It seems really hard to believe that is the transcript that actually took place and the surface ship still waited until after the originally scheduled surfacing time to sound the alarm.
Apparently, Oceangate has suspended all exploration and commercial operations !
There’s going to be a lot of disappointed customers out there.
(tbh, i can’t understand why that site is still there)
Their “Latest News” and “Press Releases” sections are a bit out of date. Joking aside, I also find it hard to believe the whole website’s still there, complete with video footage of ol’ Stockton himself. It’s such a tone-deaf thing to do, leaving it all up in its hubristic glory, that it makes me wonder if the culture of the whole company is infected with Rush’s apparent lack of introspection.
No surprise, particularly since the Titan was the only submersible they had that was supposed to be able to go to any significant depth. They had one or two others but they were all shallow-water submersibles and I don’t know if they were even in use.
As I said in the other thread, this is predictably the end of OceanGate. It’s not the end of deep-sea exploration or even of further Titanic exploration, but Stockton Rush has given the entire industry a bad name that they’re going to have to live down – exactly as David Lockridge and more than three dozen other experts had warned – despite the strenuous safeguards of the other ventures and vessels.
I’m very skeptical of the authenticity of the transcript.
But I can understand a delay in calling for assistance, assuming this is how things went down. A commercial company is going to be worried about damage control in addition to safety, and the culture of OceanGate wasn’t exactly safety first.
So who’s going to make the decision to publicly announce that they might have a failure? That’s a tough question when the obvious answer, the CEO, is potentially paste at the bottom of the ocean. You better be damn sure there’s a real problem, or you have to answer to the CEO when he gets back.
See, if I am a CEO of some extreme-activity outfit, and I survive a mishap by the skin of my teeth, I am going to be ticked off if my minions did not start a massive effort to find me very shortly after they lost me.
But that’s just me.
Here’s a some info on Benjamin Rush’s views on slavery from the Dickinson college website:
“… Rush, therefore, was a committed and prominent abolitionist. In 1787, he joined the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society, not only as a powerful advocate but also as an author of its new constitution and as secretary and later president. He maintained close contacts with Philadelphia’s African American community, including helping found the city’s first black church.
But this fairly straightforward narrative of Rush’s views on African Americans, slavery and abolitionism is complicated by other facts. Rush bought a child slave, William Grubber, whom he owned until he freed him for compensation in 1794. The question remains open about Rush’s relationship with Grubber. Did he feel conflicted about voicing strident views against slavery while owning another human being? Rush himself offers little comment in his writings.”
It is a very weird non sequitur to bring up in a podcast anyway given that there are probably a couple of hundred million Americans with slave-owning ancestors.
Psychological screening is very important in selecting submarine crews in navies, especially now that many navies operate nuclear submarines, which almost never surface when on patrols.
Being in an enclosed environment for months would be hard even if it wasn’t underwater. No sunlight, little to no privacy, no getting away from some asshole who’s giving you shit. It’s tremendously stressful. Some people just aren’t up for it.
Or maybe all the employees are too busy looking for new jobs elsewhere and no one has thought to take this stuff down. Or maybe the only person in the company with the proper computer passwords to access the website and make alterations is crab food at the bottom of the sea.
Allow me to put your heads together and come up with what looks like a plausible hypothesis.
Never mind. It was covered.
Except that they did go in to make a change: the notice that they’ve suspended operations. I sympathize with what you’re saying and don’t mean to condemn all the surviving Oceangate staff absolutely, but if they have the ability to take down the site – and it seems they do, if they’re in there making updates – then they should take it down, as a matter of good taste and respect.
I agree with you, but either the folks currently running OceanGate don’t or they just aren’t thinking about it. Or maybe someone is trying to figure out how to keep the company going without their “best” sub and CEO.
If I was working at OceanGate my focus would be on applying for a job elsewhere, but that’s just me. I’ve been employed by a company circling the drain and I just don’t see any point in staying until the bitter end.
That would be me. I’d last about five minutes in even a large military submarine. A tiny submersible would be a total non-starter. I have enough vestiges of claustrophobia than even ordinary elevators bother me. You couldn’t pay me enough to get into a tiny tube and then have the hatch bolted shut from the outside and the whole thing tossed into the ocean.
The one type of enclosed space that I’m strangely fine with is the sleeping accommodations on small boats, probably because I owned a much beloved sailboat. The bunks in the main cabin were airy but the ones up in the bow were what I considered “cozy”. The fact that there was a hatch directly above you that could be opened for fresh air and egress definitely helped. 
There’s a finality associated with completely taking down the site that effectively says the company is finished. While this may be objectively obvious, I suspect that there’s no one in a position to actually make that decision. So I’m speculating that the edit that was made to the home page was the absolute minimum necessary. I agree, of course, that leaving the site up is ridiculous and distasteful.
OK, back to the sub itself. If the transcript is legit what would have caused a slow ascent? It’s a pretty simple system, just weights being dropped to provide positive buoyancy. Could the hull have been taking on water between laminations?
I’ll believe it when I see it on heavy.com (because they’ll have it before a more mainstream news source does, but they tend to be pretty accurate all the same).
Anyway, as it stands, I throw the bullshit flag at the part where the ascent is slower than expected. It’s like someone (someone not on the sub, but rather an author) is trying to suggest the sub is filling up in unseen areas with water. Which is of course bullshit.
If you’ve seen the transcript apparently the descent was abnormally fast, as if the sub weighed more than it should have. So… IF this is legit whatever make it sink faster than normal could have inhibited resurfacing.
As to what that might have been… I don’t know. I’ve heard speculation that it was somehow taking on water between the laminations but I’m not sure that sufficient water could be absorbed in that manner before the hull imploded to make much difference. Or maybe it could.
Or maybe whatever was supposed to release the ballast failed to fully release all of it? Hey, I’m not an engineer.
Other than that I got nuthin’
It was a stowaway. See any number of crappy SF stories for how badly having unplanned weight onboard ends. 