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shouldn’t this be treated like Everest ? you know the risks if you get into trouble your on your own.
I suspect that if they have sunk to the bottom, they are on their own. I doubt a rescue at 13000' is possible in the timescale.
@funkydunk
Looking at those pics, did they even get put in the water? ie simple way to make loads of dosh. Lock people in a tin can with no windows, winch them up in the air, move them around a bit and then turn a DVD on of shots of the Titanic 🙂 they would never know
Anyone else remember that Channel 4 programme from the early 2000s where they convinced some people that they had been selected for a space mission?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Cadets_(TV_series)
And
i think these people are more likely to have given something back despite taking/making their millions.
The very fact they are billionaires makes it impossible that they've done their fair share.
Back to the OP, still wouldn't wish dying in a submersible on anyone.
I doubt a rescue at 13000′ is possible in the timescale.
Even if they knew exactly where they were, which they don't, how long to get specialist recovery equipment to the dive site, let alone try to locate the sub and use it? Not feasible.
Their only chance is that they are somehow alive and bobbing like a cork, and they are miraculously spotted somehow in hundreds of square miles of ocean.
dont begrudge other peoples wealth
Not at all, just the way they chose to spend it.
BUT I can’t see any military taking the sort of risks involved with this unless it was win/lose a war situation.
The military (well ours anyway) would not be using equipment constructed from unapproved/unregulated materials.
All UK Naval Vessels (Inc Subs) are approved by either Lloyds or another independent regulatory body. I work on the T26 Frigate programme (for a subcontractor) and we need Lloyds certification for all pressure equipment, which feeds into the 'whole ship' Lloyds certification.
Ultimately the Military is an employer which has a duty of care under the Health and Safety at work act to provide safe equipment/facilities for its employees - i appreciate this goes out the window in a time of war.
However, i can't imagine the likes of China, Russia or certain middle Eastern countries are as tightly regulated.
but with all the suffering that goes on in the world due to poverty, I’m struggling to muster much sympathy for a group of exceedingly rich people
If you ride a half decent mountain bike, it probably cost enough to feed, house, clothe, or medicate quite a few people in the most poverty stricken parts of the world. For what? A weekend hobby? Rich is relative. If you have total assets including your house of £682,662, you are in the top 1% of the wealthiest people on the planet, or just £72,996 and you're in the top 10%. Either way, you're 'exceedingly rich' on a global scale, consuming resources unfairly and pissing on the world's poor. Similar to the submarine trippers, it's just a matter of degree. We all hypocritically and conveniently draw the 'too rich' line somewhere above our own status, but from the perspective of the world's poorest, most people on here are well above it.
As a general rule you can’t really disclaim your way out of much, but then round the world yacht races (including races where you pay the boat owner for the “luxury” of taking part) do go ahead and people die doing them
And there have been successful lawsuits regarding some of those deaths. Comes down to whether it was just the unavoidable risk of those races or if that risk was increased by failings on the part of the company.
from the viewpoint of 6.somethig billion people.
Alluding to my earlier post, I suspect your average labourer in Mumbai probably wouldn’t have much sympathy if you or I smashed ourselves to pieces on our 8 grand bikes whilst trying to ride a trail well beyond our abilities..a position I understand.
Anyhow, what I find staggering is there doesn’t appear have been any contingency built in. Assuming as there must be some kind of tracker on the sub that makes it detectable if it is at the surface (even my 400 quid drone has a ‘find me’ feature), it must still be at the bottom of the sea.
Whilst it’s most likely failed catastrophically, if it’s still intact surely some kind of device that floats to the surface attached by a very thin (and long) cable would have been easily enough to design to enable easy detection
as it is, it looks like it’s been stuck together as part of a university engineering project.
Looks like the British Guy does loads of crazy stuff, so I'd say on borrowed time.
Hamish Harding, 58, is one of the five missing with the OceanGate Expeditions vessel, which was reported overdue on Sunday evening about 435 miles south of St John’s, Newfoundland.
Harding is the chair of the private plane firm Action Aviation. His wife is called Linda, and he has two sons named Rory and Giles, as well as a stepdaughter named Lauren and a stepson, Brian Szasz.
As a student, he left Cambridge with a degree in natural sciences and chemical engineering.
