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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Technology
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That guy was a backyard inventor and charlatan, like those 19th century backyard aircraft inventors. It's one thing to take yourself out of the gene pool through your own recklessness, it's another to take others with you.
Rush bypassed over a hundred years of engineering lessons learned the hard way with the rationale it stifles innovation. He even fired and sued one of his own employees for calling him out on it. The sub had zero certifications and then he lied to customers about it saying his designs were approved by NASA and Boeing who never even heard of the guy.
Aside from the lack of safety engineering and lack of proper fail-safes in his design, there's a reason engineers don't use carbon fiber composites in subs. They have a tendency to delaminate. When used in aircraft, composites have to be examined and certified at a regular service interval with special inspection equipment.
I think that sub was an accident waiting to happen from day one. The hull probably failed due to inspection negligence and a failure to detect delamination. That's even if the hull could have been rated properly for 4km. If it wasn't the hull, it would been one of the other jury-rigged systems.
I can't believe people smart enough to acquire the wealth for that excursion weren't smart enough to check out the qualifications of the company hosting it. I think it was plainly obvious just looking at the sub yourself. A navigation system that consists of a consumer laptop PC and Logitech gaming controller should have been a dead giveaway.
Honestly, the most surprising thing is that they managed 6 successful dives to titanic before it failed.
And that they convinced multiple billionaires, who are generally assumed to be smarter and better educated than the rest of us, to step aboard that blatantly-unseaworthy deathtrap.
Guess what, billionaires aren't smarter than everyone else. Usually it's just existing wealth, luck and a lack of morals that gets them there.
The system is rigged to make it much much easier to make money if you already have money.
There are a lot of different types of characteristics that get described as 'smart.' Risk aversion is often categorized as 'smart,' as in "I'm too smart to do something that risky," but that is definitely not something billionaires are known for - you can't get that much money without big risky bets paying off.
Rich people don't really seem to be smart so much as they just have a sort of rat-like cunning that confers high performance at screwing people and stealing shit.
On the contrary, I've long been of the opinion that anyone can claim their slice of the American Dream, just as long as they aren't too picky about who they carve it out of. There doesn't even need to be risk, per se, just some ambition, enough intelligence to know the limits of you can get away with, and a complete lack of shame.
Lack of shame doesn’t do you any good financially if you aren’t using it to take social risks that people with shame wouldn’t
But that's my point. The only real risk is that somebody with an overgrown sense of morality might think badly of you. As long as you don't cross the line of hurting someone who matters (in the sense of being rich or powerful) you can just reenact that meme of Jason Statham wiping his tears with wads of cash, and get on with the exploitation.
Stress fatigue and fractures doesn't show itself after one dive without completely tearing down the craft and inspecting components - and this was probably the deepest dive they've been on.
pressure increases on a log scale the deeper you go, so you need to account for that, evidently, they did not account for it, and they also failed to understand requirements for regular teardowns and inspections of prototypes.
Honestly I don't find it surprising at all.
There are multiple times where people have died due to fractures as a stress fatigue in different areas.
I remember a story about the crash of United Airlines flight 232, in where a DC-10 suffering an undetected stress fracture after many flights finally broke an engine to the point of it severing out all hydraulic lines to the control surfaces - they had to try and land the plane via throttle. It's actually a very interesting story if you want to look it up - they even made a movie for it.
The issue here is the number of dives it took before something failed catastrophicly - you usually engineer it to withstand the stress for X number of dives - 6 dives are far too few and and it is indicative of poor design and poor maintenance. - compare UA232 where it only happened after multiple years and 200+flights before it finally failed catastrophicly.
Pressure increases linearly in water because it's not compressible. You're probably thinking about the exponential increase in air
Whoops, I guess I made a mistake. Ah well.