Sad to think about the folks inside the OceanGate Titan right now. Usually the flip side of innovation is danger, as demonstrated by Deepwater Horizon (see Ten years since Deepwater Horizon set a depth record).
How innovative is the Titan? Here are the most critical specs:
Let’s compare to Alvin, built by a cereal company in 1964.
Alvin has the same payload as Titan, but weighs 38,000 lbs (65 percent more) and has dramatically less interior volume. A perhaps more significant difference is that Alvin has small windows. From a 2013 article:
When we set sail later this year, Alvin will have five windows: three up toward the front that are 7 inches across on the inside (17 inches across outside), and two smaller ones off to either side that are 5 inches in diameter on the inside (12 inches across outside). These are considerably larger than the windows we had before.
Titan reportedly has a 21-inch diameter viewport. Let’s hope that wasn’t the failure point. The other big difference is that Titan hull is “Carbon Fiber and Titanium” (above web site) while Alvin’s personnel sphere was entirely titanium (and could detach from the rest of the machine in an emergency, then rocket to the surface).
Here’s hoping that everyone comes out of this alive, though that seems unrealistic.
Related:
- Remembering William Lewis Herndon, captain of the gold-laden SS Central America (the treasure hunters decided not to attempt sending humans down into 8,000′ of water, but to do it all with remotely operated equipment)
- “DEEPSEA TITANIUM PRESSURE HULLS” (U-Boat Worx): In our deepest-diving submersibles, we use titanium alloys to achieve optimum size, weight and performance characteristics. Titanium has several distinct advantages – it is stronger than regular steel thereby enabling us to keep the weight of deep-diving models as low as possible. Other advantages include that it requires no maintenance, has an extended lifecycle, and has incomparable anti-corrosive properties.
Hope for the best but it seems unlikely by now.
Why not a bathyscaphe for commercial tourism?
It has to be teetered to a surface ship, seems safer then a micro-submarine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trieste_(bathyscaphe)
I’ve read suggestions that carbon fibre (the material used for the fuselage of the missing sub) is not ideal for this application. Using carbon fibre to contain high pressure inside a vessel is fairly well understood. When the high pressure is outside the pressure vessel, as in deep-water exploration, it’s not easy to understand or model, and small, undetectable manufacturing flaws can cause catastrophic failures.
“Why not a bathyscaphe for commercial tourism … It has to be teetered to a surface ship?”
That would be a bathysphere. A bathyscaphe is self-propelled, to a certain extent, with impellers and depending on the design one or more horizontal or vertical rudders.
The Alvin is interesting in that it had a plug hatch held in by pressure. The Titan has seventeen bolts that can only be removed externally, so even it it surfaces, air from the outside could not be accessed until the submersible is located and reached by a ship … with the correct wrench on board. On the other hand, if the hatch popped off on the surface, the thing would be flooded and sink I suppose, so either way the crew is in trouble.
Don’t forget this “sub” is basically a garage built contraption that has never been certified or tested. Alvin on the other hand has been going strong since the 60s. It continuously gets rebuilt and re certified. Alvin was tested in a laboratory setting while Oceangate was tested in the actual ocean with people aboard. If I had to go to the bottom of the ocean I’d choose alvin. The real innovation in this area is DSV Limiting Factor. Check it out!
It came up in the lion kingdom’s auto recommendations a long time ago. The sleek looking submarine looked like an imac, the democratization of Titanic, & another example of progress. Who knew it was junk. Titanic has claimed its 1st victims since 1912.
Diversity is strength! The OceanGate CEO (white) refused to hire “50-year old white guys” because “they were not inspirational”:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12219265/Stockton-Rush-said-didnt-hire-50-year-old-white-guys-NOT-inspirational.html
He advocated the Silly Con Valley “move fast and break things” approach:
‘I wanted our team to be younger to be inspirational, and I’m not going to inspire a 16 year old to go pursue marine technology, but a 25 year old, you know, who’s a sub pilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational.
‘So we’ve really tried to get very intelligent, motivated, younger individuals involved because we’re doing things that are completely new.’
With the acoustic pinger using independent power and outside the pressure vessel and acoustic communications both failing at the same time would a suggest an implosion. Just now a debris field was found.
