New evidence strongly suggests that OceanGate’s submersible, which imploded and killed all passengers on its way to the Titanic wreck, was unfit for the journey. The CEO, Stockton Rush, bought discounted carbon fiber past its shelf life from Boeing, which experts say is a terrible choice for a deep-sea vessel. This likely played a role in the submersible’s tragic demise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can’t believe people smart enough to acquire the wealth for that excursion
You do not need to be smart to acquire wealth.
Of the people in the sub, I am confident that 4/5 of them were born into wealth, and I can't really find any information on the other one.
The Dawoods (father and son) were only wealthy because their father/grandfather was wealthy.
Stockton Rush was also born into wealth, his family made their money from oil and shipping.
Can't find a lot of information about Hamish Harding, but he was flying aeroplanes at 13 and went to a prestigious private school called The King's School, so it's safe to say he was also born into considerable wealth.
Initially, I thought Stockton Rush couldn't be a total moron because he had a degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton, but having followed the college admissions scandal, we know what those degrees are actually worth. Crap.
The college admissions scandal was for people who didn't have enough money to donate for an entrance ticket. If you're rich rich you just donate a bunch of money and your kid gets in, no scandal necessary
The 5th guy worked for the company that owned the salvage rights to the Titanic, was a professional diver, and was considered an expert on the Titanic, and he'd been on a lot of dives before to recover artifacts and map the wreck.
He more than anyone should have known this was the crappiest sub he'd ever been on, but he was seemingly obsessed. I can imagine he was invited and didn't pay for a slot.
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 have met several gazillionaires. Some are quite smart, some not so much - but every one of them thinks that they’re smarter and more capable than they are
I don't get why carbon fiber was used in the first place. The composite material is known for its great tensile strength: tensile as in tension, not compression. Carbon fiber is actually also known for being lousy at handling crushing (compressive) loads. If you crush carbon fiber, it'll fail shortly after.
Going under water would place the vessel under compressive loads, which at a quick glance would be the wrong type of loads for carbon fiber. That's my initial take on it, however I haven't spent any real time trying to engineer one.
First, he was an aerospace guy and several things he's said make me think he was sort of chauvinistic about deep sea exploration in general, stuff like "It’s perfectly fine. Having all these certifications for airplanes is one thing, but the carbon fiber was perfectly sound."
Second, his business model, taking four people down with him in something other than Cameronesque claustrophia, and doing so without the cost of owning a proper launch vessel, instead renting any ship that could hold and then monitor his launch sled, meant it was critical he make something big and light, by deep sea submersible standards, that was at least nominally expected to handle the load. Shit, I guess in some sense, he did, since it went down and back two or three times or whatever. At the absolute best, though, he'd invented a disposable sub, and he clearly didn't worry about that limitation any more than the rest.
Fiber composites are complex. Carbon fibers can be made to withstand compressive loads in that you make composites with the CF and other materials. Even so carbon fibers are about half as strong in compression as tension. Even so, carbon fiber might have a specific strength of around 3000 kN-m/kg, steels might be around 63 kN-m/kg. So it's not as simple as "carbon fiber isn't as good in compression as tension, never use it in compression." A lot of current research in aerospace is to produce better manufacturing methods and resins for carbon fibers to phase out aluminum and steel parts. Mostly in tension yes, but compression too, all parts without preloading generally are some degree in compression during their stress lives.
Should he have bought expired carbon fiber for a submarine? No. Is carbon fiber completely absurd in submarine usage? I don't imagine so. Though steel is plenty fine for a submarine, normally the hard part is the sinking by design, not the floating, so weight savings aren't super important.
Would be interesting so see a statistic on deep water sub excursions versus fatalities. Probably somewhere between astronauts and WWII bomber crews.
There is little regulation for deep sea subs since they operate in international waters out of jurisdiction. You can pretty much do whatever the hell you want out there. If someone manufactures within jurisdiction, regulations may apply. Though they would be easy to circumvent.
Definitely good safety and engineering practice is written in blood, but regulations are not always enforceable.
Being smart is a strict non-requirement for acquireing wealth. You really don't need to be smart to get wealthy. You need to be unscrupulous enough to rip off others. You need to be happy to gamble a lot of money on risky ventures and you need to be lucky enough that the risky ventures work out and don't blow up.
