OceanGate Suspends All Exploration and Commercial Operations Following Titan Submersible Implosion (cnn.com) 70
OceanGate, the owner of the Titan submersible that imploded during a voyage to the Titanic, killing all five people on board, says it has suspended its exploration and commercial operations, according to its website. From a report: The company's CEO, Stockton Rush, was among those who perished when the Titan submersible imploded in the North Atlantic Ocean last month. "OceanGate has suspended all exploration and commercial operations," the top of the company's official website says. The website still features highlight reels of equipment and expeditions, as well as descriptions of expedition offerings, including to tour the Titanic wreckage.
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
It took them this long? Did they have a backup sub that was also made from expired carbon fiber?
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Killing your CEO might be worse.
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Nah, just as reddit, the CEOs do nothing but exploit the workers! The workers would be millionaires if it weren't for those pesky CEOs! If you say otherwise, you're a bootlicker!
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The workers would be millionaires if it weren't for those pesky CEOs!
It is funny that you said something so very true in what you thought was a clever take-down..
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Well, as we can see in this example, had they fired the CEO instead of the engineers, 5 people could still be alive.
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Ouch.
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Killing your CEO might be worse
I've worked for companies where killing the CEO would have probably saved the company.
shutdown now and have $0 to payout in the lawsuits (Score:2)
shutdown now and have $0 to payout in the lawsuits
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
It took them this long? Did they have a backup sub that was also made from expired carbon fiber?
I'm guessing they knew the company would shut down from the moment they confirmed the implosion.
But for a company with a few dozen employees it probably takes a while to figure out the logistics of an unplanned shutdown (contracts, debts, other projects, etc). Especially if the CEO just died.
ABC7 posted this as BREAKING NEWS (Score:2)
ABC7 posted this as BREAKING NEWS [twitter.com]. This is a term that has been increasingly abused over the years, usually by tabloid journalists. They may fail in a lot of ways, but I don't expect the old MSM to come off like that. This story is a back-page, just before the classifieds and obits blurb in the "as expected" category, if even worth mentioning at all. It is most definitely not worthy of anything so attention-getting as BREAKING NEWS.
The abuse of that phrase is literally more interesting than the story it
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Because in another other fork of the multiverse, Anonymous Coward is replying with [citation needed].
No surprise there (Score:2)
That's what happens when all of your customers cancel their reservations, and you're hit with multiple wrongful death lawsuits.
And yes, I know that all the passengers signed liability waivers, but as the saying goes: "Good attorneys blow their noses on waivers".
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That's what happens when all of your customers cancel their reservations, and you're hit with multiple wrongful death lawsuits.
And yes, I know that all the passengers signed liability waivers, but as the saying goes: "Good attorneys blow their noses on waivers".
Great ones blow their clients.
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Damn, I need a better lawyer.
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Smart ones blow the judge.
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You can't waive criminal liability, so there's that.
What's kind of interesting here is it doesn't seem they engaged in fraud or anything... they were just stupidly foolish (both company and clients) and operating in an unregulated area. I don't believe that is criminal.
Then again, maybe some laws come into play once they started charging for their foolish stupidity and were giving sales pitches to get customers. Professional stupidity is often held to a higher standard than that of amateurs.
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What's kind of interesting here is it doesn't seem they engaged in fraud or anything
I think there might be some level of fraud in terms of passengers misled into thinking the operation had more safety measures than it really had. I get the impression the head of the company made a lot of claims to potential clients that were not true, and that will come out in email and text in wrongful death lawsuits...
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The line between "deceptive marketing practices" and outright "fraud" can be fuzzy, but they surely crossed it by saying that various reputable companies and organizations like NASA participated in the design of the submersible, when in fact they had not.
They probably crossed that line by telling their clients that the sub met or exceeded DNV [wikipedia.org] classification standards when in fact they had chosen not to submit vehicle for classification because they knew the vehicle wouldn't pass -- as we now know from their
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Yes those are all great examples, that I would consider actual fraud, and I think courts will as well. There was so much internal communication pointing out issues as well that the company also knew about fundamental design flaws in ways I think could be considered fraud since they did not reveal those things to customers either.
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Even "deceptive marketing practices" could possibly be enough to void the liability waivers.
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Oceangate strongly intimated that the Titan was designed with the help of NASA's Marshal Spaceflight Center, Boeing, and the University of Washington. All three deny any involvement in the design or any formal cooperation. I imagine that's where the talk of fraud comes from
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It is a little surprising. Usually it takes longer for the C suite and major investors to illegally transfer assets out and get the company to assume personal debts before they scuttle the ship.
Re:No surprise there (Score:5, Interesting)
There's still the YOLO crowd, you know the ones who keep trying to climb Mt. Everest despite it being littered with over 200 corpses. The difference is what level of risk you're willing to accept and how much are you willing to spend on the experience. Billions of passenger miles are flown every year and we've come to accept the risks of flying because they've been mitigated by decades of regulation and investigation when there is a mishap; air travel is still safer than driving a car. [simpleflying.com] Still though, dying in a car crash with odds 1 in 5000 is still better than dying in a badly designed submersible with odds of 1 in 7.
