[somenameforme]

Like the video [1] mentions, they were only improvising on things (including the controller) that would not pose a safety hazard if they failed. The critical components like the capsule were designed alongside NASA and others. People aren't just tossing safety to the wind, but trying to create a better balance. NASA does spend a extreme amount of money on compliance and safety - yet that doesn't prevent them from doing things like blowing up $600 million Mars probes because of a mismatch between Imperial and Metric units. [2]

Basically you cannot, no matter how much money you spend, prevent every possible mistake, or even every "obvious" mistake, because "obvious" is often only obvious in hindsight. And going too far on the side of risk avoidance leaves you frozen in time, unable to progress, even as you continue to make mistakes - which drives you even further into extremes of risk avoidance. Of course on the other end being completely cavalier about safety leaves you making mistakes you both can and should have foreseen.

So I suppose we'll just get to see which this was. If anything my prediction here would be that they started becoming so comfortable with these dives that they impacted the Titanic, going for that epic view, resulting in a cascade of system failures or even a breach, bearing in mind you're already going to be near critical pressure thresholds. Absolutely zero basis for my prediction, but I think it's much more probable than a controller failure. They had redundancies on the controllers, and could surface without them. But human hubris has no such constraints.

[1] - https://youtu.be/29co_Hksk6o?t=213

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter

[mysterydip]

He told CBS News: "You know, there's a limit. At some point safety just is pure waste. I mean if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed.

Don't get in your car. Don't do anything. At some point, you're going to take some risk, and it really is a risk/reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules."

https://metro.co.uk/2023/06/20/titanic-sub-ceo-was-worried-a...

[swid]

I’ve know mountain climbers, hang glider/paraglider pilots, scuba divers, sky divers, and more and we pretty much say that exact thing. I’ve been casual acquaintances with people who have died doing extreme sports.

Usually, the people in these sports say if the worst were to happen to them, they accept that risk and wouldn’t want their fate to stop other people from following their passions. That the feeling of being alive chasing these dreams fulfills a part of them, and they would be lost without that fulfillment.

We all do take risks for our own happiness, different people just want different things from life and will drawn that line in different places.

My guess is the five people on the sub would not want this incident to stop people from attempting to visit the Titanic.

[salawat]

...Yes, you're going to take risks. Got it. This risk in particular ends up with you as chunky salsa 4 kilometers under the water, because you couldn't be bothered to sink a copy of the bloody thing with no one in it first.

If it's worth making, make 2 or 3 of with at least one slated for being destroyed at one point.

Space Shuttle Enterprise never saw Space or the launch pad. It was still made and flown.

[pcthrowaway]

There's a spectrum of risk comfort in mountaineering though.

At the end of the day if there's a rockslide, there's nothing you can do, so you have to be willing to accept some level of risk.

But at the same time, the majority of mountaineering deaths are due to people taking unnecessary risks (for the sport). Being poorly prepared in terms of gear, or making poor decisions, or not being educated enough in climbing, safety assessment, and rescue techniques.

There's absolutely a lot you can do to mitigate the risk, and I think even the experienced mountaineers who choose to take more risk (say, traveling lighter and placing less protection in order to cover more ground in a day) don't advocate for that as the standard way to practice the sport.

I'll be honest, I've had a few close calls myself, but I've taken those as lessons in how to do things more safely going forward, because I value doing things safely more than "bagging more peaks".

I guess if your dream is something like "climb every mountain" accepting more risk is necessary.

But I don't see why the people on this Titanic expedition couldn't have achieved their goals while spending a bit more time on R&D + QA.

Also, people should be making these risk decisions for themselves, not others. The CEO may have had it coming to him, but I feel bad for the other crew on board if they weren't able to decline the expedition, or weren't provided adequate information about the testing that had been done.

[black_13]

But they endanger others who have to go looking or attempt to rescue them.

[jonathanstrange]

This is not true, the maker of this sub compromised substantially on safety and did not have it certified by an independent body like most other builders of deep sea submarines do. In fact, members of the small deep sea submarine community wrote a letter to the company warning them about the safety hazards and the lack of certification. Source: Today's interview with a deep sea exploration submarine commander on German TV (ARD Tagesschau).

In particular, this company used carbon fiber materials that were neither tested nor certified for the intended operational depth, and they also did not do extensive testing like you do when you certify a craft.

[gambiting]

As it's explained in another comment - the CEO wanted it tested but there isn't a facility anywhere on earth equipped to test it. Perhaps the argument then is that part of the company funding should have been building a custom rig designed for testing this highly custom 5 inch thick carbon fibre shell - but it's not like options to test it were available and were ignored.

[jonathanstrange]

This is not true either. As the submarine commander interviewed lays out, the testing is done by actual dives, and there is a certification body for it. Almost every other deep sea exploration submarine is certified. However, getting certified is voluntary.

Of course, certifying it just means that independent experts take a look at the design and use sensors during dives. All of these vehicles are experimental. But not even trying is negligent.

[hef19898]

It is almost like there are already deep sea subs in existence. And that people already figures out how to test, and certify, them.

[zirgs]

I suspect that certification is not going to be voluntary any more after this.

[lelanthran]

> the CEO wanted it tested but there isn't a facility anywhere on earth equipped to test it.

