I'm sure most of us have been on projects where similar bad engineering decisions were made. It's depressing how common these attitudes are. At least death isn't a possibility with the projects I've left in disgust.
Titan is fairly akin to modern software engineering, there's a lot of behaviours in the company that certainly resonates. Mechanical and structural engineers don't behave like this 99% of the time.
To be fair, most modern software engineering doesn't directly lead to someone dying, so in a lot of cases, it makes economic sense to try and push out that additional feature quickly rather than combing every line for potential bugs.
Most customers are going to go with the product with more features even if there are a few more bugs, compared with one with zero bugs and much less functionality.
Depends how severe the bugs are. If they're rare edge-case ones that won't result in significant loss of data or functionality, I can believe that; but I've seen far more instances where the product grows so many buggy features that it becomes barely usable as the bugs start affecting core functionality, while the additional features are basically useless to me.
I heard pressure testing of the carbon fiber wasn't done. They relied on sensors to detect delamination instead. In software engineering, a component is both created and unit tested with tests on relevant functionality. Delamination sensors are poor compensation for a missing test. They probably didn't test the delamination sensors, either.
Maybe somewhat off-topic, but if you don't know, there is a video on YouTube published 11 months ago by "CBC NL - Newfoundland and Labrador" titled "This submersible takes passengers to The Titanic wreck. Climb in!" (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClkytJa0ghc)
If I put myself 11 months in the past watching that video, I would probably think this company OceanGate is so professional with zero possibility of merging and mixing their passengers with whatever content in that tiny toilet box.
In my mind, all 5 lost souls are explorers. But 11 months... that's long enough time for someone to generate doubts on the thing to either fix it or speak out.
Except they all signed waivers, per the article, that they were mission specialists. The nuance was important and the jury is out on whether the implication was fully communicated to the people who paid to join. The article seems to indicate that it was...
IANAL, but I very strongly suspect that a court would rule in favor of OceanGate. I think a court would say "a mission specialist who pays you, and not the other way around, is a passenger"
Calling them anything other than passenger (per the article) was specifically designed to subvert regulations that would have required them to certify the sub. And courts don't like that very much.
If that was the reason then he was probably paying his lawyers $15 an hour too.
You can waive risks, but not a certainty of death. If it was inevitable that the sub would implode at some point because it was so poorly constructed, and Stockton Rush was just playing a very elaborate game of Russian roulette with his customers, then the waiver isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
The other problem is that I’m fairly sure that OceanGate didn’t disclose everything they knew, which would also invalidate the waiver.
For example, David Pogue signed the waiver and went down in it (albeit not very far). He seems like a fairly sensible person with a family who doesn’t have a death wish, did they really disclose to him about the window not being rated for the depth, the whistleblower lawsuit, the letter in 2018 to OceanGate warning them to stop development, etc?
A waiver built on lies is worse than useless, far from getting them out of legal peril it proves that they knew that death was a real possibility.
I'm not sure the word explorer should ever be diluted to be just sitting down in a vehicle as a passenger. At worst, they sat on a plane to Newfoundland for a number of hours, sat on a boat to get to the launch site and sat in a submarine for a few hours (assuming a successful itinerary).
Mitigating factors for an explorer should be (imho): novel destination, novel experience of natural forces, novel challenge of actively piloting/driving, unusual physical hardship, unusual mental hardship, novel engineering challenge, unusual training requirements, committing to significant unknowns, etc.
> Soon afterward, Rush asked OceanGate’s director of finance and administration whether she’d like to take over as chief submersible pilot. “It freaked me out that he would want me to be head pilot, since my background is in accounting,” she told me. She added that several of the engineers were in their late teens and early twenties, and were at one point being paid fifteen dollars an hour. Without Lochridge around, “I could not work for Stockton,” she said. “I did not trust him.” As soon as she was able to line up a new job, she quit.
Photos of the recovered debris show an intact titanium end bell being lifted by a strap through where the acrylic porthole was. No sign of porthole or carbon fiber tube. Not yet clear what failed first, the tube or the porthole.
The porthole was made to withstand outside pressure, not inside, so if the tube failed --- which seems most likely given the extensive analysis about the carbon fiber --- the momentary burst of internal pressure would probably have been enough to blow the porthole out.
