet it held up until it didn't.

lesuorac 1y ago
I'm not sure he had the money to make another hull. I think that's the crux of the issue, he didn't have a usable system and he didn't want to give up his ambition.
- shortrounddev2 1y ago
  Other than the finances of it, he was a total narcissist who refused to believe anyone else knew more about anything than he did. Even when presented with hard data he chose to ignore it and killed himself as a result.
- lupusreal 1y ago
  Money was a big part of the problem. The whole point of making it out of carbon fiber was to make it light and therefore cheap to operate. He could have made a long DSV with plenty of room for passengers out of metal, the Aluminaut DSV was such a craft with proven performance, but then he would have needed to buy or rent a more expensive ship to operate it with.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - lenerdenator 1y ago
    All of this really should have made someone stop and ask if this was the part of the human experience that really needed cost reduction. But it didn't, so... shrugs.
    - lesuorac 1y ago
      Well, I for one enjoy being able to fly in airplanes. I'm glad nobody back in the day decided that flight wasn't something most Americans should be able to do. On the related topic, people did wonder if Rush was the right person to be leading this project and numerous people raised governmental complaints. However, mostly due to staffing issues within the government they weren't handled in any appropriate amount of time and any entity with the ability to stop him didn't.
  - duskwuff 1y ago
    > Money was a big part of the problem. Yep. There are a ton of incidents described in the report which all stink of penny-pinching. Probably one of the most obvious is reusing the titanium end cap components from the first submarine; this may have played a role in the failure of the Titan, as the mating surfaces may have been damaged or incompletely cleaned when rebonding them to the new hull.
shortrounddev2 1y ago
There's a documentary about it on Netflix and the impression I came away with is that, while there are fundamental engineering problems associated with a carbon fiber design, they could have probably overcome them in one way or another. The problem with oceangate is that their CEO was an arrogant narcissist who thought he knew better than everyone, and if anyone stood in his way he would explode with anger at them and fire them. It was a company with absolutely no culture of safety and a cult of personality where people were punished for being honest. The CEO knew about the problems and still somehow believed, to his core, that everyone else (including hard data!) was wrong. He believed in his own infallibility so deeply that it killed him
- Ralfp 1y ago
  You don't need to watch Netflix series. There is a transcript of entire conversation between Stockthon and David Lochridge where the former scolds the latter for taking his safety concerns outside of company and firing him: https://media.defense.gov/2024/Sep/20/2003550726/-1/-1/0/CG-100%20INTERVIEW%20TRANSCRIPT%20-%20DIR%20OF%20MARINE%20OPERATIONS%20WITH%20CEO_REDACTED_REDACTED.PDF https://media.defense.gov/2024/Sep/20/2003550726/-1/-1/0/CG-...
  - bouchard 1y ago
    The Netflix documentary has some extra interviews with employees, clients, etc. which are interesting. (1hr 51min runtime though)
  - rawgabbit 1y ago
    Quote: >Not at all, because carbon fiber is better compression than tension. And that's what nobody understands. It's completely opposite of what everyone else says. Everyone's, oh, carbon fiber can't handle compression. They're full of shit, and I've proven they're full of shit. If you want to see that, you take a look at the third scale model that we tested. Jesus Christ, I met people like him in previous jobs when I worked in Aerospace. Don't need to know nothing but a giant ego and connections to get a job managing engineers.
morpheos137 1y ago
Stockton Rush would have fit right in in Silicon Valley. Rush and stock on.
- southernplaces7 1y ago
  [flagged]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
Ralfp 1y ago
It didn't implode on next dive, it was much worse. On dive 80 during surfacing people heard a "loud bang" from the submersible (according to a witness it sounded like a gunfire). They looked at their "RTMS" system and found recording of loud noise from the hull. But only three days later they did the dive 81 (with customers). After this dive their tension sensors shown that their carbon hull no longer compresses under pressure like it used to. They then made plan to inspect the hull after dive 83. But instead they left Titan winter on the parking lot in Saint Johns where it was not protected from any exposure because that was cheaper. During summer they hauled it for a dive 88 (I don't know why they jumped from 81 to 88, prolly cancelled dives because of the weather?). During hauling it become loose and started knocking against the hauling platform (LARS) because of the waves. Day later they did a dive where it imploded. On side note, they had no way to access and inspect the carbon hull without having to completely dissemble vehicle, and that too was considered too pricy to do. This was a disaster of organization with messianic CEO dismissing all concerns with bravado and legal treats that got what was coming to them. If you want to, here's transcript of him scolding and then laying out one of engineers because they took safety concerns outside of the company: https://media.defense.gov/2024/Sep/20/2003550726/-1/-1/0/CG-100%20INTERVIEW%20TRANSCRIPT%20-%20DIR%20OF%20MARINE%20OPERATIONS%20WITH%20CEO_REDACTED_REDACTED.PDF https://media.defense.gov/2024/Sep/20/2003550726/-1/-1/0/CG-...
- lesuorac 1y ago