Harding is an aviator, holding an airline transport pilot’s licence and business jet type ratings, including the Gulfstream G650. He is also a skydiver, was inducted into the Living Legends of Aviation in 2022, and is a trustee of the Explorers Club.
He also previously worked with the Antarctic VIP tourism company White Desert to introduce the first regular business jet service to Antarctica.
Harding has made many trips to the south pole and, in 2016, accompanied Buzz Aldrin, who became the oldest person to reach the south pole at 86. He also went into space last year with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company.
Harding is the current holder of three Guinness world records, relating to his work as an adventurer. In 2019, he was commended for the fastest circumnavigation of the Earth via both poles.
As part of a crew of eight astronauts and aviators in a Qatar executive Gulfstream G650ER ultra-long-range business jet, Harding led the mission to mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. He achieved the feat in 46 hours, 40 minutes and 22 seconds.
In 2021, he achieved the greatest distance covered at full ocean depth and the greatest duration spent at full ocean depth.
Alongside Victor Vescovo, Harding dove in a two-man submarine to the lowest point in the world’s oceans, the deepest point of the Mariana Trench, the Challenger Deep – a depth of about 36,000ft.
https://tritonsubs.com/subs/gullwing/
Compare the engineering in that sub to the Oceangate.
https://tritonsubs.com/whytriton/
Those are built to Classification Society standards apparently.
Might have a go to about 50m, not sure about 4000m!
Edit: I assume it's the same company that builds Triton ROV's. The amount of time I have seen those things on deck, dripping hydraulic oil and surrounded by pissed off techs, I might give it a miss altogether!
and I actually posted a thread about this after being wheeled off the hill by mountain rescue at the weekend. And whilst I’m feeling sorry for myself, I would fully understand if someone thought ‘silly bugger, what does he expect if he’s throwing himself down a hill on his bike’
But I was under the impression you crashed on a low risk, easy bit of trail. So the people thinking that are doing you something of a disservice & are demonstrating that their prejudice seems to be trumping any sense of empathy or sympathy for a fellow human being. There could be 5 people slowly asphyxiating in a cold dark tube as we sit here and type about it. I think criticising their assessment of risk at this time is pretty callous.
The very fact they are billionaires makes it impossible that they’ve done their fair share.
Ridiculous statement.
Off the top of my head..... Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg , Jeff Bezos....
BG has a net worth of about $100 Billion but has given away around $38 Billion so far and continues to do so.
Harding is the chair of the private plane firm Action Aviation. His wife is called Linda, and he has two sons named Rory and Giles, as well as a stepdaughter named Lauren and a stepson, Brian Szasz.
As a student, he left Cambridge with a degree in natural sciences and chemical engineering.
Harding is an aviator, holding an airline transport pilot’s licence and business jet type ratings, including the Gulfstream G650. He is also a skydiver, was inducted into the Living Legends of Aviation in 2022, and is a trustee of the Explorers Club.
He also previously worked with the Antarctic VIP tourism company White Desert to introduce the first regular business jet service to Antarctica.
Harding has made many trips to the south pole and, in 2016, accompanied Buzz Aldrin, who became the oldest person to reach the south pole at 86. He also went into space last year with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company.
Not just the 0.01% of wealth but something like the top 0.0001 % of Co2 contributors then
**slow clap**
Edit: I assume it’s the same company that builds Triton ROV’s. The amount of time I have seen those things on deck, dripping hydraulic oil and surrounded by pissed off techs, I might give it a miss altogether!
its not.
But I was under the impression you crashed on a low risk, easy bit of trail
I did. Still entirely my own fault though, but fair point.
I think some of the facts of this sub incident are fairly well established however, ie this was an experimental device that they are sending 4000 meters below the sea with limited options should it all go wrong. And whilst I genuinely hope they are rescued, I don’t think it’s particularly callous to be questioning their assessment of the risks when discussing it.
With regards to not having any sympathy, perhaps I should have said ‘less sympathy given the circumstances’. The fact they are millionaires is irrelevant, I just think it’s a pretty dumb thing to have partaken in.
But I was under the impression you crashed on a low risk, easy bit of trail. So the people thinking that are doing you something of a disservice & are demonstrating that their prejudice seems to be trumping any sense of empathy or sympathy for a fellow human being. There could be 5 people slowly asphyxiating in a cold dark tube as we sit here and type about it. I think criticising their assessment of risk at this time is pretty callous.