Looking at the design of the Titan, it looks like a death trap. Carbon fiber has critical failure modes that can be hard to detect and is unproven for manned deep sea submersibles. The front seal between the door and the hull could have failed, the front view port could have failed, the entire design looked like one of those tourist subs designed for at the most a 50 meters depth rating. You should never have such a large opening on a deep diving vessel, a small wedge shaped hatch into the crew space is the best solution.
The CEO said he didn’t hire 50-year-old white guys because they were not inspirational. As a result he is now squished fish food.
Looks like we have five new contenders for the Darwin award.
For more innovation, take a look at the Chinese Striver bathyscaphe that went down to the Challenger Deep, there is only one material good enough for crew compartments for deep diving vehicles, and that is titanium. Room for a crew of 3, one more than the DSV Limiting Factor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Striver_(bathyscaphe)
A NOTE TO READERS PAVEL IS A FOREIGNER WHO HAS ADMITTED TO INTERFERENCE IN OUR ELECTION. Pavel how could you possibly make submarine jokes in a time like this? You have sunken to a new low.
How can I make submarine jokes? I have a fish brain and now identify as a Fangtooth fish and live in the Abyss, so you are correct, I have sunken to a new low. It is really hard to find food in the Abyss, so I really appreciate when you humans make a sacrifice and send down an offering of meat.
Somehow reminds me of Theranos. Though Wikipedia says Stockton Rush had a bachelors in aerospace engineering, seems like the he had the itch and smugness to prove the established engineering and whatever millions(or maybe billions) in r&d wrong with a new untested approach. In the Bad Blood book the fresh out of college grads were surprised to see that under the Theranos machines hoods was just a uninpressive mess of wires and circuit board(s), just as everyone was surprised that consumer grade electronic devices were used inside the capsule. Sounds like Oceangate used government approval loopholes just like Theranos. Of course I have no expertise or training in any of the above so what do I know.
Lots of similarities for sure. Stockton Rush’s company falsely claimed to have partnered with experienced deep sea exploration institutions, just as Holmes alleged that Theranos was working with Pfizer & Schering-Plough. From Wikipedia, probably updated in recent days/hours: OceanGate claimed on its website as of 2023 that Titan was “designed and engineered by OceanGate Inc. in collaboration [with] experts from NASA, Boeing, and the University of Washington”[This quote needs a citation] (UW). A 1⁄3-scale model of the Cyclops 2 pressure vessel was built and tested at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at UW; the model was able to sustain a pressure of 4,285 psi (29.54 MPa; 291.6 atm), corresponding to a depth of approximately 3,000 m (9,800 ft).[29] After the disappearance of the Titan in 2023, UW claimed the APL had no involvement in “design, engineering, or testing of the Titan submersible”. A Boeing spokesperson also claimed Boeing “was not a partner on the Titan and did not design or build it”. A NASA spokesperson said that NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center had a Space Act Agreement with OceanGate, but “did not conduct testing and manufacturing via its workforce or facilities”.[30]
The only similarity I see is the false claims made by Theranos that they are working with Pfizer & Schering-Plough and the false claims made by OceanGate that they are working with NASA, Boeing, and the University of Washington.
The big difference and this is huge in my opinion, is that Theranos frauded investors into giving her over $700 million for a product that simply didn’t exist. OceanGate, on the other hand, used its own money and while the submarine was poorly designed, it did survive over 200 trips.
The attention OceanGate got would not have been as big news today if it wasn’t for the news media. Looking back in history, there are a lot of tragic incidents in a similar way, where you have an entrepreneur offering a product or a service that has gone wrong.
David Lochridge, a former OceanGate employee, filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging he was fired after raising safety concerns about Titan.
Referring to the submersible, his legal team wrote: “Lochridge learned that the viewport manufacturer would only certify to a depth of 1,300 meters due to the experimental design of the viewport supplied by OceanGate, which was out of the Pressure Vessels for Human Occupancy (‘PVHO’) standards. (Newsweek)
So the viewport was only certified to 1300 m, whereas the Titanic wreck lies at 3800 m . . . “Titan reportedly has a 21-inch diameter viewport. Let’s hope that wasn’t the failure point.” (your blogpost on 21 June)