How is that legal in the US? It is insane that someone who clearly was acting in the interest of the public (albeit the rich, fee-paying public...) should be found at fault for doing something that is clearly morally correct.
I don't normally read Wired, bu this article is both morbidly fascinating and a great tale of human hubris.
"Settlement" does really say a judge oversaw the entire thing while a corporation bullied somebody working for the public interest into silence.
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.
The cost and risk, as compared to what was on offer never matched up.
The experience (whether worth the risk or not) was about the adventure and being down there, not the size of the view.
This is the sort of experience where I doubt the view was anywhere as good as what an unmanned vehicle that prioritized lighting and filming could capture. I suspect this was far more about being able to say “I spent $[huge amount of money] and got to see it with my own eyes” even though the view was probably pretty shit with everyone crowded around a small dome.
Basically the same reason people climb Everest and not peaks ‘nobody’ knows about that are a lot less crowded.
A cramped interior and a small window, making the thing feel harder and less attainable, amps up the excitement.
But to put your own life and others at risk making that move... whoooooooweeeeee, that's fully into batshit crazy land.
This event is just thinly veiled with a little bit more civility and tech progress.
I mean, privileged rich dude who thinks he knows better than experts wins Darwin award, and some people dumb enough to trust him got to go along for the (one way) ride.
I'm not any more disturbed by it now than I was a year ago, and a year ago it barely moved the needle. And then it was only about the 19 year old son of one of the passengers -- even at that age, a child ought to be able to trust his father to keep him safe, and Shahzada Dawood utterly failed on that count.
The 19-year old son is eligible, though he won’t win the award because he was peer-pressured by his dad.
I personally paid scant attention to this story, mostly only observing how much of a media frenzy there was around it. Sure, it's fine to write up a story on what led up to the failure of the sub and fine for ppl to be interested in that story. But it's not a 'world shocking' nor particularly disturbing story. (I can think of things going on right now that are both shocking the world and truly disturbing, but I won't go there. Suffice to say that we devalue language when we use it sensationally.)
Sad story, really. These people at least died while actively pursuing a dream, though it finished in a dramatic way. This is unlike so many people in Gaza or Ukraine just to mention what pop out of my mind. :’(
As I understand it, the passengers were made aware of the risks.
https://www.businessinsider.com/read-oceangate-waiver-titan-...
"American amateurism in matters of life and death"
I'm a Canadian. As a Millenial of the "just watch a Youtube video and figure it out" generation, and somebody who has watched some things (like housing) get strangled by regulation, I can see the appeal of American libertarianism on a lot of subjects.
But as Vonnegut said: matters of life and death.
Better rules of thumb are “whether externalities are internalized”, “asymmetry in upside vs downside”, “ability to measure outcomes”.
How do you know this?
Seems a remarkably similar sentiment to the e/acc types currently loudly influencing tech and business discourse on various media.
End the human race by transferring all our consciousnesses to the immortal AI mainframe? A-OK!
End the human race for a fancy new sub design? Not effective. :(
Which in the world of regulated engineering disciplines usually translates to new regulations to prevent the newly discovered failure modes. The point of regulation isn't to eliminate 100% of bad engineering, it's to rigorously define and enforce the current standard of good engineering so that the vast majority of cases don't fail.
Can you imagine a world without rules? Awful.
Is this a tasteless pun ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
He is like one of the inventors of the parachute (Franz Karl Reichelt), still wanted to try because he believed in it.
Unfortunately believing is not enough when it comes to reliability.
Effort was good though, as apparently it worked at some point.
> This submersible design, later renamed Titan, eventually made it down to the Titanic in 2021. It even returned to the site for expeditions the next two years. But nearly one year ago, on June 18, 2023, Titan dove to the infamous wreck and imploded, instantly killing all five people onboard, including Rush himself
which could explain why they sell tickets.
I'm sure SpaceX already knows the rockets won't make it back intact, but they still launch anyway (despite the losses).
That's substantially more successful than Soyuz which crashed a lot more and killed someone by parachute failure and crew by depressurisation (and another crew escaped the exploding rocket by launch abort system and another abort subjected the crew to a 21G descent) in the early days and is still considered one of the safer rockets ever (Soyuz-U, the rocket, had 22 failures out of 786 launches, and Soyuz, the spacecraft on top, made 153 missions).
There's still a long future in front of us for SpaceX to screw it up by skimping on things or run into some very bad luck or unforseen issues, but at least as it stands now, pointing at test launches going bang, when they're weren't ever expected to not go bang, and calling the production rocket unreliable is not well supported.
And even Musk personally acknowledged that he nearly tanked SpaceX early on - because they didn't have experienced engineering lead to take the project - and he ended up hiring one when they scraped enough on government money to get there.
I'm certain they don't have this attitude with manned trips.
Pioneers can go to great lengths to overpromise safety, budget, and timeline to secure funding.
It's the fifth mission or something, and worked for two years.
They actually went to the Titanic with that sub and previously succeeded to reach the Titanic, then it's later on, that the vehicle started to become fragile due to multiple reuses.
“Beneath the waves” was right out.
There absolutely is.
Hubris, stupidity, learning from the mistakes of others.
Blaming him is a giant, flashing sign.
DON'T BE THAT GUY
... was it? They didn't test enough and the tests they could be bothered to do, failed. Then they shipped anyway and he got himself and several other people killed.
A non-charitable interpretation of these events could be made that it was an elaborate and long-term murder/suicide.
