But it didn't, so... shrugs.
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.
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.
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
https://media.defense.gov/2024/Sep/20/2003550726/-1/-1/0/CG-...
>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.
> [redacted]: (...) (indiscernable) say my goodbyes to ya
> Mr. Rush: OK, it's never easy
> [redacted]: Some are easier than others
> (whereupon, the interview was concluded)
It's not ideal on a first pass analysis in the same way concrete can't to shit in tension yet with a bunch of carefully placed steel and number crunching magic it works great. I think they proved that CF has the same potential. A more serious attempt could likely work in some capacity.
Here's a detailed report on it. Pages 32-33 has their take on material analysis, probably the most relevant to this failure
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA270438.pdf
I'm personally more suspicious of oceangates manufacturing process than the material, but I'm far from an expert here.
It’s impractical to build something like an Ohio class submarine that can reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench when you also want multiple internal compartments in case of damage.
You can get better efficiency with multiple spherical pressure vessels joined together over a cylindrical vessel, as spherical pressure vessels better distribute the loads than cylinders. This is done in some particularly deep diving military subs, which are then surrounded by an unpressurized cylinder for hydrodynamics.
Deepflight Challenger [...] is the first deep-diving sub to be constructed with a pressure hull (central tube portion) of carbon fibre composite, built by Spencer Composites for HOT. Its carbon fiber design would later influence the tube for the sub Titan,[12] which imploded...
In carbon fiber composite, it's actually the epoxy which provides the compressive strength, and while it has very good compressive strength, the real advantage is its very low density. It is only just barely denser than water, so you can make your hull extremely thick with essentially no loss in buoyancy. Carbon fiber does fail catastrophically, but they could have just made the hull so thick that they were never getting anywhere near the failure point. Further, since carbon fiber is built up in plied layers, you don't have the same sorts of processing limits as with thick metal plates.
The basic concept of Titan was sound, it was just horribly horribly executed. With their flagrant violation of basic engineering and safety practices, they would have killed people no matter what they made their sub out of.
This submersible used untested techniques. They didn't adhere the layers together properly and apparently never bothered to X-ray the tube as that would have shown at least some of the defects. It also seems like there were other design issues with how the tube was paired to the ends.
Most importantly, the deaths were caused by negligence during operation and maintenance. They had the data showing when the hull was damaged on the previous expedition, but either never did their due diligence and analyze it or ignored the results. Even during their last expedition, they may well have avoided death if the alarms had been heeded.
EDIT: to answer the people who seem skeptical, there are companies making carbon fiber vessels that have successfully gone much deeper than those Titanic dives. We're still in the learning stages with the technology, but we'll eventually find the combinations and standards that can make it safe to use (at which point, it may become better than our current solutions). Until then, maybe we shouldn't be shoving people into damaged experimental vessels to see what happens.
https://www.compositeenergytechnologies.com/underwater-carbo...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376273321_Carbon_Fi...
For deep underwater? Apart from the series of stupidities you go on to list, I'd love to hear your reasons as to why?
I'm a carbon f bike rider, even down to carbon spokes and I do not trust the material, knowing that pressure, or force, applied in the wrong direction will make it crack!. As for carbon in a circle...no way.
It's been proven to work?.
A submersible constructed of carbon fiber went to depths that many metallic submarines and submersibles cannot.
If somebody constructs a submersible and then tests it to 5000m and finds it fails on the 200th run after exhibiting for the past 50 dives bad acoustic data. Wouldn't you think it's fine for them to take people on the same designed submersible that's only done 100th runs and still has good data?
Everything is a consumable in the long run. They didn't have data on what Titan looks like before a failure. Although in hindsight the acoustic data looks really bad, the issue really is just the specific design didn't have a known lifespan. A submserible without that defect is going to be a lot safer.
With care and engineering trickery CF in a submersible (compression) probably can work. They still managed to make a few good dives with it despite comically bad decisions in just about every key area. The manufacturing process was primitive, the QC basically nonexistent and procedures didn't make any allocations for the materials (they beat on the thing like it was made of steel). Imagine what a well funded company with experience in CF, robust QC and careful operating procedures could do.
Their trick was pre-formed carbon tubing glued to aluminum lugs. Sound familiar?
