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by jmyeet 743 days ago
One interesting thing about this saga is we learned just how much of a badass James Cameron is.

James Cameron put together the team that designed the DeepSea Challenger, which he took to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, far deeper than Titanic. One interesting tidbid (IIRC) is that they spent 3 years just designing the pressure vessel in software before they ever built anything, so precise the engineering had to be. And even then they did have some system failures on that dive but nothing catastrophic.

OceanGate was an exercise in hubris from people who didn't know better and didn't want to know better. It was pure ego from the uninformed. I personally found the general reaction to be fascinating too: it's like a whole bunch of people discovered class awareness and solidarity.
1 comments
lacksconfidence 743 days ago
Surprisingly the DeepSea Challenger was only $10M as well. Thats certainly a ton of money, but it's in the same ballpark as what ocean gate spent.
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em-bee 743 days ago
i guess the difference was that ocean gate needed to recoup the expense and make a profit as fast as possible whereas the deepsea challenger didn't. so they could take their time and do it right without pressure.
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upon_drumhead 742 days ago
If you get the chance to watch Deepsea Challenge[1], it's worth the time. They were under a lot of pressure, which James Cameron was very proud of and the source of. They had more problems then you think, but was able to make it work.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2332883/

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em-bee 742 days ago
of course. i meant they weren't under pressure to cut corners and ignore problems in order to make a profit. it was a different kind of pressure, to make sure they didn't miss any problems and to eliminate any risks, and possibly they risked the project being aborted if they could not solve all the problems.
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stavros 737 days ago
> They were under a lot of pressure

At that depth, I imagine they would be.

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gusfoo 743 days ago
True but Ocean Gate were planning on multiple use, surely a higher bar.
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sillywalk 742 days ago
> Ocean Gate were planning on multiple use,

FTA: "up to 10,000 times, according to internal design documents."

That seems like an absurdly high amount.

> surely a higher bar

was that a pun?

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