The article mentions that at one point the viewport only had a depth rating only 1,300 meters, but it’s not clear if it was upgraded later on. The more I think about it, would it have been able to withstand even the first dive to Titanic depths without it being upgraded?
The articles comments on acrilic conversion factors are (obliquely) about that. Essentially for any construction material you have a failure rating and a factor of safety - the allowable load is failure divided by FOS, so your materials working load is usually significantly under its failure load.
Equipment rated for depths of 1,300 will be capable of several times that, possibly only reaching immediate material failure at 8,000 meters. But there's a reason you have a FOS; you want to be well within your material limits, not pushing it close to breaking point. After multiple trips that material could be weaker, or an unexpected stress could cause early failure.
See "When acrylic aquariums fail", in Plastics World.[1] That article lists the major acrylic aquarium failures up to 2018. Since then, the AquaDom, listed in the article, failed.[2] Not the same problem, but does involve thick acrylic sections under water pressure.
Acrylic does not come without drawbacks. The engineer needs to have full knowledge and understanding of these drawbacks to successfully design, manufacture and assemble an aquarium that will stand and support aquatic life for years. To ensure longevity, the typical large aquarium is designed with a factor of safety of 11 to 12. This may seem high, but when one considers the implications if one of these large aquariums were to fail, and the sudden, catastrophic event that occurs when they do fail, it becomes more understandable and acceptable. Unfortunately, aquariums have failed for various reasons, leading to tremendous damage, huge monetary losses and, at times, complete loss of the aquatic life. There have been high-profile public aquarium failures, which typically involve huge aquariums, as well as private aquarium failures that range from several hundred to thousands of gallons of water loss. Some common reasons why acrylic aquariums can fail include:
- Poor bonding of acrylic panels creating a weak seam
- improper installation
- poor manufacturing of the acrylic panels, resulting in inferior strength and stiffness
- residual stress molded or formed into the panel during manufacturing
- introduction of large gouges or notches that can significantly increase stress in the panel
Unfortunately, these issues commonly do not reveal themselves during inspection, assembly or the initial setup stages. Further, when the actual failure event does occur, which is typically months to years after installation, it is quick and catastrophic. The seam or crack opens nearly instantaneously without warning. The phenomenon behind this is called creep rupture—the disentanglement of the molecules of plastic over time, at a stress level significantly below the yield strength—yes, below the yield strength—of the plastic.
> Ramsay grabbed a copy of Stachiw’s acrylic handbook from his spare bedroom. When Stachiw’s team was doing its tests, “they would pressurize it really fast, the acrylic would implode, and then they would assign a conversion factor, to tabulate a safe diving depth,” he explained. “So let’s say the sample imploded at twelve hundred metres. You apply a conversion factor of six, and you get a rating of two hundred metres.” He paused, and spoke slowly, to make sure I understood the gravity of what followed. “It’s specifically not called a safety factor, because the acrylic is not safe to twelve hundred metres,” he said. “I’ve got a massive report on all of this, because we’ve just had to reverse engineer all of Jerry Statchiw’s work to determine when our own acrylic will fail.” The risk zone begins at about twice the depth rating.
So apparently acrylic is not tested or rated in a way that gives you a simple "safety factor." But going by this quote, the acrylic might have hypothetically been tested to implode around 7,800 meters, which means that anything over 2,600 would be in the "risk zone."
A more important lesson is that once you know you're dealing with a narcissist or a liar, you can't "correct" for their lies. You basically need to throw out all the data they provided, and redo any analysis from scratch.
I mean, I get it, it was a clown show. And yes, give it 15 minutes of fame, because it's the Titanic and all.
But I feel like some people care about this far more than I can understand, and the news cycle on this is quite protracted. People die in stupid ways every day and this doesn't seem more egregious than most.
If you mean that the event isn't significant in a societal sense, I totally agree. I don't really think there is any big moral conclusion to take from it. However, the story just has so many fascinating elements to it. The whole titanic story is fascinating, and it is incredible people found the wreck and can observe it. The technology is incredible. Then there is the thrill of exploration and the natural danger to it, but there is also the hubris of the OceanGate CEO, significant enough that he was blind to his own danger, which resulted in the deaths of more people than him. And what was the moment like? An implosion in an instant of a second... as opposed to being trapped and slowly suffocating. Those are two images hard to get out of one's head.