Let's face it, Rush won't be the first inventor to die while piloting his craft which I think is poetic considering the arrogance he showed to others in the submersible community when they offered help and criticism. OceanGate misrepresented the relationship with Boeing, UW, and NASA too. That could be prosecuted as well but who are you going to prosecute? On the positive side, generations of engineers will be taught "don't do this." lessons regarding Rush and Titan and that'll be the only positive thing to come out of this.
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you know the ones who keep trying to climb Mt. Everest despite it being littered with over 200 corpses.
The corpses on Mt Everest fall into two categories: a) pioneers struggling with a real challenge, and b) the modern unlucky. Right now in 2022 Everest is a bog standard tourist attraction. Pay your money, hold on to the rope as you climb, everyone does the thinking for you, hell sherpers will carry your gear for you. It's no longer the difficult climb that it was once considered and I personally know someone who went from zero climbing experience to making the summit within a year, and hasn't climbed since.
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No disagreements there, but people are still dying and this year appears worse, 10 so far. [outsideonline.com]
According to data collected from record-keeping website The Himalayan Database and other accounts, the annual average number of deaths on Mount Everest from 1922 through 2022 is approximately five climbers. The 30-year average from 1993 through 2022 is 6.2 deaths. Thus, the 2023 season is approaching twice that.
I've come up with a new unit of measurement, the Titan YOLOs which represents 5 deaths doing YOLO things.
So that's 1.2 Titan YOLOs based on the 30-year average and 2 Titan YOLOs this year.
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If you google for unclimbed mountains, you'll be surprised that they still exist. In a few cases, Bhutan in particular, it's because they're legally off-limits out of respect for local beliefs. OTOH, some of those Himalayan peaks have turned back all climbers to date due to avalanches. You don't even have to go to the Himalayas. There are peaks that remain unclimbed due to various combinations of remoteness, weather, and technical difficulty. If you manage to be the first to bag some lonely spire in th
Carbon Fiber sub (Score:1)
I'm not an expert... just a guy... but my understanding is that carbon fiber is strong in tension... and has basically no compressive strength of relevance.
The compressive strength of that hull would have been the epoxy resin... basically plastic... which given the process would have been impregnated with a zillion little bubbles from the laminating process. Very small bubbles that normally wouldn't matter but given the depths those would have to create stress points throughout the laminations.
I'm not an ex
Re: Carbon Fiber sub (Score:2)
Carbon fiber sounds kewl and high tech and expensive.
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An thus we probably have the jest of the problem. For the last two decades we have been hearing nothing but how carbon fiber is the miracle material. Lighter than steel but a bazillion times stronger. This idiot gets it in his head that it's the perfect material.
I image we are only beginning to to see how deep this cluster fuck goes.
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Carbon fiber *is* an amazing and useful material. That doesn't mean it's right for everything.
Lewis Carrol lampooned this kind of stupidly lazy thinking in Alice in Wonderland.
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There were other carbon fiber submersibles, but this was a specialty use case.
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I think the cluster fuck goes skin-deep, mostly with this 1 rich dude who thought it was a cool material because it was on his Lamborghini.
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well, maybe more to the point, why? Carbon fiber will weaken with repeated stresses. Would a (name your material here) tube really been that much more expensive? Is weight really that big of an issue? It seems to be very hard to justify.
Silly (Score:2)
Why not make it of an appropriate metal and coat the outside with carbon fiber? It would accomplish the goal.
It would seem to me that hookers, blow and a revolver would be a cheaper way to commit suicide.
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I mean, you probably just stated the whole crux of the problem here? Carbon fiber will weaken with repeated stresses. The first time they built a sub like this from carbon fiber material and tested it, it probably worked just fine. Maybe even a few times after that. That's probably why the CEO got so much confidence in his idea that carbon fiber was completely usable for the purpose?
I'm guessing that if the carbon fiber suffers all these micro fractures under compression from bubbles in its epoxy resin hold
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Maximum stress cycles is not something you usually need to worry about with carbon fiber because it's customary to overbuild carbon parts so their service cycles to failure far exceeds their designed service life. Aluminum similarly has no "fatigue limit"; an aluminum part will also eventually fail if subjected to enough stress cycles, even if the stress is very small. We don't usually worry about this with alumimum parts becuse we expect those parts to be properly engineered.
The thing is, I doubt anyone
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Good case study in aluminum fatigue over time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_611
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Knowledge of metal fatigue in airframes goes all the way back to 1954, when two DeHavilland Comets famously disintegrated in the air within a few months of each other. That history of failure due to metal fatigue has continued to this day, although becuase this is a known issue modern failures always entail negligence in maintenance.
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Yes. "Properly engineered" means looking up the relevant properties of your materials in a handbook. I will be stunned if that kind of data existed for carbon fiber cycled to 13,000 feet below.
The real time structural monitoring was clever but presupposes that all failures will be gradual. I would not bet money on that without years of experience and would not bet lives on it without decades.
