It's a non profit.

The window manufacturer warned them that it's design was not sufficient to rate it for 4000 meters, or so I read.

There are human factors issues with the design, I question the hatch design as well as electronics compatibility and environment systems.  Condensation, plus near freezing conditions means off the shelf electronics are not suitable.  Additionally, Bluetooth wireless communication for critical systems is stupid.

Their hesitation to test it according to some standard meant they knew it wouldn't pass.  Now, if they wanted to create a new market space, then that's different.  I am sure the standards assume a long service life, indefinite compression cycles or cycles in the thousands, etc.  

If they wanted to create a new standard for a cheap to make, consumable submersible, with a short defined service life, then that would be appropriate in theory.

ETA

Communications systems were dog shit as well, and emergency preparation was non existent.  No transponders, nothing as simple as a dye pack to locate it on the surface should it drift off course and surface in unknown area.

I wonder how 50 year old white guys designed the rescue boats and subs?  I actually feel sorry for the people, except ceo, a horrible way to go.

I doubt it’s ever found but what do I know. The ocean is big as hell and that sub is tiny in the grand scheme of things

The whole “90 hours” really gave this story legs.  An opportunity for a hero story.  An emotional attachment.

While in reality, there it little actually pointing to the validity of the 90 hour mark.  There’s baseless statements that there was 90 hours of oxygen.  But nothing to prove it.  

But lots to lend credence to a shoddy operation focused on 1 goal and ignoring the possibility, and history, of things going very wrong.  Including many first hand accounts from persons who have seen the titanic from the window.

Proof of them ignoring the history of things going very wrong:  previously losing comms and not improving the comms capabilities even though each ride had $1,000,000 of passengers inside.

Tech has improved but look how long it took to find the titanic to begin with. Now make the target tiny and mostly made out of carbon fiber. May be found, maybe not. Not gonna be easy.

If the sub was crushed the only parts they likely could ever find are the two titanium flanges.

They are.  A bit of dark humor is one thing.  I'm not in love with society's glee in mocking this.  I mean should the dirt poor in trailer parks celebrate every time a plane crashes with a bunch of wealthy Americans who can afford to fly on it?

Theres 2 scenarios I'm envisioning.

1) They imploded and never felt a thing. I think this happened.

2) They are basically in an isolation chamber rotating nonstop in their own piss and shit in pitch black darkness with 0 sound coming from the outside and unable to sleep because you get smashed in the face with a logitech controller everytime the vessel turns over again.

No telling where it ended up, either.

They had one expedition with paying customers and apparently couldn’t even find Titanic with the mothership providing them directions, so they gave up after three hours and surfaced.

Discovery on the lawsuits will be interesting.

The way I see it, the government was already gonna waste that money on something stupid.
At least this way, the guys get some sort of real world experience doing search and rescue things with their big fancy toys.

A LOT less than Biden's recent Green initiative, or that we send to Ukraine with no audits, or that was defrauded from Covid payments....

Yeah, sure it is.

Show me how profit was reinvested into the organizations mission rather than spent in salaries.

Let’s start with this fact.  They knew the comms system was a total failure.  We know that system was never improved.  

Let’s look at this fact.  They knew there was no method of rescue.  And they didn’t fix that.  

How about the window on the front?

Non profit.   Lol.  

Salary generator.  That’s what it was.

I have categorically rejected a lot of the speculation and sensationalized reporting based on a lack of details. My entire life I've been taught to ignore noise and focus on signal, and most news reporting is, well, noise.

But in the absence of any actual signal, it's hard to keep ignoring the noise, so I've sorted through the noise looking for clues. At this point, I believe that the mother ship has suspected since Sunday afternoon that the sub simply imploded due to material fatigue from being worked beyond its limits.

I also believe they've been tight-lipped about that, for the reasons you state. I have read thousands of posts here and dismissed them as peanut-gallery speculation (and they are, to be sure - that hasn't changed) on the assumption that surely there are more details known only to the mother ship and the rescuers. But those 'more details' simply aren't emerging now, and it's beginning to look like they never will. Because those other details apparently don't exist. I fear that I've been waiting on a 'rest of the story' that never existed.

I have hoped since day one of this that, at a minimum, the mother ship had at least an idea of where the sub was, a sonar ping or something, and once the rescuers were in place they'd be able to home in on that area and find the sub in minutes, or hours. But that hasn't happened. I have hoped that the mother ship had an operating theory about what went wrong and either a highly educated guess as to where the ship was or a well-informed suspicion that it had been destroyed due to catastrophic failure. But if that's true, we haven't been told yet.

I had hoped that the pictures shown with random cables sticking everywhere on the ship were prototype pictures. To some extent that hope was realized - it does look, based on the most recent evidence, like the last iteration of the design included some protection for the exterior cabling and other junk hanging off the ship. That's good. Obviously not good enough, though.

