[southernplaces7]

The Wired article clearly paints Rush as someone who was irresponsible and cavalier about even the basics of good engineering before testing a complex thing with real human lives that trusted him too much.

In the essence of that argument at least, they're right. His using a prototype he knew to be a failure to then explore the ocean with customers aboard, under the same conditions as those that caused its test failure, is criminally negligent.

However, pointing to all sorts of mistakes and gambles small or large as narratives towards a full blown condemnation of extremely dangerous efforts is mistaken I think:

In the world of exploring extremely harsh environments, some heavy risk is inevitable even if you do everything you know of right. In such contexts, something could go catastrophically wrong just as easily as it could all end successfully and a narrative will be constructed for why either was the case even if either outcome was interchangeably plausible..

Pushing immediate blame on someone for something going wrong in an inherently risky activity is to fall into this above narrative trap. It also implies the idea that people who do dangerous but potentially worthy things are wrong for doing so because they didn't have perfect foresight.

[throwup238]

> In the world of exploring extremely harsh environments, some heavy risk is inevitable even if you do everything you know of right. In such contexts, something could go catastrophically wrong just as easily as it could all end successfully and a narrative will be constructed for why either was the case even if either outcome was interchangeably plausible..

That implies that what they were doing was somehow pioneering. It wasn’t. Deepsea explorers and the oil and gas industry have used submersibles at those depths for decades and their safety profile is very well understood. There are facilities to test them and procedures to make sure they’re safe before anyone risks their life. All Rush did was make a poorly designed, poorly tested submersible with the wrong materials where he cut corners left and right. TFA is just a laundry list of criminal negligence.

The Titan passengers make up the bulk of the fatalities from civilian submersibles this century. Save for military submarines and the occasional industrial accident, they’ve been extremely safe.

[southernplaces7]

I don't disagree. In the case of Thurston Rush, what he did was absurdly negligent, in multiple instances across a long stretch of opportunities to simply do basic due diligence with testing and redesign. For whatever reasons of his own, he didn't and died horribly along with those others.

My wider point was more about how in certain fields, those who strive for certain achievements often do similarly risky things and only get called out if there is a catastrophic failure. If they succeed, they're often lauded. Also, in some areas it really is impossible to avoid mistakes, and those who get criticized for making them are often only those who got unlucky instead of actually negligent. This doesn't apply in the case of Titan though, since he made multiple glaring mistakes that he could have corrected and was urged to do so by known experts in parts design.

[sgarland]

> Save for military submarines and the occasional industrial accident, they’ve been extremely safe.

And even then, USN submarines are absurdly over-engineered. Or more aptly, they’re engineered to survive a massively hostile environment, even under multiple worst-case scenarios. FFS, the USS San Francisco slammed into an underwater mountain at flank speed at a depth of over 500 feet, and still managed to surface and get home under her own power. New sonar dome, ballast tanks, etc. and she was released for duty for another eight years.

This is only possible when you have multiple, redundant systems for everything.