And inheriting lots of money and connections usually helps as well.
Incidentally, this seems to fit the bill for someone who'd pay a quarter million to poop in front of 4 people on the way to an assisted suicide where in the best case you can watch a video feed of the Titanic.
I wonder if there was some level of wealthy person peer pressure involved. Rich people aren't that stupid (I'm being generous here and looking for reasons) and maybe there would be some backlash in not going ahead with things, even if red flags were found. It's not like those flags were hard to see, apparently anyone in the submersible field knew this guy and what he was doing wrong.
It would have been a brilliant business move if it had worked. Shysters and cheats have been mixing in expired or substandard additives to food and drug products for all of history. As long as nobody dies, and you don't get caught, it's just free money in your pocket. I believe it was Heintz, around the turn of the 20th century, who lobbied strongly in favor of the Pure Food and Drugs Act in the US because he felt it would give him a competitive advantage over others by requiring the additives in food be safe. Crazy concept, right?
From my limited experience with laying up carbon fiber, I know there's the raw carbon fiber cloth and there's liquid resin that you spread into the cloth. It's also very common to see carbon fiber cloth that is "pre-impregnated" - the resin is already applied to the cloth. Everyone calls this "pre-preg".
So I've seen a lot of folks online scratching their heads about "how can carbon expire?" or "my carbon fiber (bike/boat/etc.) is N-years old, is it expired?" but I think the most likely thing to expire is the resin. Once the resin is cured it is much more stable.
Any materials folks or structures engineers who want step in and correct me, please do.
I'm seeing a lot of misconceptions in the replies. You have it mainly right from a very high level.
The reason why prepreg "expires" is simply that the resin system is mixed before being impregnated into the fibers, so it starts the curing reaction immediately. These resin systems are usually designed to cure properly at high temperatures, typically 250-400F depending on end-use, but they'll still slowly react at lower temperatures. To further slow the reaction, prepreg is kept frozen. Prepreg also has two types of expirations: "shelf life" and "out life". Shelf life is how long it can last frozen. Out life is how long it can last at room temp.
Theres a few issues that can happen when using expired prepreg. It can be harder to laminate since it will be too stiff and not as sticky. It won't cure correctly causing failures in the resin.
Expired prepreg can be recertified by testing the material for those types of failures. Check if the prepreg can fold over a certain radius and stick to a certain angle without sliding off. Cure a sample and test it to see if cured properly.
So I’ve seen a lot of folks online scratching their heads about “how can carbon expire?” or “my carbon fiber (bike/boat/etc.) is N-years old, is it expired?” but I think the most likely thing to expire is the resin.
Well it would have an expiry if purchased from Boeing. All materials used in aircraft have stringent performance requirements. Resin is a plastic and like all plastics it degrades over time. It can lose strength and fail to meet materials ratings. Now if you wanted to make something like a regular boat hull out of the stuff it would probably last a lifetime, but if you want to make something like an airplane wing, that's a different story.
Anyway carbon fiber composite is stronger and lighter than steel, but the wonderful thing about metals is they can have good properties for supporting all kinds of loads. But even then you have to inspect for fatigue on a regular basis when loads cycle repeatedly. Carbon fiber doesn't do as well with that.
I agree with all of that. My intuition is that prior to curing, the polymers are less stable and may change in unpredictable ways depending on subtleties in the storage environment and handling. After curing, the polymers are much more stable and durable.
Metals definitely are more forgiving, and we have better tools for testing, especially non-destructive testing. Whether the CF flaws are due to fatigue or workmanship, it's easy to miss them in inspection.
I'm also curious what the sub designers saw as the advantage of CF for this application. Is light weight really all that advantageous for a submersible? Generally no one chooses CF if they are prioritizing cost.
I don't see where it fits as a good solution either. Typically it's used where weight is the main consideration, such as in aircraft. CF is more expensive, has higher maintenance cost, and more difficult to produce than metal. Was it more about doing something different than doing it better? Well the tried an true method for deep sea submarines is a titanium sphere and that's quite expensive so it probably was a lot cheaper.
They were trying to get the sub to be as light as possible so it could be operated from nearly any vessel. The goal was to have the sub and a launch sled that could be launched and recovered aboard a rented ship. This was all to save money; they didn't want to have to purchase and outfit a special purpose support vessel.
