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by ageitgey
1098 days ago
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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. |
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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.