  > But instead they left Titan winter on the parking lot in Saint Johns where it was not protected from any exposure because that was cheaper. This came up in the hearings. It's standard practice to do this but it's probably different leaving say the metallic Antipodes [1] outside than carbon fiber. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipodes_(submersible) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipodes_(submersible)
  - jcranmer 1y ago
    The report here more or less outright says that leaving it outside was a major factor in the incident. The incident on dive 80 was adjudged to be partial delamination of the carbon fiber layers, and leaving it outside subjected it to freeze-thaw cycles that propagated the delamination into near-total delamination, which promptly failed the next time the hull was pressurized. Although there is also the aborted dive 87, which subjected to the submersible to a lot of percussive damage via wave action.
jordanb 1y ago
It didn't do a lot of dives before it failed. The dive number was the number of "dives" oceangate did using any hull. Additionally most of those dives were 20 feet down in a marina for testing.
dwheeler 1y ago
> The thing that I find amazing about this sub, is that the final hull survived all those trips, and then before the final one let everyone know it was toast, and Stockton ignored it. He was careless with peoples lives, but his sub actually did what he set out to do, and if he listened to the instruments, he'd still be alive... I disagree. In fact, I think that's quite unlikely. First, unlike a metal hull, carbon fiber hulls accumulate subtle damage on compression that's hard to detect. Then, when they fail, they tend to fail catastrophically. So "this hull worked before" isn't evidence of success in this case, as it normally would be, it's evidence that you're getting closer & closer to the disaster. Second, I think Stockton would have just kept diving, even if this event hadn't failed. He might have even gotten more reckless (though per the report he was already extremely reckless). If you keep playing Russian Roulette, and occasionally add another bullet, eventually the game will end. There is no evidence he was going to stop until he was killed by his own decisions. None of this takes away the tragedy of it. It's sad, and will remain so.
- chowells 1y ago
  I think you missed the thrust of OP. The submersible had instruments in it to report on the hull condition. They all were reporting it had previously experienced severe strain before the last dive, and they were designed as tripwires. If they tripped, the hull should have been considered unsafe and not used again. They were ignored. It is a shock that they actually worked and reported the hull was unsafe before it failed. Given everything else, it's not a surprise in the slightest that they were ignored.
  - post_break 1y ago
    Exactly, the hull performed, then the instruments told them with a loud bang that it was toast.
    - chowells 1y ago
      Once again... The instruments reported the hull was no longer safe for use before the start of the last dive. That was well before the implosion. You keep ignoring this part to focus on how there was no engineering that would suggest that those instruments would actually give early warning. I'm halfway there with you. It is actually a surprise that they reported it was unsafe before the dive. But they did, and that makes the subsequent human failures even more egregious.
petsfed 1y ago
>The porthole design was poor, the carbon fiber had tons of defects, the controller, everything was cobbled together, yet it held up until it didn't. Emphasis mine. Everybody hammers on the controller like using a gaming controller was somehow more indicative of the unseriousness of the endeavor than, you know, the firing of the guy who said the hull was unsafe. Based on what I've read, that was one of the few authentically competent design decisions of the whole bloody thing. Why waste time and resources building, designing, and most importantly lifetime testing something that you can buy off the shelf for $30 US? The US Navy has been using off-the-shelf game controllers for years now[0], because they work. And as a bonus, the submarine designers can be confident that if Stockton Rush or Seaman Manchild or whoever throws his controller in a fit of rage when his submarine doesn't work right, the controller will still work afterwards. Absolutely, there were problems with the control scheme (reportedly, the motors were wired into the control board wrong, so the x- and y-axes were reversed). But that's not the fault of some usb controller communicating with the control box. That's the fault of the people working on the actually bespoke portions of the submarine. 0. https://www.cnet.com/science/us-navy-launches-submarine-maneuvered-by-xbox-controller/ https://www.cnet.com/science/us-navy-launches-submarine-mane...
- rcxdude 1y ago
  >Why waste time and resources building, designing, and most importantly lifetime testing something that you can buy off the shelf for $30 US? That's fine, but you would think they would buy a high quality one (like $70), use a wired one, and maybe have a spare? I think that's a lot of where the ire comes from. It's the cheapest and easiest part of the system and still they skimped out (and it's memable for gamers, given how common the experience of 'third party controller the little brother/least favored friend has to use' is). I worked on a self-funded student project making an autonomous underwater vehicle and we still used a better controller than they did (the xbox 360 controller is the obvious choice for such things. It's ubiquitously understood, trivial to interface to, reasonably priced, and pretty damn solid)
- trenchpilgrim 1y ago
  It's not just that they used a game controller, they used a super cheap crappy controller instead of something backed my a major company with millions of R&D funding or a modern device with better sensors (hall effect/TMR) better suited for controlling vehicles in something other than an arcade game. Like, they couldn't even spring an extra ten bucks for the same controllers that Navy uses.