Good, because they had a massive recall because the carbon at the joinst started to chip and crack. Member of our club had to call a friend to come get him because his top tube came apart fifteen miles from town. Took em a while to replace it too. Eventually he ended up on a Serotta (Titanium with extra metalurgical tricks to make it lighter still).
Yes. It can be safe. The problem is that its crystalline structure can fail instantaneously without any ability to detect beforehand. In this case the sub was likely improperly manufactured and improperly stored and damaged from previous dives and from transport. The company “planned” to inspect but as no non destructive testing was possible, they didn’t bother.
It's a fine material to use for unmanned submersibles!
Sounds like someone else that's been in the news these last few months.
Try decade.
There has to be a point at which you go "fuck it" and stop working for such a guy, even if you haven't been the target of his temper. I lasted 9 months at a company that had a CEO who wasn't explosive, but toxic in so many ways. His company had a 90% staff turnover over any given 18 month period, primarily everyone outside of senior leadership. If senior leadership had stopped propping him up, and quit that company would have been dead and buried far quicker. Thankfully that company wasn't involved in anything that could endanger anyone's lives.
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-...
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.
Reading this is like watching someone gamble their life savings away because they know the next round/hand is gonna be the one where they win it all back.
While I love this list, I do not like that you are blaming everything on CEO.
This company followed current ethical policies, and used them to exclude actual experts and skilled people. CEO operated in environment that supports this behaviour, and only cares about irelevant metrics!
But again, this is not juzt about CEO (he deserves the blame), but why he was able to operate for so long, and why his critics vere silenced!
My point is where such companies get funding?! They produce garbage and should go bankrupt pretty fast! But somehow "investors" kept feeding them money, because they are super "ethical"!
- Man crushed by custom carbon fiber submersible
That's still false though.
> https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19810045017
As 95% of the carbon fiber market is T300, and as T300 hasn't changed in the years since, I think it holds up.
Long story short, raw carbon fiber has a high compressive strength, but it's still just ~40% of its tensile strength. Carbon fiber composite single-plies or tapes have a reduced, but still reasonably high, compressive strength. When you get to multi-ply 0/90° or 0/45/90° composite laminates, "allowable" A-Basis (<1% likelihood of failure) compressive strength is very low -- around 400MPa -- well under the compressive strength of good steel.
And that's under ideal conditions. You've got to apply knock-downs for ply angle, moisture, through-thickness shear, impact damage, and manufacturing defects.
...Hence the Titan sub failed at a compressive load of something like 200MPa.
I'm not accusing you of this, but one of the issues with carbon fiber is that people see on a specsheet that it has, e.g., a "tensile strength = 4000MPa" and they assume that composite parts will exhibit a practical tensile strength of 4000MPa. The properties of CFRP -- CF composites with epoxy or PEEK or whatever -- are always way reduced, and sometimes quite difficult to pin down.
That said, the tensile strength of CF is always high, as a rule of thumb. Its compressive strength really isn't.
Sure this is idealized, but so is the strength of steel.
The concern with carbon fiber is its potential for delamination, not its compressive strength. Titan's failure was after delamination.
(To build some intuition: carbon fibre, is just that, i.e. a fabric. No-one expects to be able to push on the edges of a sheet of fabric get any real resistance at all. If you then embed that it a plastic, i.e. make a composite, the plastic is mainly what makes it hold its shape. It's only really made stronger in tension by the fibers in it, why would you expect the compression to be better?)
- Man crushed by an instantly imploding submersible
They just disregarded the screams because they couldn't afford to make sure it was still working.
The things I'm working on have a much lower (zero?) chance of death but this is a tale as old as time. _Looks longingly into the backlog..._
Why is there a transcript of the CEO interviewing one of his own employees, apparently in front of the NTSB, from 2018?
Edit: the transcript is between Stockton Rush and his former director of marine operations, David Lochridge, plus three other staff. [...] Lochridge: "That meeting turned out to be a two-hour, 10-minute discussion… on my termination and how my disagreements with the organisation, with regards to safety, didn't matter." [...] The 2018 meeting was recorded.
> "Now, if it fails, then you have to stop, and it's -- again, this is not something that just happens all of a sudden. It doesn't just implode. It screams like a mother before it implodes."