Engineering disasters (e.g. the FIU bridge, the Boeing 737 MAX, the Miami condo collapse, and now the Titan submersible) are rightly subjects of significant interest in the press in general and hacker news specifically.
And rightly so - one can derive lessons on organizational culture and risk management from such incidents that are applicable to one's own life and career.
Sure but we're in a string of silicon valley come to Jesus moments and finally having a case where the founder was so deluded they got even themselves killed is going to get airtime. I don't think there's be nearly as much interest in this story if we weren't in also dealing with Theranos and FTX and the aftereffects of Cambridge analytica etc etc
OceanGate, FTX, and Cambridge Analytica were not headquartered in Silicon Valley. Out of the companies on your list Silicon Valley can only take the blame for Theranos.
The term silicon valley has long since transcended geographic boundaries to signify the tech and vc/startup sectors as a whole. Facebook and Amazon and Uber and Theranos and FTX are all a part of it. It's about the culture and the people that participate in that culture, move fast break things etc. That's what's been going through trainwreck after public trainwreck. And even if you wanted to tie it to a geographic region, which frankly is irrelevant - the vcs are based out of here
Silicon Valley investors rejected Theranos. Most of them actually consider Tharanos a great victory. Tharanos funding come from lots of large private investors, like family fortunes and so on.
That particular overconfidence in bashing Theranos as an outsider company who would never have been able to fool Real Silicon Valley (tm) is definitely a core part of the narrative that's developing, since nobody believes they'd have disowned her if she had succeeded, and those very same VCs got rugpulled with FTX not that long after making all those confident assertions look very silly in hindsight.
The summer is historically a Very Slow News Season, they are going to milk this for all they can get. There are a handful of meaningful elections in 2023, and the legislature is on vacation through the middle of August.
It takes a tightly closed mind to not glean some insight from (or sense the import of) a one-in-a-billion story that touches on class, tech, and trust.
Five people died in an unprecedented fashion due to a rich con artist sending maliciously incompetent engineering to the bottom of the ocean. Stretch a bit, please.
I think it was more an interesting way to go. I mean rich people die in everyday car crash doesn't get headlines but people die in deep sub to the Titanic or on space mission to the moon etc do.
I agree. I actually rolled my eyes when people initially complained that the Greek migrant boat collapse wasn't getting as much attention. This is a one off whereas migrants die all the time.
However as time goes on and the articles are STILL ongoing, after as you say the 15 minutes of fame, I have to agree that at this point in time any writer still writing about this is worthy of an eye-roll in the other direction.
While it was news it was worth covering. Now, if you're a journalist and you're still covering it, then I do think you're a piece of **.
> While it was news it was worth covering. Now, if you're a journalist and you're still covering it
I hold the opposite opinion. I think that covering it when everyone else was covering it would have been a waste of time because there is only limited information out there. Covering it 2 weeks or months later is much better and more information will have emerged and you can weave a narrative to tell the story better than some AI-written articles that just repeat the same 3 sentences from the Coast Guard.
Except that in Europe we have multiple report per day about the migrant death, all year long. And the difficulties, and problem arising, and…
There’s no mystery, no doubt, only pain. This sub failing, well, the pain is self induced so it’s hard to feel concerned, and it’s a mystery (not a big one, ok). It’s light news.
So both have their place. They don’t have the same impact, and well, let’s hope both will be solved… faster for the migrant problem though!
"if you're a journalist and you're still covering it, then I do think you're a piece of *"
If there's something interesting in the conclusion of the story why get so hot and bothered if someone reports on it? Your reaction is strange to a story that many found interesting and may have follow up details.
People die in stupid ways, and a lot of them have aspects in common with this.
It's a pretty interesting case study on safety culture. Dying in a stupid way is often preventable, and yet we just accept it, for probably some of the same reasons Rush did.
His spouse and 2 children will either get to keep all the money houses cars etc or have nothing, depending on how effective the liability shielding is.
I think he is one of these typical narcissistic and possibly sociopathic CEOs who who don't think they can do any wrong and that they are always correct.
I am curious to see if a Coast Guard report gets published on all of this. I am particularly interested in the decision making that lead up to the event.