lesuorac 1y ago

I'm not sure he had the money to make another hull. I think that's the crux of the issue, he didn't have a usable system and he didn't want to give up his ambition.

shortrounddev2 1y ago
Other than the finances of it, he was a total narcissist who refused to believe anyone else knew more about anything than he did. Even when presented with hard data he chose to ignore it and killed himself as a result.
lupusreal 1y ago
Money was a big part of the problem. The whole point of making it out of carbon fiber was to make it light and therefore cheap to operate. He could have made a long DSV with plenty of room for passengers out of metal, the Aluminaut DSV was such a craft with proven performance, but then he would have needed to buy or rent a more expensive ship to operate it with.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- lenerdenator 1y ago
  All of this really should have made someone stop and ask if this was the part of the human experience that really needed cost reduction. But it didn't, so... shrugs.
  - lesuorac 1y ago
    Well, I for one enjoy being able to fly in airplanes. I'm glad nobody back in the day decided that flight wasn't something most Americans should be able to do. On the related topic, people did wonder if Rush was the right person to be leading this project and numerous people raised governmental complaints. However, mostly due to staffing issues within the government they weren't handled in any appropriate amount of time and any entity with the ability to stop him didn't.
- duskwuff 1y ago
  > Money was a big part of the problem. Yep. There are a ton of incidents described in the report which all stink of penny-pinching. Probably one of the most obvious is reusing the titanium end cap components from the first submarine; this may have played a role in the failure of the Titan, as the mating surfaces may have been damaged or incompletely cleaned when rebonding them to the new hull.

shortrounddev2 1y ago

There's a documentary about it on Netflix and the impression I came away with is that, while there are fundamental engineering problems associated with a carbon fiber design, they could have probably overcome them in one way or another. The problem with oceangate is that their CEO was an arrogant narcissist who thought he knew better than everyone, and if anyone stood in his way he would explode with anger at them and fire them. It was a company with absolutely no culture of safety and a cult of personality where people were punished for being honest. The CEO knew about the problems and still somehow believed, to his core, that everyone else (including hard data!) was wrong. He believed in his own infallibility so deeply that it killed him