They could have dropped it to the bottom of the sea with weights, have a timer release the weights and hauled it back up. Cheaper than renting any testing facility on earth.

They could have done this multiple times on the same hull until it imploded. If a month of dropping it and retrieving it doesn't result in implosion, then it's probably safe enough to put people into it.

There was no need to make its first test of that pressure with people in it.

[robertlagrant]

The answer to "this can't be tested" isn't "don't test it". It's "don't use it".

[gambiting]

A lot of things that we use all the time couldn't be reasonably tested in operational scenario in any other way than by just using them(most planes are in that category - you can test a lot of things on test benches but there isn't a way to test an airliner at operational speed an altitude other than actually flying it)

[robertlagrant]

I think if SpaceX can send 15 robotic rockets into space to test them, this lot could've sunk a prototype to high pressure and got a diver to go down and smack the hull with a wrench for a while.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Actually, it's "don't design it in a manner that will be untestable."

[RC_ITR]

>Like the video [1] mentions, they were only improvising on things (including the controller) that would not pose a safety hazard if they failed.

This is an extremely dangerous attitude though (obviously). In the BBC documentary, the thrusters are out of orientation and they just solve it by saying 'turn the controller, since right is your new forward.'

In the documentary it's played off as fun, but there's a non-zero chance the sub is currently stuck within seafloor wreckage and it could 100% be the fault of the controller.

Bad steering certainly wouldn't prevent them from dropping ballast (which they imply is the ultimate failsafe), but it is not a zero-failure-risk system.

[ilamont]

The critical components like the capsule were designed alongside NASA

I saw that claim, and wondered what it entailed. The founder is clearly in the mold of testing mission-critical/life or death systems in production, while skirting or floating the rules. Such a claim is like one of those logos you see on the front of software start ups home pages, claiming some usage by Google, MIT, or CERN, without any verification or context.

[somenameforme]

Their release is here [1]. The NASA tracking number is SAA8-2031655. The agreement started in 2020, and concluded in 2022. One of the guys on board the sub is Stockton Rush, the founder/owner of the company. He clearly believes (or believed as it may ultimately be) in the product they created, and wasn't just casually playing games for bucks.

I would largely tune the media out on this. They have no more special insight than you or I. All that's known is that a sub has gone dark; everything else is speculation. Within 3 days we'll know for certain whether the people on the ship have been rescued, or are dead. In case it's the latter, we won't have any realistic idea of what happened until the sub, or its remains, are recovered. And that may simply not happen.

[1] - https://www.oceangate.com/news-and-media/press-releases/2020...

[robertlagrant]

> I would largely tune the media out on this. They have no more special insight than you or I.

The older I get, the more I think this.

[gregors]

You mean this NASA....

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo1.h...

https://history.nasa.gov/Apollo204/invest.html

Where a small fire in a controlled environment killed people in 30 seconds?

or this, where they didn't listen to the engineer?

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781...

NASA isn't a magical place where they don't mess things up

[weird-eye-issue]

Why is the capsule considered the only critical safety component?

If everything else fails wouldn't it just fall to the bottom of the ocean? Even if it can survive that depth that only sounds good on paper. Nobody could get to you.

[lb1lf]

The capsule itself is positively buoyant.

As long as it can jettison the ballast (and is not tangled up in something on the seabed, say, the Titanic), it will come to the surface.

[ceejayoz]

And the ballast is held on via electromagnets. Lose (or deliberately cut) power, you're going up.

[tristanb]

I don't think it is on this "sub". I believe I read they used a material that degraded over time in water.

[barelyauser]

Isn't this like a huge waste of energy?

[andruby]

I don't think weight is a huge issue for submarines (unlike say airplanes), so taking a few batteries along should be fine.

(I don't know anything about subs) you could even store a few batteries in the ballast.

[ceejayoz]

Between "waste some power on a magnet" and "we're permanently stuck on the bottom of the ocean about to run out of air", I know which one I'd pick.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

There's a difference between a "waste of energy" and a failsafe emergency system that happens to use a lot of energy.

[adql]

It's nothing compared to amount of power to the engines, you don't need kilowatts to "just" hold a ballast

[nvusuvu]

Clear tradeoff for safety.

[RC_ITR]

Sure, but they can also incorrectly steer themselves into wreckage that causes them to be stuck...

[weird-eye-issue]

Right, so you need the ballast. Which is not inherently part of the capsule. Which proves my point.

[lb1lf]

Well, you need to be able to change the weight of the capsule somehow, otherwise you'd be stuck bobbing at the surface. (Or at the seabed).

The puzzling bit, from what I have gathered, is that the ballast is not fail safe.

[Out_of_Characte]

Because an implosion is a single point of failure leading to instant death. Anything else can be salvaged by staying calm and using one of multiple ways to resurface.

[cheekibreeki2]

Subs will always have 1000 ways to kill you and most of them are catastrophic. You're pretty much boned if anything goes wrong especially with so few crew members, lack of compartments, backup propulsion, etc.

[weird-eye-issue]

Really? Anything else can just be magically salvaged? I'm not sure there is that much room for error 2 miles below the surface

[RC_ITR]

They are visiting a debris field. There is a much more than zero chance they are stuck on something.

[theonething]

> blowing up $600 million Mars probes because of a mismatch between Imperial and Metric units.

Damn, if I were the person/team responsible for that mistake, I don't think I could live that down.