Rush bought (his definition of) justice as a product. Justice isn’t a right in the U.S. it’s a product you buy, via an attorney willing to use the legal system to bully truthsayers into submission. Any feudal lord will tell you this is their right. This playground, that he alone created, is his fief. Lochridge was fucking with it.
I’m not super bothered by one lord getting other lords killed. Lawyers and insurance will settle this to the relative dissatisfaction of the other parties (lawyers and insurance companies never lose). What is a travesty is how often this happens in aggregate, lords consistently winning their idea of justice against serfs and peasants. And there’s an entire industry now damaged by this one person’s hubris.
Off topic, but interesting to me: not sure if I've ever seen an editing mistake in The New Yorker before, and I've been reading it since I was a teenager. In a quote, "Ocean Gate" should be "OceanGate" or at the very least should include a "[sic]".
It's not a mistake if it's verbatim. The [sic] is usually to show that the mistake isn't by the publisher but adding an additional space in a company name probably isn't egregious enough to warrant it.
This is a little more off-topic but when I first encountered uses of "sic" I thought it was an acronym for "spelling is correct", due to how it was being used. Only later did I realise that wasn't the case, but a search of the Internet shows that many others also came up with the same acronym and reasoning.
Yes it is (and [sic] is specifically used for verbatim quotes[1]). Companies often take their style guides pretty seriously, so an extra space can be a big deal. But in any case, The New Yorker has extremely high AP standards, so that's why I'm surprised to see even such a slight mistake.
> Anyone who has worked on a challenging project has heard concerns like this at various stages. It's absurd to conclude the project was doomed or reckless, just because someone expresseed concerns about success or not enough precaution.
This is almost certainly what Rush told people and a refutation of this claim is exactly why I think stories like this are valuable.
It's all a matter of degree. When one or two people tell you your ambitious project is doomed or reckless, there's some room for doubt. At some point though the scale tips. When your chief pilot writes a formal document refusing to pilot your vehicle, the overwhelming majority of your close peers tell you in no uncertain terms that you are going to kill someone, a group letter from people ranging from the Coast Guard to other experts again implore you not to dive, then the scale has definitely been tipped.
It is especially frustrating to see the CEO respond to these concerns as "a serious personal insult" as this is an extremely common pattern for how safety gets compromised.
Even if you think that people's safety concerns are overwrought, the absolute worst reaction is to take it as a personal affront, especially if it's coming from all directions. You think they're naive, you think they're not informed, whatever sure maybe. But you think that by raising safety concerns they're insulting you? That is a blaring red flag to me.
Whether you think this story is overplayed or not, in isolation, this article is hardly irresponsible journalism. It is a sober look at how safety gets compromised in the real world.
> I agree with all that you said, except that we as outsiders don't have enough information to make the conclusions you want to make.
> The best evidence for recklessness would be a pattern of similar failures.
There was a pattern of similar failures though as the article points out. OceanGate had only been doing deep dives since 2021 and every year of deep dive operation there was at least one serious mechanical malfunction (at least that was caught on camera). In 2021 the system that was supposed to drop the sub's weights failed. This one one is not quite as egregious in that it only points at some engineering difficulties and therefore only indirectly at recklessness (although the fact that Rush seemed unsure that the mechanical backup would work and suggested the final failsafe of 24 hours at the bottom of the ocean before finagling the mechanical backup is worrying).
The 2022 malfunction is much more egregious. One of the thrusters on the sub was installed in the wrong direction. Not only was this not caught until the sub was on the ocean floor (which hints at a very worrisome pre-check procedure), the worst part was when it was caught Rush didn't abort the mission. This seems to be a level of risk-seeking far beyond what is appropriate for a deep-sea mission. When you have such a major mechanical oversight, which would easily suggest that other problems might exist, and decide nonetheless to continue, that is a level of risk-seeking I'm willing to say exceeds what is appropriate for manned deep-sea operations.
If you're looking for literally repeats of a manned sub imploding and people dying, well... that gets to happen once when your CEO is the one manning the sub so almost by definition you can't get repeats of that.
I think I know where you're coming from. Which is even if you had an extremely safe operation, with only a 1 in a million chance of failure, over a long enough period, you will have a catastrophic loss of life. And when that happens people are going to come out of the woodwork saying how unsafe everything was leading up to it and news articles are going to be written about it and it's going to seem like a fiasco after the fact, because people are going to come up with all sorts of post-hoc explanations talking about how obviously bad everything is.