I think the design was flawed from the start, proper stress testing would have revealed it. From what I understand they basically sent it down a few times and said all good, we're done.
The sub did have titanium front and rear bulkheads. If their goal was to make it cheap and light, they might have done better hatching together a train of CF spheres. A cylinder is not strong enough.
Though to be fair, even the best design with the most rigorous testing can fail catastrophically. If that weren't the case space flight would carry no risk. And space is easier to deal with than the pressure at 4km ocean depth. Still that doesn't change my opinion of Rush, he was a hack.
The design was definitely flawed from the start. The carbon fiber is not a good material to use for repeated stress cycling. Each time the carbon fiber compresses it causes tiny fractures in the resin. They basically made a one-time use sub as each time it was used the carbon fiber became weaker. There was no way to test how weak it had become because testing it would further weaken it.
Even worse, in the only third party testing that was performed, by the University of Washington, they rated the original iteration of the Titan only up to 9800 ft. As far as I can tell, Oceangate never redesigned the sub after that, and still decided to take people to 13,000 ft.
Also, given that Rush would brag about how cheap the original hull was, I doubt they fully replaced it when they noticed cyclic fatigue in the sub later. To me it looks like they did some kind of shoddy repair. And that's the Titan everyone ended up with.
Also, given that Rush would brag about how cheap the original hull was
I've seen some short interview clips with him and it seemed like he was proud of how cheaply and recklessly he was doing shit. I'd only have to talk to the guy for five minutes and make up my mind I'm not getting near anything he's doing. Those ill-fated tourists had conversations with him a lot longer than that.
It could have been fresh from the factory and would have had the same result It was an improper application of the material to save on the more expensive titanium Same with the acrylic viewport, while not the best material it’s the design that was non-standard Quartz would have been better but more expensive Not the time to cheap out on materials, design, nor experience when lives are on the line
Fresh from the factory might have got away with it, they tried to reuse a vessel that was barely useable for 1 journey and had known material flaws that would have limited the number of pressurisation cycles the craft could have taken.
I'm so conflicted on this. On the one hand he seems like a giant asshole that saves on safety to make a few more bucks but on the other hand he trusted his system completely and died with it. So not really greedy asshole but stupid entrepreneur who didn't realize how wrong he was?
I guess society needs people like him that make crazy things. Science itself is pretty much like this, trying out stuff and be creative. People often made inventions while other people were telling them that it would be impossible to do so.
However, I think where he actually behaved really like an asshole was taking people with him who he made believe to be in a safe vessel. He could have made a disclaimer saying something like "this is an experimental vessel, I'm not sure if it will hold up and people have warned me. I still want to take the risk and you can come, too, if you are willing to take the same risk."
Taking risks for the sake of innovation, fine, I guess it has to be done to move forward. However, building a submersible that can go to these depths is nothing new. Been there, done that, basically. To throw all lessons learnt with previous vehicles out with the garbage is just monumentally stupid.
Engineers and scientists do try to do and make crazy things but they try to do it safely, and doing it safely costs money which he didn't want to spend.
I guess the most positive spin is that he risked and gave his life to try new things which can progress things more quickly, but he didn't just risk his own life, he risked the passengers which is unforgivable. If he were doing it solo to not endanger others then I could respect that.
Thing is, as James Cameron pointed out in his interviews, this is not a cutting-edge field. The science of submersibles is well explored and the technologies are mature. Engineers know exactly how to construct a safe submersible to go as deep as you want. There are companies like this that make and sell these submersibles.
This guy was not doing research or experimentation. He was trying to cut costs because he probably couldn’t afford a proper submersible under his business model and still make a profit. The only reason for using unconventional materials - materials that are well known to be unsuitable for this purpose - was that he thought he could do it more cheaply if he didn’t go through safety certification or buy a sub that had already been certified. The point was to spend less money by taking more risks and make a profit. He was not innovating, and he was arrogantly overconfident, to the point of overriding all the experts who had warned him this would get people killed.
It's one thing if he died alone and another when he took other 4 people with him. I would still chalk it up to greedy asshole, because he cheap out things that would've saved the four people.
<insert yo mama joke here>
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