Enough with the Titanic!

[Ford]

"You have to just remember the early days of the space program."

Ah, yes. Who could forget the plucky billionaires who built and flew half-arsed unregulated rockets made from car parts and bits of old refrigerators?

It is not even close to being the space program, but I work - at a very low level - in the early years of the self-driving car industry. It is a pretty small industry. In the US there's basically 2 companies. I work with people who have been at some of the other ones that didn't make it to commercial viability. Including a couple people who were at Uber when they had "the incident."

In case you missed it, five years ago an Uber "self-driving" taxi hit and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. There was a safety driver behind the wheel, but according to what I've heard the company had "relaxed" some of the safety features in order to meet some goal. The safety driver was negligent, the company shouldn't have done what they did, and someone died. Would a human driver have been able to stop in time? No, but that was irrelevant. "Robot car kills hapless pedestrian" was the headline.

And that was it for Uber's self-driving taxi company.

That became the stakes. Waymo, Cruise, Baidu, Nuro, Zoosk, and all the others are under a sort of perpetual Sword of Damocles. If someone dies in or near any of our cars - even if it isn't our fault - the company dies with them and maybe even the entire idea of autonomous vehicles.

So that informs what you do. This cloud of mist in the ocean that used to be the CEO of this company didn't just kill himself and his fellow adventurers.

 

[Bronzeage]

Murphy's 4th Law: Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.

What happened is not a mystery. Any structure placed under great pressure changes shape. When the pressure is reduced, it changes shape again. Any material known to science or nature has a finite number of times it can be bent and straightened out before it breaks. This applies to steel beams and rubber bands.

Carbon fiber is very strong, but it's much more likely the failure was in the resin that binds all the fibers together.

A lot of jokes have been told about this incident, but the part I find the funniest is that the designer thought there was a reason to have 4 days supply of oxygen.

 

[ZiprHead]

Murphy's 4th Law: Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.

What happened is not a mystery. Any structure placed under great pressure changes shape. When the pressure is reduced, it changes shape again. Any material known to science or nature has a finite number of times it can be bent and straightened out before it breaks. This applies to steel beams and rubber bands.

Carbon fiber is very strong, but it's much more likely the failure was in the resin that binds all the fibers together.

A lot of jokes have been told about this incident, but the part I find the funniest is that the designer thought there was a reason to have 4 days supply of oxygen.

I read that some of those deep sea subs can only go to the extreme depths once. They are considered unsafe to do so a second time.

 

[Elixir]

I read that some of those deep sea subs can only go to the extreme depths once.

They can only return once. You can send them down again …

 

[James Brown]

"How deep will this thing go?"

"Oh, she'll go all the way to the bottom if we don't stop her."

 

[Loren Pechtel]

A lot of jokes have been told about this incident, but the part I find the funniest is that the designer thought there was a reason to have 4 days supply of oxygen.

The oxygen makes sense. What if surface conditions preclude recovery? You'll have to wait out the storm and you need oxygen for that because you can't just open the hatch. 4 days seems on the short side to me.

 

[Bronzeage]

Murphy's 4th Law: Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.

What happened is not a mystery. Any structure placed under great pressure changes shape. When the pressure is reduced, it changes shape again. Any material known to science or nature has a finite number of times it can be bent and straightened out before it breaks. This applies to steel beams and rubber bands.

Carbon fiber is very strong, but it's much more likely the failure was in the resin that binds all the fibers together.

A lot of jokes have been told about this incident, but the part I find the funniest is that the designer thought there was a reason to have 4 days supply of oxygen.

I read that some of those deep sea subs can only go to the extreme depths once. They are considered unsafe to do so a second time.

There was a craft made specifically to set a depth record and the engineers who designed and built it, specifically declared it could be used only once.

 

[Bronzeage]

A lot of jokes have been told about this incident, but the part I find the funniest is that the designer thought there was a reason to have 4 days supply of oxygen.

The oxygen makes sense. What if surface conditions preclude recovery? You'll have to wait out the storm and you need oxygen for that because you can't just open the hatch. 4 days seems on the short side to me.

That's my point. When the long list of potential problems was examined, more oxygen on board was the solution to many of them. It's like the story about the Space Shuttle. The final build was much heavier than the initial design, which meant the brakes were undersized. Instead of improving the brakes, which would have cost more and added weight, they made the landing strip longer.

The four days of air was for bobbing around on the surface because the mother ship had to see the Titan to know where it was. The idea that it might sit disabled on the ocean floor for 4 days, waiting for rescue is silly. Their only deep ocean resource was the Titan and it was a yoyo with a worn string. Sooner or later it was going down and not coming back.