This isn't that. All of the concerns that the article airs were "pre-registered" so to speak. They weren't people after the fact saying "oh yeah I definitely knew that was a bad idea" or people after the fact exaggerating how serious their warnings were to make themselves look good. These were all people putting in writing their concerns and telling Rush straight up that he's going to kill people without mincing their words.
> we as outsiders don't have enough information to make the conclusions you want to make.
There is a place for epistemic humility and recognizing that some things are beyond our grasp and especially that a news article is potentially just cherry-picking quotes to create a narrative, but you're swinging too far the other way. Insiders are not the only people who have the standing to have an opinion on what they're doing. Otherwise, e.g. fraud would be definitionally impossible (did they intend to do x? Well you'll never know because you're an outsider!).
This wasn't some new gig economy venture, or some software idea. This was a submarine carrying tourists to one of the most dangerous places on earth.
There are companies dedicated to certifying maritime vehicles and standards against which they need to be built and tested, and Stockton Rush explicitly rejected them because he felt that they were stifling to innovation. Additionally, the people who told him that he was needlessly endangering people's lives were experts in their fields. And again, it wasn't just "someone", it was virtually everyone with experience in super-deep submersible operation.
The idea that just because there are often naysayers who claim some big projects are impossible doesn't mean that there aren't situations where they should absolutely be listened to and taking passengers on a submersible down to the Titanic is absolutely one of them. This guy played fast and loose with safety and if it had just been him down there, that would be fine, but he managed to bamboozle a bunch of innocent people into it as well.
> the people who told him that he was needlessly endangering people's lives were experts in their fields
Turns out engineers and other experts disagree with each other all the time.
I assume you are an expert in your field. Do you always get listened to?
> just because there are often naysayers who claim some big projects are impossible doesn't mean that there aren't situations where they should absolutely be listened to
I didn't say that. People expressing concern, is not enough evidence to say the management was wrong. All good managers consider criticism. It's then up to them to use judgement to decide what to do.
> This guy played fast and loose with safety
I guarantee if he spent 10x more on safety and still had the same outcome, the articles would be the same. Risk is just not easy for the public to reason about.
Maybe you're right, but once again the gossip the journalists dug up doesn't tell us that.
all I've heard about this guy is that he ignored warnings, cut corners, and that he was a wealthy dude who's never had to deal with anyone telling him no his entire life. in all the reporting I haven't heard anything at all that would make me say "he got that right at least" and I challenge anyone to come up with something.
also when engineers disagree with each other you generally don't continue to use the topic of disagreement as a passenger vehicle. Finally, the guy making decisions wasn't an engineer and as far as I've heard no actual engineers who were well informed on the subject and experts in the domain were supporting this guy.... so what you should have said is "management disagree with engineers and dismiss their opinion all the time, often leading to high public catastrophes like the Challenger and the Titan"
Hearing something else would require a journalist to formulate an alternative narrative. Not only would that conflict with their peers, it's not very interesting for readers ("actually that guy with the sub took a sufficient level of care").
Have you every had insider knowledge about a public story? How different was it from reality?
> no actual engineers who were well informed on the subject and experts in the domain were supporting this guy.
How did it get designed and built then? I wouldn't own up to this project with bad press. Would you?
Everything is an accident waiting to happen. That's what an accident is.
Driving to work, that's an accident waiting to happen. Consider all the poorly signed roads, drivers of various states of sobriety and rage.
The sub was in use for years, they did well to engineer within their budget. There's always someone pointing out something wrong, nothing would get done if you actioned every single 'concern'
> There's always someone pointing out something wrong, nothing would get done if you actioned every single 'concern'
> someone [...] single concern
"That spring, more than three dozen industry experts sent a letter to OceanGate, expressing their “unanimous concern” about its upcoming Titanic expedition—for which it had already sold places."
More than three dozen someones. More than three dozen concerns.
Hey man just letting you know in case you missed it, but this submarine catastrophically failed, killing 5 people. For this reason, I think it's a good idea to consider the reasons people called out concerns about its safety instead of brushing them off. That's just my opinion, though.