Ralfp 1y ago
You don't need to watch Netflix series. There is a transcript of entire conversation between Stockthon and David Lochridge where the former scolds the latter for taking his safety concerns outside of company and firing him: https://media.defense.gov/2024/Sep/20/2003550726/-1/-1/0/CG-100%20INTERVIEW%20TRANSCRIPT%20-%20DIR%20OF%20MARINE%20OPERATIONS%20WITH%20CEO_REDACTED_REDACTED.PDF https://media.defense.gov/2024/Sep/20/2003550726/-1/-1/0/CG-...
- bouchard 1y ago
  The Netflix documentary has some extra interviews with employees, clients, etc. which are interesting. (1hr 51min runtime though)
- rawgabbit 1y ago
  Quote: >Not at all, because carbon fiber is better compression than tension. And that's what nobody understands. It's completely opposite of what everyone else says. Everyone's, oh, carbon fiber can't handle compression. They're full of shit, and I've proven they're full of shit. If you want to see that, you take a look at the third scale model that we tested. Jesus Christ, I met people like him in previous jobs when I worked in Aerospace. Don't need to know nothing but a giant ego and connections to get a job managing engineers.

morpheos137 1y ago

Stockton Rush would have fit right in in Silicon Valley. Rush and stock on.

southernplaces7 1y ago
[flagged]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

Ralfp 1y ago

It didn't implode on next dive, it was much worse. On dive 80 during surfacing people heard a "loud bang" from the submersible (according to a witness it sounded like a gunfire). They looked at their "RTMS" system and found recording of loud noise from the hull. But only three days later they did the dive 81 (with customers). After this dive their tension sensors shown that their carbon hull no longer compresses under pressure like it used to. They then made plan to inspect the hull after dive 83. But instead they left Titan winter on the parking lot in Saint Johns where it was not protected from any exposure because that was cheaper. During summer they hauled it for a dive 88 (I don't know why they jumped from 81 to 88, prolly cancelled dives because of the weather?). During hauling it become loose and started knocking against the hauling platform (LARS) because of the waves. Day later they did a dive where it imploded. On side note, they had no way to access and inspect the carbon hull without having to completely dissemble vehicle, and that too was considered too pricy to do. This was a disaster of organization with messianic CEO dismissing all concerns with bravado and legal treats that got what was coming to them. If you want to, here's transcript of him scolding and then laying out one of engineers because they took safety concerns outside of the company: https://media.defense.gov/2024/Sep/20/2003550726/-1/-1/0/CG-100%20INTERVIEW%20TRANSCRIPT%20-%20DIR%20OF%20MARINE%20OPERATIONS%20WITH%20CEO_REDACTED_REDACTED.PDF https://media.defense.gov/2024/Sep/20/2003550726/-1/-1/0/CG-...

lesuorac 1y ago
> But instead they left Titan winter on the parking lot in Saint Johns where it was not protected from any exposure because that was cheaper. This came up in the hearings. It's standard practice to do this but it's probably different leaving say the metallic Antipodes [1] outside than carbon fiber. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipodes_(submersible) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipodes_(submersible)
- jcranmer 1y ago
  The report here more or less outright says that leaving it outside was a major factor in the incident. The incident on dive 80 was adjudged to be partial delamination of the carbon fiber layers, and leaving it outside subjected it to freeze-thaw cycles that propagated the delamination into near-total delamination, which promptly failed the next time the hull was pressurized. Although there is also the aborted dive 87, which subjected to the submersible to a lot of percussive damage via wave action.

jordanb 1y ago

It didn't do a lot of dives before it failed. The dive number was the number of "dives" oceangate did using any hull. Additionally most of those dives were 20 feet down in a marina for testing.