 

[lpetrich]

A tale of two vessels lost at sea - Adam Lee at OnlySky - about the ill-fated sub and the ill-fated migrant boat

Stockton Rush and the Randian cult of the lone genius - Adam Lee at OnlySky

The hubris

No one can say that OceanGate wasn’t warned. However, Stockton Rush scoffed—repeatedly, publicly—at these concerns. From the Smithsonian profile:

…tourist subs, which could once be skippered by anyone with a U.S. Coast Guard captain’s license, were regulated by the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993, which imposed rigorous new manufacturing and inspection requirements and prohibited dives below 150 feet. The law was well-meaning, Rush says, but he believes it needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation (a position a less adventurous submariner might find open to debate). “There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown—because they have all these regulations.”

In a 2019 blog post, OceanGate explained why they didn’t pursue independent certification:

While classing agencies are willing to pursue the certification of new and innovative designs and ideas, they often have a multi-year approval cycle due to a lack of pre-existing standards, especially, for example, in the case of many of OceanGate’s innovations, such as carbon fiber pressure vessels and a real-time (RTM) hull health monitoring system. Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.

Rush also fired back at Rob McCallum:

“We have heard the baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too often,” he wrote. “I take this as a serious personal insult.“

This attitude wasn’t just talk. It filtered into OceanGate’s design philosophy. Reportedly, they sought to hire young and inexperienced engineers, rather than older engineers with more experience, because that was more “inspirational”.

New hires might not have spotted the flaws with the design. Even if they had, they certainly wouldn’t have felt confident or empowered enough to push back against a rich, charismatic CEO insisting it was safe.

What recklessness.

 

[lpetrich]

Reading about the Titan disaster, I was reminded of Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand’s protagonists in that novel are fearless capitalists, making bold decisions to assert their superiority over hand-wringing socialists and unimaginative bureaucrats.

In one scene, they drive a high-speed train through dense population centers on rails made of an experimental, untested alloy. They scoff at journalists who fear that they’re going too fast, or government officials warning that the rails might give way. And because Rand is scripting the story so that her heroes are always right, they triumph in glory.

It’s hard not to hear echoes of this thinking in the OceanGate tragedy. Whether or not he read Atlas Shrugged, Stockton Rush (even his name sounds like a Randian character!) cast himself in the same role: the capitalist innovator doing what everyone else said was impossible, and succeeding because he was smarter and more courageous than the naysayers.

Then,

Great advances rarely, if ever, come from the peerless genius of a single mind working in isolation. When one man thinks he’s smarter than everyone else and has no need to listen to criticism, that’s when the warning bells should start ringing.

 

[lpetrich]

Also, Why libertarian cities fail - Adam Lee at OnlySky

In my Atlas Shrugged series, I mentioned how Ayn Rand holds an attitude best described as “cornucopianism.” She treats every natural resource as inexhaustible. Nothing ever gets scarce or runs out, so nothing needs to be conserved.

When the narrative moves to Galt’s Gulch, a secret hideout for the world’s greatest capitalists, the paradox gets sharper. Their logging, mining and heavy industry don’t create any pollution or leave any mark on the beautiful natural landscape. What’s more, conveniences like roads and coffee and fresh fruit appear as if materializing from nowhere, despite there being no obvious way to produce them.

Then talking about ways to get around annoying regulations.

Rio Verde Foothills is an unincorporated rural community in the wilds of Maricopa County, Arizona. As you may know, Arizona is largely desert, and deserts are well-known for lacking abundant water.

Arizona law requires homebuilders in active management areas to secure a reliable source of water expected to last at least a hundred years. However, there’s a loophole: the law only applies to subdivisions of six homes or more. You can guess what some clever developers do: they simply build lots of “subdivisions” each consisting of only five homes.

The people of RVF have been getting their water from nearby Scottsdale, moving it in tanker trucks. But the Scottsdale city government decided to stop that, and the people of RVF were outraged.

"When some proposed forming their own self-funded water provider, other residents revolted, saying the idea would foist an expensive, freedom-stealing new arm of government on them. The idea collapsed."

Then noting the failures of Von Ormy, Texas and Grafton, New Hampshire. Von Ormy:

Businesses were supposed to flock to this oasis of freedom, drawn by low taxes and minimal regulation. Instead, because the town lacks a sewer system, it couldn’t attract investment—and anti-tax rules made it impossible to issue a municipal bond to pay for one. With no source of funding, the police department lost its accreditation, the fire department collapsed, and the city council has dissolved into acrimonious infighting

Grafton:

Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat. “Despite several promising efforts,” Hongoltz-Hetling dryly notes, “a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services.”