> On dive 80 during surfacing people heard a "loud bang" from the submersible (according to a witness it sounded like a gunfire)
Well, there you go.
> But instead they left Titan <during the> winter on the parking lot in Saint Johns where it was not protected from any exposure because that was cheaper.
> 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.
Early on, it was made clear that carbon fiber hulls could not easily be inspected for integrity issues like metal hulls can be. I'm not an expert, but I'm guessing sensitive instruments have been around for a while for the purpose of inspection. Having a hull you cannot easily inspect would/should make most people/companies nervous.
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.
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.
They used an unproven custom-designed sensor + controller system to monitor the health of the hull.
The monitoring system detected the beginning of total hull failure in the exact way they intended. They then ignored that monitoring system because hull failure would have been inconvenient.
Really that's the whole story of Stockton here. Massively motivated reasoning. Anything inconvenient was written off as wrong. A lot of normalization of deviance too as some of the written-off concerns turned out to be wrong. But not all of them.
I recently got my PPL and that's a massive risk for pilots. You fly in weather you shouldn't and get away with it for a while. Then it becomes normal. You've "proven" you can handle it. Then a situation comes along that requires more margin than you have left and you die.
All metals suffer from that, too. It's called fatigue damage. It bedeviled the aviation industry for a long time because there was no reliable way to detect the fatigue damage.
Eventually, an ad hoc formula was developed to calculate the fatigue damage, and then replace parts that were getting close to the limits.
That's why airliners are scrapped after something like 62,000 flight cycles.
Most aircraft fleets operated by people who care will do something similar but perhaps not as extreme. In fairness to them they don't expect to fly the plane as long as USAF does (70+ years for the B-52, 50+ for many fighters).
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-mane...
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)
Like, they couldn't even spring an extra ten bucks for the same controllers that Navy uses.
So, a bunch of giant red warning flags AND they didn't bother to properly store the casket. I feel bad for the passengers, Stockton got the FAFO award he deserved.
The temperature and pressure in that tiny fraction of a second was probably 10s of thousands of degrees and hundreds of jumbo jets smashing into them so fast that their bodies didn't even register the trauma.
Blew my mind.
Nearly forgot that they heard the explosion on the surface ship, 2 miles above the sub... that kinda screws with my head tbh!
It takes the brain 13 milliseconds to register an image.
It takes the brain 100-200 milliseconds to register pain.
They could have heard some cracks but most likely had no knowledge of the implosion. Their bodies just turned into mist.
I'm angling to die in bed of old age, but at full cognition and perfect awareness of what lies ahead I'm sure a lot of people would pick the Titan over the toll slow death and it's related miseries takes on a family (this is a very weird sentence to type about the Titan, lol)
Water carries sound really well. Whale songs can still be detected what, thousands of miles away or something ridiculous?
It is kinda freaky to think about.
His hubris killed people. He ignored experts. He ignored warnings. This outcome was predictable.
If the hull failed without people it would be no big deal. However, Rush was running out of money so he felt rushed and got reckless.
What differentiates a good founder from a bad one is being right.
Maybe that makes them bad startup founders? I don't know. In my opinion "Startup Founder" is a role which should play second to "ethical human being."
Even SpaceX, with unlimited resources, tried carbon fibre, couldn't get it to work, and switched to stainless steel. Different application but still. It's not a budget material.
PHYSICAL CAUSES
"4.2.4.4. American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) Classification Society Background" ... "The ABS Underwater Rules do not permit the use of carbon fiber composites for Pressure Vessels for Human Occupancy (PVHOs)"
"4.2.4.5. Det Norske Veritas and Germanischer Lloyd (DNV GL)" ... 4.2.4.5.3. According to a DNV Surveyor, carbon fiber has not been accepted as suitable material for the construction of submersible PVHOs, especially when subject to external pressure experienced at ocean depths. According to DNV GL, carbon fibers are not considered suitable for significant compressive loading conditions."
"5.1. Inadequacy of Structural Engineering Analysis. OceanGate’s TITAN submersible design was a complex, high-risk, deep-sea submersible. The design and testing processes for TITAN did not adequately address many of the fundamental engineering principles that are considered crucial for ensuring safety and reliability for operations in such an inherently hazardous environment..."
