[Mattasher]

No judgement of OceanGate either way, but the Monday morning quarterbacking is pointless.

Doing dangerous things is dangerous. If we had infinite time and infinite money no corners would be cut for anything, all risk would be subdued, and we'd still be waiting on the first person to climb Everest or go into space. Cameron himself has taken risks in subs, and if one of them imploded I'm sure you could find some cheap or untested component to blame.

[ageitgey]

There is a lot more backstory here.

When James Cameron designed Deepsea Challenger with Ron Allum (his sub designed to go to the deepest known point on earth) he was competing against another team. For structural integrity under repeated compression/decompression, he used steel for the hull of his vessel. The other team was using a composite hull like OceanGate was using. James Cameron raised strong engineering concerns against using a composite hull and told the competing team that they would die if they used that technology due the the risk of the hull shattering under repeated compression/decompression cycles. In the end, Cameron won the challenge by diving to the lowest known point on earth and the other sub was never used. He went much, much deeper in his sub than the Titantic site (which he has also explored many times).

So when OceanGate lost their vehicle, it was basically (in Cameron's view) confirming what Cameron had said all along. It would be like if you had been warning for years that building houses out of straw was a fire risk and then someone's straw theater burned down.

James Cameron's point was that there has been over 70 years of engineering work done on deep sea subs to make them safe and that the OceanGate team was ignoring that knowledge and taking unnecessary risks.

[predictabl3]

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. OG failed to get basic certifications every other deepdive got.

They failed to test multiple fail-safes at depth. There's no indications of testing air supply or scrubbers over time. They bolted from the outside despite claiming to learn from spaceflight (Apollo 1, anyone). The composite hull, viewport, and more were seemed by everyone else to be insufficient.

Previous missions included them finding out the propulsion was on backward, getting snagged on the titanic, getting lost for 5 hours, losing communication with the tracking ship.

Did they systematically fix a single one of these problems? No!

They removed ability for the ship to contact them because the CEO was tired of getting interrupted.

I know it's sacrilegious to say it here, bit billionaires are not magically brilliant by nature, and they got caught up in their own hubris. I'm sorry but this was one of the biggest waste of resources I've ever seen. But god forbid anyone say that because they're "mean" or "just hate the rich" or whatever other uninformed take Ive seen.

[_blz2]

> and this is just the tip of the iceberg

Sometimes these are enough...

[balls187]

Is it quarterbacking, when the person is also a quarterback?

James Cameron has (purportedly) designed and built submersibles, and has made the dive to the Titanic many (edited) times.

I take his pov less as a second guessing game, and instead providing an informed opinion, in part because this event will have repercussions for everyone else who is using submersibles.

[oneTbrain23]

It is not even informed opinion. His remarks can be basically put into textbooks and lecture slides as fact. At this point he is basically authority on this kind of public commercial dive. OceanGate basically building something and selling it to the public even knowingly it will fail. And this whole charade of finding 30mins interval alarm were just a total waste of taxpayers money. I hope each and everyone in OG get sued to bankruptcy. Anyone with enegineering qualifications and decided to work there were juat irresponsible.

[mv4]

Several? He made 33 dives to the Titanic site.

[calyth2018]

Cameron's taken risks in subs that took them to more than 2x the depth and back.

The list of DSVs taking people well past the depth of the Titanic and came back is actually fairly long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-submergence_vehicle#Deepe... Maybe having at least someone familiar with those as an SME would save lives and resource, because OceanGate's going to be sued into oblivion

I was chatting with an engineering student (not finished the Bachelors), and he said that the carbon fibre weave from OceanGate's own video made a 2nd year mistake for not weaving diagonally.

I was chatting with a Masters student in Aerospace, and he said CF is great for tension, sucks for compression. Their use is compression, and in essence had a plastic hull going down to 4000m.

It's not just dangerous things is dangerous. OceanGate flew in the face of basics in engineering, fucked around and found out. If only their CEO didn't flaunt regulations and peddled his shit to naive people and expose them to unnecessary risk and taking 4 people with him.

[baryphonic]

I disagree. Risk isn't binary. Part of being an engineer is trying to quantify the risks of a given design so that anyone subjected to the platform is aware of them. If a submersible with a cylindrical carbon fiber hull fails after five or ten dives and gives no advanced indication of its impending failure, that's a much riskier proposition than a metal structure which can go hundreds of times and shows very obvious advanced warning signs.

To put it in a different context, consider when Uber was playing with autonomous driving. Their miles-driven-per-incident rate was orders of magnitude lower than any commercial fleet of human drivers or even the general population of human drivers.

Engineers have an ethical duty to try to quantify these risks and present them as accurately as possible to those who make decisions. Anything less than that is performance art.

[Waterluvian]

The fatalist “you can’t get it perfect so don’t try” attitude is worse than unhelpful. It reduces safety to a binary state.

[mwbajor]

Alot of the people that were tourists* were as arrogant as the designers. Its ironic in this case considering the titanic's construction also had a fair amount of arrogance.

We all know what happens when designers of anything are arrogant.

* notice I said tourists, not explorers of which they were not.

[balls187]

What makes them tourists and not explorers? I get the 19 year went along to spend time with his dad, but the others had some affiliation.

His father had apparent been fascinated with the Titanic since he was young.

The pilot and founder of Oceangate had built his own submersible.

One of the men was nick named “Mr Titanic” due his studying of the Titanic.

[PepperdineG]

>What makes them tourists and not explorers?

Paying $250K for a ticket. If I buy Carnival cruise trip, does that make me an explorer?

[mwbajor]

What makes an explorer an explorer? To me, and to most people, I would think it means to find something previously undiscovered.

Nobody was calling the passengers on the MIR submersibles that have been visiting the titanic since the 90's "explorers" because it was already discovered and heavily documented.

At some point it ceases to be considered "exploration". Also, most explorers have been paid to do the exploration, not the other way around.

[khazhoux]

Post-mortem analysis saves future lives.

[AnimalMuppet]

"Safety regulations are written in blood."

But in this case, some... not regulations, exactly, because I don't think there's government rules that apply that far out to sea, but some requirements for certification were ignored. Publicly and openly ignored.

The point of safety regulations is that the blood only happens once. In this case, the blood happened more than once, because even the existing rules were ignored.

[ufmace]

I don't get where these takes are coming from. Deep sea submersibles are not some revolutionary thing nobody has done before. There's no brave, glorious exploration here. There's already a large body of knowledge and expertise on how to dive that deep and stay safe while doing so. If you ignore all of it and try to go with some hacked-together thing that everyone told you is dangerous because cost cutting and YOLO, you're not a pioneer, you're just a fool.

[gchamonlive]

Not all corners are cut the same