Then bears came in.

That’s not the setup to a joke. Some people were disposing of food garbage carelessly, where the area’s native black bears could get at it. Others were feeding them deliberately (!). Either way, bears learned that humans meant food—and they became increasingly bold and aggressive in their attempts to get it. On top of all its other problems, Grafton found itself dealing with a rash of bear attacks, pet deaths and maulings.

Bears are very good libertarians, much like cats.

Commenter WCB noted

And we had the "Galt's Gulch" project in Chile. Which collapsed in a morass of incomptence, poor planning and corruption.

Adam Lee has also written Socialism is all around us

 

[ZiprHead]

Don't tell Jason H about this thread.

 

[thebeave]

A tale of two vessels lost at sea - Adam Lee at OnlySky - about the ill-fated sub and the ill-fated migrant boat

Stockton Rush and the Randian cult of the lone genius - Adam Lee at OnlySky

The hubris

No one can say that OceanGate wasn’t warned. However, Stockton Rush scoffed—repeatedly, publicly—at these concerns. From the Smithsonian profile:

…tourist subs, which could once be skippered by anyone with a U.S. Coast Guard captain’s license, were regulated by the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993, which imposed rigorous new manufacturing and inspection requirements and prohibited dives below 150 feet. The law was well-meaning, Rush says, but he believes it needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation (a position a less adventurous submariner might find open to debate). “There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown—because they have all these regulations.”

In a 2019 blog post, OceanGate explained why they didn’t pursue independent certification:

While classing agencies are willing to pursue the certification of new and innovative designs and ideas, they often have a multi-year approval cycle due to a lack of pre-existing standards, especially, for example, in the case of many of OceanGate’s innovations, such as carbon fiber pressure vessels and a real-time (RTM) hull health monitoring system. Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.

Rush also fired back at Rob McCallum:

“We have heard the baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too often,” he wrote. “I take this as a serious personal insult.“

This attitude wasn’t just talk. It filtered into OceanGate’s design philosophy. Reportedly, they sought to hire young and inexperienced engineers, rather than older engineers with more experience, because that was more “inspirational”.

New hires might not have spotted the flaws with the design. Even if they had, they certainly wouldn’t have felt confident or empowered enough to push back against a rich, charismatic CEO insisting it was safe.

What recklessness.

What they actually said is that they didn't want a bunch of old WHITE guys, as they wouldn't inspire a younger, more diverse generation.

This might be a case of "go woke, go broke" (as in broke submersible).

 

[lpetrich]

Another case of libertarianism gone wrong: Oso Tragic, Oso Foolish – Johns Hopkins University Press Blog - April 3, 2014

On Monday, March 24, we heard the news of the gigantic landslide that buried the tiny town of Oso, Washington, about an hour north and east of Seattle. When I originally wrote this (March 28), the official death toll was 25, but over 90 were missing and feared dead. At last count it is 28 dead, 22 still missing. ... It’s estimated at 15 million cubic yards moved all at once. A Washington state geologist said the slide was one of the largest landslides he’d seen. The mud, soil and rock debris left from the mudslide is 1,500 ft (460 m) long, 4,400 ft (1,300 m) wide and deposited debris 30 to 40 ft (9.1 to 12.2 m) deep.

But many of the news reports talk about the slide as if it were completely unexpected. This is definitely not true. In fact, it has been studied by geologists for decades, and was known to be a very active and dangerous slide area, with great potential for a catastrophic failure that would overrun the town. The locals knew of the problem, and called it “Slide Hill”; geologists had also given the earlier slide events names, such as the “Steelhead slide”.

"Ironically, a new 2006 law in the State of Washington had gone into effect prohibiting the building of more homes in danger areas such as this." Yet some people kept on building homes there.

 

[lpetrich]

In fact, the warnings of the state were not only ignored, but actually defied. For in a strange twist, the law inspired some people to fight the state’s efforts to “meddle in the private affairs of residents”. As the news of the slide came out, it turned out that one of the main activists protesting the 2006 zoning law to prevent runaway building in hazardous areas was Thomas Satterlee. He was one of the leaders of the activist anti-government “Patriot” movement, organizing armed militias in the area to fight back against the “big bad Government.” In the 1990s, he tried to declare the area as “Freedom County” and hoped to run it without any oversight from state or federal law; all of his efforts were struck down, eventually reaching the Superior Court. Satterlee was also a big advocate of the “Sovereign Citizen” movement, where individuals buy paperwork from con-artists who claim that by filling out and filing the paperwork, they can become “sovereign citizens” independent of the jurisdiction of state and federal laws, and no longer required to pay taxes or obey any laws they object to. (Legally, this is false, and every time they have gone to court, they lose). Advising various tax protestors, Satterlee (who never went to law school) practiced law without a license (for which he was found guilty in 2002), and he and his group even threatened the local sheriff if he tried to stop them.