dwheeler 1y ago

> The thing that I find amazing about this sub, is that the final hull survived all those trips, and then before the final one let everyone know it was toast, and Stockton ignored it. He was careless with peoples lives, but his sub actually did what he set out to do, and if he listened to the instruments, he'd still be alive... I disagree. In fact, I think that's quite unlikely. First, unlike a metal hull, carbon fiber hulls accumulate subtle damage on compression that's hard to detect. Then, when they fail, they tend to fail catastrophically. So "this hull worked before" isn't evidence of success in this case, as it normally would be, it's evidence that you're getting closer & closer to the disaster. Second, I think Stockton would have just kept diving, even if this event hadn't failed. He might have even gotten more reckless (though per the report he was already extremely reckless). If you keep playing Russian Roulette, and occasionally add another bullet, eventually the game will end. There is no evidence he was going to stop until he was killed by his own decisions. None of this takes away the tragedy of it. It's sad, and will remain so.

chowells 1y ago
I think you missed the thrust of OP. The submersible had instruments in it to report on the hull condition. They all were reporting it had previously experienced severe strain before the last dive, and they were designed as tripwires. If they tripped, the hull should have been considered unsafe and not used again. They were ignored. It is a shock that they actually worked and reported the hull was unsafe before it failed. Given everything else, it's not a surprise in the slightest that they were ignored.
- post_break 1y ago
  Exactly, the hull performed, then the instruments told them with a loud bang that it was toast.
  - chowells 1y ago
    Once again... The instruments reported the hull was no longer safe for use before the start of the last dive. That was well before the implosion. You keep ignoring this part to focus on how there was no engineering that would suggest that those instruments would actually give early warning. I'm halfway there with you. It is actually a surprise that they reported it was unsafe before the dive. But they did, and that makes the subsequent human failures even more egregious.

petsfed 1y ago

>The porthole design was poor, the carbon fiber had tons of defects, the controller, everything was cobbled together, yet it held up until it didn't. Emphasis mine. Everybody hammers on the controller like using a gaming controller was somehow more indicative of the unseriousness of the endeavor than, you know, the firing of the guy who said the hull was unsafe. Based on what I've read, that was one of the few authentically competent design decisions of the whole bloody thing. Why waste time and resources building, designing, and most importantly lifetime testing something that you can buy off the shelf for $30 US? The US Navy has been using off-the-shelf game controllers for years now[0], because they work. And as a bonus, the submarine designers can be confident that if Stockton Rush or Seaman Manchild or whoever throws his controller in a fit of rage when his submarine doesn't work right, the controller will still work afterwards. Absolutely, there were problems with the control scheme (reportedly, the motors were wired into the control board wrong, so the x- and y-axes were reversed). But that's not the fault of some usb controller communicating with the control box. That's the fault of the people working on the actually bespoke portions of the submarine. 0. https://www.cnet.com/science/us-navy-launches-submarine-maneuvered-by-xbox-controller/ https://www.cnet.com/science/us-navy-launches-submarine-mane...

rcxdude 1y ago
>Why waste time and resources building, designing, and most importantly lifetime testing something that you can buy off the shelf for $30 US? That's fine, but you would think they would buy a high quality one (like $70), use a wired one, and maybe have a spare? I think that's a lot of where the ire comes from. It's the cheapest and easiest part of the system and still they skimped out (and it's memable for gamers, given how common the experience of 'third party controller the little brother/least favored friend has to use' is). I worked on a self-funded student project making an autonomous underwater vehicle and we still used a better controller than they did (the xbox 360 controller is the obvious choice for such things. It's ubiquitously understood, trivial to interface to, reasonably priced, and pretty damn solid)
trenchpilgrim 1y ago
It's not just that they used a game controller, they used a super cheap crappy controller instead of something backed my a major company with millions of R&D funding or a modern device with better sensors (hall effect/TMR) better suited for controlling vehicles in something other than an arcade game. Like, they couldn't even spring an extra ten bucks for the same controllers that Navy uses.