Again, all of this could be speculation. They may be quietly winching the sub to the surface with five living passengers in it right now. But I'll freely admit that my hopes to that end are pretty much gone now. I have hoped all along that we'd have more reason to hope as the search went on and more details were released. But that simply hasn't happened, and as time goes on I'm more and more convinced that they aren't releasing any more details because they simply don't have anything good to release. The only details they have to release would just make their incompetence and recklessness more obvious. So they're sitting on those until the lawsuits come.



(And again....the above is still peanut gallery level stuff. The people on site obviously know much more than we know. It may be that what they 'know' is simply the certainty of what the rest have been speculating all along)

Regardless of the eventual outcome of this situation - it will undoubtedly serve as a very good example of poor decision making and poor risk management.

What I don't understand - why would any paying customer (with hundreds of thousands of dollars to burn) choose this operation over one that uses the Triton?

I don't feel bad for them. Anyone with any common sense would look at that thing and see problems, I think this Rush guy is an epic salesman and a con artist.

Someone posted a video of the deepest diving sub being made and tested (in this thread I think), that guy takes people down* (Caladan Oceanic), Triton (sp) subs built the thing. They made sure it was rated to go 20% deeper than the deepest point on Earth. I'd give THAT guy my money, not some dipshit with no sub experience and something that looks like an above ground propane tank, then there is the controller.

*after watching a few of the videos, despite my dislike of tight and enclosed spaces, I would go for a ride in that thing.

I originally thought they were in a titanium hull with a carbon fiber inner skeleton. Then I realized it was just CF with TI endcaps. Then I realized they really did have cheap controllers, cheap switches, external snag points, a windows OS supporting their controllers, and zero actual indication that they'd ever really tested their reserve oxygen supplies. At this point the 96 hour figure seems like something I could have calculated on the back of a napkin.

*shrug*

It’s inspirational?

when assholes collide.

Someone making a $100,000 salary has A LOT more in common with the dirt poor than they do with billionaires, a point often lost with conservatives.

I'm seeing a shift from mockery of the stupidity of this vessel and it's lack of forethought to mockery of the now dead people that took the company at its word that it could deliver a trip to the Titanic and back.  That doesn't resonate too well to me.

This.

Yep
People bought into the CEO's bs 90hr media claim.
They've been dead.

True

Is it a recovery mission now? Will the submersible vessel ever be found?

I’m sure the CEO was hitting Hamish hard for an investment.

at best id guess the the titanium parts could eventually be found.

I think - like aviation - when you get a sudden loss of comms and no sign of anything, it's extremely unlikely there are any survivors. I agree with the poster that stated the support vessel was likely aware there was a catastrophic event, but did not want to say so.

Everything about the vessel tells you he gave zero shits about his clients.  They were simply the money sponges to squeeze to pay for his tremendous achievement of turning a gravesite into a tourist attraction.

Who should pick up the tab for the rescue/recover efforts?

God almighty

I bet the Nashville Shooter thread is way up towards the top!

Seems like a simple underwater sound making device that could send out an SOS sound every 10 min could have save them if the hull didn't fail.

Without some type of sound or signal from the submersible this seems impossible to find before they run out of water.

As a saturation diver once said to me (about deep-sea equipment failures) you're looking for component parts. He was referring to an ROV that wondered into  a dynamic-positioning thruster. The thruster did pretty well, the ROV less so, lol.

If the support vessel has a good clue where it is (and I think they do) they should locate the titanium caps.  

The 96-hour figure was the best available information. It increasingly looks like garbage, but we simply didn't know that at the time - and honestly, we still don't, in any ultimate sense. Nobody has yet to explain where the 96 hour figure came from.

I thought water was the problem

I really would like to know what bonding agent they used for the Ti ring to the CF tube. I bet they used plexus

At this point following this thread, I doubt it will be found intact.

I remember reading many pages back it was from the companys website.

How many successful missions did this sub have prior?

I wouldn't be surprised if they used 3M 5200.

That 96hr figure came from the finest diversity hires available on the market.

Its ego. He thought he knew better than everyone else and its not that he didn't care about his 'clients' but rather I don't think he thought there was anything wrong with this contraption. If he gave zero shits he would never be on that thing.

Since he was on this trip it's entirely possible there were warning signs on the way down and he pushed anyways. Listen to him in interviews. The dude thought safety is humorous.

3, from what I understand

I saw a video interview w/ a passenger from last year and he explained how there was 7 different system that could get it back to the surface. Everything from ballast, to being able to detach the legs. Also was an automated one that somehow would trigger even if all the occupants were unconsicous.

So it seems like they all failed, it got stuck or imploded.

Someone once asked me why we spend so much time and money resuscitating & saving gangbangers/cop shooters/bad guys/victims of their own stupidity.

Answer: That’s how you learn & get better at saving good guys when they need it.

This.   This is money spent actually giving real world experience in stuff that these groups SHOULD be doing, instead of spending it on more Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion consultants...