In the case of Oso, Washington, Satterlee was particularly active in fighting the 2006 zoning law, whose primary intent was to prevent excessive building in the region, especially in hazardous zones below the landslide. His acts of defiance influenced his neighbors, who also ignored the law and the warnings of expert geologists. Instead, they chose to live in a clearly identifiable area of great hazard. Some of the victims of the slide, who knew about the risks and openly ignored expert advice, are no “innocents” who had no warning. Those who never heard of the risk, however, bear no blame for staying in a danger zone. In another ironic twist, Satterlee apparently paid the ultimate price for his defiance of experts: he and his family are among the missing and presumed dead.

He did indeed die:

Who they were: Washington landslide deaths - Data Desk - Los Angeles Times
Victims of the Oso mudslide | Local News | Seattle Times

From the LATimes, "Satterlee died of accidental blunt-force impacts, the medical examiner’s office said. Also killed were his wife Marcy, his granddaughter Delaney Webb and her finance Alan Bejvl."

 

[Ford]

Don't tell Jason H about this thread.

"Yeah, but you see...the submersible failed precisely because of a regime of over-regulation! Had the free market been unleashed, there would be weekly trips down to the Titanic wreck, and they'd all be perfectly safe because healthy competition among unregulated companies would lead to innovation! This one submersible imploded not because it was designed poorly or constructed of materials that weren't tested to a sufficient degree, but because this stalwart businessman was cowed by the regulatory structure put in place by socialists trying to stifle creativity! He skimped on inspection and rigorous testing not because he was just in pursuit of ego or profit, but because of the crushing weight of the threat of government regulation! Had he been free to develop the sub without the threat of constraints or lawsuits over negligence, the crew would be sitting in a pub right now, swapping stories of their journey with other intrepid explorers!"

 

[lpetrich]

On a more pleasant note, I found tourist submarines in service in several places around the world. All of the larger ones have a line of windows on each side. Some places have semi-submarines, offering underwater views but not getting completely submerged. In Oahu, one tour company offers underwater scooters, a self-propelled frame with a helmet.

• Oahu Submarine Scooter Adventure 2023
• Atlantis Submarine Day Tour 2023 - Barbados - 100 ft / 30 m
• Atlantis Submarines Night Tour 2023 - Barbados - 150 ft / 50 m

Well within the photic or sunlight zone.

Aruba Atlantis Submarine Expedition 2023 - one of these pictures shows the sub pilot's area -- with lots of dials and switches and the like. Very unlike the Titan.

Let's look at a "real" deep-sea submarine, the Alvin, a research submarine that has been in service for 59 years, and that has been rebuilt several times over that time.

•  DSV Alvin
• Alvin in Photos – Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
• Systems - National Deep Submergence Facility - showing its controls and some computer screens

Also with lots more controls and lots more indicators than the Titan.

 

[lpetrich]

The Titan is strictly speaking a submersible, not a strict-sense submarine.

•  Submarine - A submarine (or sub) is a watercraft capable of independent operation underwater. It differs from a submersible, which has more limited underwater capability.
•  Submersible - A submersible is an underwater craft which needs to be transported and supported by a surface vessel or platform. This distinguishes submersibles from submarines, which are self-supporting and capable of independent operation.

That does not seem to me like much of a distinction, so we can call both of them broad-sense submarines.

ETA: Wikipedia now has  Titan submersible implosion

On 30 June, Insider published an analysis of the recovery photos by Plymouth University professor Jasper Graham-Jones. The analysis concluded that a failure of the carbon-fibre hull was the most likely cause of the loss, given that no large pieces of carbon fibre are known to have been recovered. However, Graham-Jones found that that the acrylic viewing window may have failed, noting that the lifting strap for the window's bell housing went through the porthole. While the salvage team might have removed the window before salvaging the bell end, the team more likely would have left it in place and raised the part with a bag. However, if the window had failed first, Graham-Jones said he would expect larger pieces of carbon fibre to have been recovered.[135] He stated he did not know whether the hull failed first, blowing out the window, or vice-versa.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

 

[thebeave]

Speaking of Titanic (I know some people don't want to hear anymore about it, but tough shit)...

Something that I wasn't aware of until about 5 years ago or so is that Robert Ballard's search for the Titanic was actually a cover story for a highly classified mission he was hired for to find a couple of sunken US nuclear submarines lost during the Cold War years.