I was referring to Larry Connor, the billionaire mentioned in the aforementioned article who is trying to explore this idea again on a seemingly sounder basis. For him it can just be a very expensive hobby, like collecting Fabergé eggs or cloning woolly mammoths for steak.
The possibility of being hauled into court is why reporting on this matter usually has the engineers and many other workers on the Titan being quoted anonymously. I very much doubt any of them have the resources to defend themselves against billionaire heirs who can afford to hire the best attack lawyers on the planet.
Gotcha. I missed the original context.
The article says the new sub costs $20M, and that OceanGate was charging $250k for a ride (comparable to suborbital spaceflights, like on New Shepard or Virgin Galactic’s ship). So they can pay for development after ~80 customers. There are probably enough people out there that would pay that.
But as you say, if the hobby doesn’t pay for itself, no big deal. James Cameron’s sub didn’t pay for itself, either.
To expand on this, he did no baseline testing to determining how many or how often acoustic indicators of failure would indicate the time to abort. If you have no data that says “150 total pings means imminent failure”, for example, the acoustic monitoring is USELESS.
For all we know, the monitoring system gave its (correct) warning three seconds before implosion. Or .3 seconds. Fat lot of good that did.
[geek simile] A composite pressure vessel is like a General Products hull in antimatter. Little damages compound until SMACK the whole thing is gone, all at once and nothing first.
And AFAIK the submersible was never “certified” for operation. Just that it had passed certain specific tests and that the components were manufactured to the specs given. It has been noted that Rush would threaten legal action against anyone involved pushing back or whistleblowing including after leaving the project.
In a typical project of this nature, the design would have been reviewed and approved by one or more professional engineers, who would be easily traced by the stamp/seal they put on approval documents. (Naturally, there is liability insurance available.) It’s sounding like development of the Titan wasn’t handled this way though.
Indeed not. Some of the early reporting involved interviews with kids straight out of school being put in charge of rather important bits of engineering. Another way to save costs and avoid people telling Rush things he did not want to hear.
I’m sure they did the best they could but at that age combined with the lack of experience, they should have been under a professionally licensed mentor/boss.
I rolled my eyes at the part where he balked at the cost. Because instead of costing a few thousand dollars… it was going to cost fifty thousand dollars.
Like, srsly? You couldn’t spend 50K to get the cornerstone of your multi-million dollar startup (hoping it would grow into a multi-billion dollar startup) safety checked? Not even half the price of admission for a single passenger on a single dive?
Hey, he didn’t get to be rich by spending money when he could cut corners!
He cheaped out at EVERY possible turn. Combined with his pervasive attitude that safety checks were entirely unnecessary, of course he balked at an extra zero.
I was also able to read the Wired article. There were new details in there that I’d not known about from previous media reports:
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the first hull that he built from the carbon fibres failed before it was complete;
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the scale models all failed the pressure testing and imploded, at simulated pressures well short of the Titanic depth;
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the caps at each end of the hull had been recycled from the first model, even tho engineers thought that was unsafe;
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the second hull had eye bolts installed so that the vessel could be lifted by cranes, putting additional strains on the joints between the caps and the hull.
Really, it’s a wonder the thing lasted through its first dive, much less as many as it actually did.
I get the impression Rush fancied himself some cutting-edge explorer while completely disregarding all the preparation and contingency planning that goes into discovering something but also living long enough to get back to civilization and tell other people about it.
The wired article is now on Ars technica:
Brian
60 Minutes Australia has a new report featuring Cameron, who slams the US Coast Guard for unnecessarily (in his opinion) dragging out the search effort after the Navy reported hearing an implosion on the first day.
The USCG officer responsible replies that the USN report was classified so they couldn’t reveal it (Cameron heard it from a Navy source almost immediately), and that morally and by law, they can’t end a S&R effort without physical evidence.
I don’t think there was much else in this report I hadn’t known.
Meh. They need to train regardless.
Cameron’s point was that it was cruel to the families to let them keep hoping for four days when it was pretty clear by the first night that they were all dead.
P.H. Nargeolet’s daughter (featured in the 60 Minutes Australia story) is of two minds about that point. One the one hand, they wanted to know what really happened; on the other, for those four days they were able to believe there was still a chance.
Ah, that makes sense. It wasn’t the search itself that’s the problem, it was the slow release of information.
Hate to be a conspiracy theorist in any way, but so long as we’re on the topic of the length of the search & rescue operation (this got modded in the Breaking News thread) I thought it was also very strange that the suspense lasted exactly as long as the oxygen was said would last, were they all on the bottom of the ocean hoping for rescue for 5 days. It sure made for an exciting 5-day media circus with a literal countdown! 
It’s simpler than that - the Coast Guard weren’t going to give up the search until it was 100% confirmed that it was impossible for there to be survivors. So they keep going until it becomes impossible and also debris starts showing up. For sure that did fuel media attention, but there is no need to invoke conspiracy theory. Even near-certainty of an implosion is not certainty, so the search goes on as a matter of course.
Perhaps, but the article did mention a few stupid decisions I hadn’t known about (and I already knew that the project had more red flags than a People’s Liberation Army parade).