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No it’s literally as stupid as it looks. Engineers who worked for the company were fired when they pointed out safety issues. The CEO bragged about buying expired carbon fiber from Boeing. He hired young inexperienced people who would confirm his bullshit.
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*An* engineer, just the one, who was brought on to certify the sub and would not.
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Sure, it was just *one* engineer, but apparently he was the only engineer they'd ever hired with outside experience in a very specialized field. The other engineers were either new graduates or even interns without degrees -- the kind of people who would do whatever the boss told them and assume it was right.
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Carbon fiber is significantly less flexible than fiberglass and significantly less resistant to deformation than steel (given the same volume/weight of material).
Those are things you want in a submersible that goes three times deeper than the deepest a military sub has ever gone (or at least how deep one has been publicly known to go).
Now, if you go very deep you also incur a significant load on the material, which ends up fatiguing it if it were a metal but with carbon fiber, you end up cracking the 'fiber
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I haven't verified this at all, but I have a theory. Here's three key pieces of info to know beforehand.
- The CEO was not a billionaire. I've seen many people claim he was, but he _seems_ to have had a net worth of around 12 million. Certainly rich, but hardly anything close to a true billionaire
- Steel is the preferred material for these types of subs, because it's very good at handling the constant compression and expansion that would be happening at the molecular level. However, steel is heavy.
- Carbon f
Re: Carbon Fiber sub (Score:2)
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It's not, if you only wanted to sink. Some people may want to float back up to the surface again though.
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It is primarily the out of water costs. The greater weight means a much bigger crane, and probably a bigger boat, too. Apparently the CEO himself mentioned the genius of carbon fiber is that it was easier to handle the craft.
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No, titanium is usually used for the pressure-bearing parts of DSVs that operate at these depths. Steel is used for hulls of military submarines that dive to about 500m, but when you want to go to 1000m or beyond, titanium is usually used, with acrylic viewports. Titanium is heavy, expensive, and difficult
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Syntactic foams are used in DSVs to provide buoyancy. They bear pressure, they're not used for pressure vessels.
If they fail, you die on the bottom.
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The way I understand it is that the tiny air bubbles in the epoxy expand and contract under the pressure changes causing thousands of tiny fractures all over the sub. After enough fractures the hull loses integrity. I don't think it had much to do with compressive or tensive properties of the fiber itself.
Re:Carbon Fiber sub (Score:5, Interesting)
my understanding is that carbon fiber is strong in tension... and has basically no compressive strength of relevance.
Carbon fiber's compressive strength is not a simple topic. You can't look at the compressive strength of the fibers themselves, but have to look at the whole system.
The carbon fiber, graphite sheet width, carbon crystal size and orientation, epoxies used and overall design all have very significant roles to play. It is very much an ongoing field of research and there have been some very high compressive strengths demonstrated by some applications.
You can see some of the complexities in the links below, which don't really go into details, but do discuss the systems and some of the most common failure modes:
https://www.cfccarbon.com/news... [cfccarbon.com]
https://link.springer.com/arti... [springer.com]
We can discuss the wisdom of using an experimental material in an experimental design in a vehicle used as a high-priced extreme environment tour bus, but it's much more complicated than "carbon fiber is bad for compressive scenarios".
I suspect this vehicle was an audition for the use of someone's proprietary carbon fiber composites in aerospace in areas where it isn't being used now very much because it has been difficult to get reliable compressive strength out of it.
Lastly, I'll point out there is still not good evidence that the initial point of failure was in the composite hull at all. The acrylic view port was blown completely out of its mount, and from the photos, it's clear that it wasn't blown outwards. That viewport or its titanium mount may very well have been the initial point of failure.
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1-A paper from Oct 22 that was a compilation of research about carbon fiber for deep sea basically concluded that the math to properly model it is not currently known, existing math for this type of stuff don't apply to carbon fiber, experimental results not always the same as the expected result.
2-Viewport: Only rated to 1,500 meters, Rush thought there was too much safety built in to the charts for that material and it would be fine, others disagreed with him.
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It's not so simple. Composites don't have the strength of one of their parts in compression and another part in tension. Also, depending on how you design it, deforming part of a structure with apparently compressive forces can actually cause tension.
Carbon fibre composite submersibles aren't a dumb idea and OceanGate didn't invent them. IIRC the US Navy built one years ago, and OceanGate got the idea for theirs from one that was designed (although never built) for an explorer who wanted to set a depth reco
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Thanks, couldn't remember the name. Steve Fossett was going to use it to set a solo dive record but he died before it happened.
Well . . . (Score:2)
Of course they did. It will be the end of them.
We know who DIDN'T vote for this... (Score:2)
The CEO. (snicker)
real startups PIVOT when the chips are down (Score:2)
Adventure Assisted Dying
The Perfect Gift for Your Worst Enemy
OceanGate Hospice Care
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declining orders (Score:2)
They found that they were suffering an unsustainable decline in orders.
New business proposition (Score:2)
Oceangate will soon offer discounted tours to visit the wreckage of both the Titanic AND the Titan. They're gonna make the submersible safer by replacing the video game controller with a hand crank.