It's a tricky one, in order to become disgustingly wealthy you've had to participate in a fundamentally unfair process that will have cost others their own wealth, health or even their lives along the way. At the same time I'd not wish being crush or asphyxiated to death 2 miles below the north Atlantic on anyone.
Plus one of the passengers is/was simply the son of a millionaire(?), not necessarily a fully fledged money loving bastard himself yet. Lots of people "deserve" punishments they'll never receive, But you can't see Death, especially an horrific one as any sort of karmic justice...
If I was going to cast anyone as "deserving less sympathy" in all of this it's the owners/operators of 'Ocean Gate' as they're clearly chasing money more than safety... Whatever the outcome they will have questions to answer I'm certain.
The comparison with biking is just no nonsense.
Yes, you can die falling off a bike but it's not very likely.
If you have a half decent bike it probably won't suffer a catastrophic structural failure.
If your bike computer goes tits, no harm done.
Most of us know how do basic bike maintenance and what to check to keep your bike working properly.
At worst a risk assessment would probably be a yellow so you stick on a helmet, gloves and some pads.
This group got in a carbon fire tube, that had bits from a campervan in it, that had a wireless control system, based around a video game controller, after signing disclaimers centred around their possible deaths.
The tube did not have any 3rd party inspection certification. Anyone who has had issues with carbon components know how tricky it can be to identify problems in the structure.
To me, any risk assessment on this comes out as a red and there is no mitigation in place that is going to help you survive any significant failure.
The whole thing was done on a budget. As above, I think this must be the cheapest way to get a HD camera down to 4000m.
https://oceangate.com/our-subs/titan-submersible.html
Composite hull was mentioned before - out of interest how would they pressure-test something like this before use, I'm assuming it's a one-off sub? Just drop it in unmanned then retrieve it?
The report says it lost contact 1hr 45 mins into the dive. Maybe there was a weak spot and it failed suddenly in the way carbon can? I guess it doesn't matter whether it's carbon or steel if the pressure finds a weak spot, you're in trouble and it just affects how quickly things go wrong.
Real-Time Health Monitoring
The most significant innovation is the proprietary real-time hull health monitoring (RTM) system. Titan is the only manned submersible to employ an integrated real-time health monitoring system. Utilizing co-located acoustic sensors and strain gauges throughout the pressure boundary, the RTM system makes it possible to analyze the effects of changing pressure on the vessel as the submersible dives deeper, and accurately assess the integrity of the structure. This onboard health analysis monitoring system provides early warning detection for the pilot with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface.
Seems like a good thing to have, is it normal kit on a sub or a new innovation as they describe it? Back to Q about testing, is needing it a sign of going a bit low on safety factors in order to have something light and manageable by a smaller launch vessel?
I was thinking about how a composites structure could fail so fast you don't have time to do much about it, but obviously this thing was designed by people who know 100% more about this topic than I do..
Some interesting stuff about the development of the hull.
https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/composite-submersibles-under-pressure-in-deep-deep-waters
That design is purely all about doing it as cheaply as possible.
because it permits creation of a pressure vessel that is naturally buoyant and, therefore, would enable OceanGate to forgo the use — and the significant expense — of syntactic foam on its exterior.
Syntactic foam is used to provide buoyancy at depth. The deeper you need to operate in the more expensive the foam. It is very expensive.
I can't be the only person who's just a little bit sad that there wasn't space for Musk on board.
Maybe he will volunteer to help go down look for them in his magic mini sub?
We can only hope.
Rich men and their toys. At least they'll have died doing something they loved: Spending money. Feel a bit sorry for the 19 year old lad. He probably had no idea of the risks of climbing inside something from which there is no escape if anything goes wrong. Think we'll see a lot more of this when Branson gets his space tourism nonsense going.
If it imploded surely that kind of explosion would be picked up on sonar or something, or at that depth would the explosion not travel far enough to the surface?
It's an implosion, not an explosion. The sub, and everything in it, suddenly becomes a lot smaller. It wasn't very big to start with compared to the volume of the ocean, so I don't think there would be much to detect.
It’s an implosion, not an explosion. The sub, and everything in it, suddenly becomes a lot smaller. It wasn’t very big to start with compared to the volume of the ocean, so I don’t think there would be much to detect.