"5.6 Insufficient Understanding of Carbon Fiber Material Properties for Deep-Sea Application. The TITAN’s pressure hull was constructed using carbon fiber, a material chosen by Mr. Rush for its “impressive” strength-to-weight ratio. [However] the use of carbon fiber in deep-sea environments remains unproven—unlike the materials with established safety records. There are currently no recognized national or international standards that approve of the use of carbon fiber pressure hulls for submersibles. Carbon fiber has demonstrated its effectiveness in other applications where the material is primarily under tension (e.g., aircraft hulls where the pressure inside the passenger compartment is pressing outwards). However, in deep-sea conditions, the pressure hull experiences extreme compressive forces, a scenario for which carbon fiber has no established track record and is generally understood to be less effective."
* * *
HUMAN DECISIONS
The physics is just the physics. There was no law of nature that forced them to take the steps they took. Instead, we have points like these:
"5.12. OceanGate’s Toxic Safety Culture. OceanGate’s operational and safety practices were critically flawed, which contributed to the catastrophic implosion of the TITAN submersible. At the core of these failures was a disconnect between the company's stated safety protocols and its actual practices. ... This highlighted systemic issues where submersible safety protocols were either egregiously inadequate or willfully disregarded, leaving critical risks unmitigated. The analysis reveals a disturbing pattern of misrepresentation and reckless disregard for safety in OceanGate's operation of the TITAN submersible, with Mr. Rush seemingly using inflated numbers to bolster the perceived safety and dive count of the final TITAN hull...
Examples of OceanGate CEO’s disdain for traditional submersible safety protocols were abundant. For example... This dismissive approach to safety culture was not limited to engineering decisions. OceanGate’s management actively retaliated against employees who raised legitimate compliance related concerns..."
This was a tragedy, because people died and this was all completely avoidable. It's the only event like this in many, many decades. I hope others will leran and avoid making similar mistakes.
I don't know if that is true. I do think we get rigid safety protocols or specifications that can make novel designs impossible. This happens in all bureaucracies.
You have to defy all the voices telling you are wrong and its going to fail.
(Of course, most of the time those voices are right, so if it is something with lives on the line, you also should be making sure you have the resources to test it thoroughly so even if it isn't well-establlished and known before you start on it, it is well-established and known through your team's work before you start putting it in the position to kill people.)
Put "Moved Fast and Broke Stuff" on Rush's tombstone.
Assume I have the money to go on a trip, am I supposed to do background checks on people and technology by myself?
From this report I gather that either the sea industry is completely unregulated, or this guy ignored all rules and nobody did a check even after something like 80 dives.
Both options sound kinda insane to be honest.
Can anyone more knowledgeable elaborate?
I think the rules/laws around commercial deep sea sub companies were unclear because most deep sea subs are research vessels or private projects (e.g. James Cameron’s sub), not tourist operations.
https://media.defense.gov/2024/Oct/22/2003569244/-1/-1/0/CG-...
> The experimental submersible vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and is constructed of materials that have not been widely used for manned submersibles. As of the date of this Release, the experimental submersible vessel has conducted fewer than 90 dives
Or a contract that redefines you from a passenger to a "mission specialist"
https://media.defense.gov/2024/Sep/20/2003550574/-1/-1/0/CG-...
I just can't imagine why a submersible structural designer would select composites for this application. IMHO, this project was doomed from the moment of that design decision, even setting aside all the other idiocy.
"Cheap, cheap, cheap" ain't just a thing that birdies say.
Maybe it's easier to imagine if you consider the designer in question not as a submersible structural designer per se, but rather a nepo baby cosplaying as one.
Submarines of this size should be using composites, once sufficient data is gathered on their behavior to develop proper factors of safety. The issue was all the idiocy that came after. This team was going to kill people no matter no matter what they made the sub out of.
It really was, in essence, an epoxy tube with titanium end caps.
Yikes
So simple thinking could view this as some wreckless narcissist CEO defrauding some naive customers, and hence a "tragedy".
But alternatively, since the CEO's attitude and the safety record was publicly known, you could instead interpret it as an elaborate suicide pact.
ortusdux•14h ago
https://www.newsweek.com/oceangate-employee-resigned-co-foun...
https://www.youtube.com/live/AvAw9YFW2i0&t=782