I agree this is a pretty small sub, however when various US subs have gone missing, it has been possible to detect the sound of the implosion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589)
when various US subs have gone missing, it has been possible to detect the sound of the implosion.
Interesting. I sit corrected.
As above, I think this must be the cheapest way to get a HD camera down to 4000m.
Except the plan to get it back wasn't quite 100% robust (was going to put watertight, but, maybe not.)
@gobucul, that's an interesting article, cheers.
The biggest challenge, Spencer reports, was developing a manufacturable design that “would produce a consistent part with no wrinkles, voids or delaminations.” And without use of an autoclave. Spencer opted for a layup strategy that combines alternating placement of prepreg carbon fiber/epoxy unidirectional fabrics in the axial direction, with wet winding of carbon fiber/epoxy in the hoop direction, for a total of 480 plies.
Spencer says initial assessment of the cured cylinder shows that it has porosity of <1%
(a quick google says aerospace porosity spec is <2.5%)
I agree this is a pretty small sub, however when various US subs have gone missing, it has been possible to detect the sound of the implosion.
My guess would be that a steel pressure hull, with multiple sub-compartments, failing would make a lot more noise, than a composite 6m tube.
Also, is the US still spending a huge amount of money on their sub-sea listening equipment?
Also, is the US still spending a huge amount of money on their sub-sea listening equipment?
Why wouldn't they be?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_2
Also, is the US still spending a huge amount of money on their sub-sea listening equipment?
almost certainly. if it imploded, something would have heard it. sounds travels quickly and a long way underwater.
Some insight into the issues and culpability of the aforementioned pay-to-play round-the-world yacht race - https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/may/11/clipper-round-the-world-yacht-race-adventure-lifetime-tragedy-simon-speirs
This real-time monitoring system they have, it'd be reporting back to the support boat wouldn't it?
limited. underwater acoustic comms is pretty low bandwidth. think in bits not bytes...
This real-time monitoring system they have, it’d be reporting back to the support boat wouldn’t it?
I doubt it. Through water data transmission is possible but it's very limited in range.
gobuchul
Free MemberSome interesting stuff about the development of the hull.
> https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/composite-submersibles-under-pressure-in-deep-deep-waters
A lot of interesting details there, thanks.
Not read the whole thread so I probably missed a similar post already, but reading this yesterday I felt pretty uneasy about the headlines of this sitting alongside the story of the 500+ dying in the disaster involving the migrant boat in greek waters. The size and scale of the rescue mission launched to rescue these 5 does seem to dwarf the efforts for the 500....almost like money talks....
it’s very limited in range
Ah ok. I guess a data cable to a buoy isn't practical over that depth.
Slightly OT, did anyone see that Netflix docu about the murder on a private submarine? Far more disturbing than I expected in the end but also interesting for the construction and general sub operation aspects.
I don't get all the resentment towards rich people spending their money this way.
I don't believe in trickle down economics, but trickle down technology seems like a real thing to me.
If people or businesses want to spend a lot of money on vanity projects like submarines, spaceships or formula one cars, and there's a chance it will make future technology safer for less frivolous uses, then I'm all for it.
Would there be less resentment if they had spent the money on a work of art for their private collection, or a grouse moor with no public access?
If all this turns out to be some sort of scandal will it be Oceangategate?
I agree this is a pretty small sub, however when various US subs have gone missing, it has been possible to detect the sound of the implosion.
Think that Argentinian sub that went down a few years ago was "heard" (not sure by what or who)...
I don’t get all the resentment towards rich people spending their money this way.
If rich people want to kill themselves in shonky submarines then I'm all for that. 🙂
If rich people want to kill themselves in shonky submarines then I’m all for that
classy response..
I don’t get all the resentment towards rich people spending their money this way.
I don't resent the spending in particular.
I resent their existence and their tax avoidance. They are (in general, possibly with limited exceptions) a thoroughly malign influence that undermines our society.
Would there be less resentment if they had spent the money on a work of art for their private collection, or a grouse moor with no public access?
#Perhaps if they were unable to hoard all that wealth - wealth that they can never spend there might be less resentment.
Anyone else remember that Channel 4 programme from the early 2000s where they convinced some people that they had been selected for a space mission?
I certainly do and wondered if Elon Musk had considered something similar for his space tourists.........