I just found out about this submarine like an hour ago. I feel really bad for the people trapped inside, especially the kid, but they kinda deserve it for even getting on this thing. Everyone's laughing at the CEO for his dumbass DEI policies, but this is just surface level stuff (lol). No one's actually explained the depths of how r-slurred this guy and his company are, so I thought I'd take some time out of my actual engineering job while I'm sitting in a boring butt zoom meeting to properly call this guy a fricking r-slur, so you can all find this just as funny as I do. I thought you all might appreciate it a little more than just some sporadic tweets about the DEI shit he did. This is going to be like a Challenger-style breakdown and what exactly went wrong so you can appreciate this frick-up.

There's gonna be a lot of naval puns in this so bear with me here. A lot of this is coming from my friend, also an engineer, who's done more research into this than I have.

In the Boatginning

Dramatards, I'd like to introduce you to Stockton Rush. Owner of the the most startup founder-ish name in history, this guy has been making janky submarines his entire life. He got his start in the aerospace industry, as a test engineer on the F-15 with McDonnell-Douglass. Anyone familiar with the industry will note that experience with McDonnell-Douglass is not necessarily a good thing on your resume.

https://www.businessinsider.in/international/news/maker-of-the-lost-titanic-sub-once-told-a-reporter-that-at-some-point-safety-is-just-pure-waste/amp_articleshow/101143398.cms

He's made a career out of building submarines that are cheaper and more accessible to the general population, and his company, OceanGate, has had a few successful designs. What's notable about his history, however, is that he's made them cheaper largely by bypassing safety standards. His first submarine that they operated was called Antipodes, was a refit sub built by a different company. Originally intended for research purposes, they used it instead for tourist dives.

The first actual submarine they built was the Cyclops 1, a carbon-fiber (we'll come back to this part) submarine controlled using a PlayStation controller, with an operational depth of 500m. The submarine is deployed/recovered from some weird floating drydock concept, which crucially allows them to not use human rated cranes to recover the submarine.

After seeing some moderate success, he's gone and built the submarine in question, the Titan, which is built from a composite carbon-fiber and titanium. They bought the hull from a company called Spencer Composites, who intended it to be SINGLE USE. The submarine was built to a factor-of-safety (multiple of how much of the expected load you can withstand before it breaks) of 2.25 (which is frick-all, especially for a submarine - should be at least 6, probably more like 10). . A lot of journ*lists who went on board the thing noted that most of the parts on the interior were sourced from local hardware stores, as were the ballast tanks. They were not, as you could imagine, comfortable about being on board once they realized this.

DEI-ing At Sea

https://twitter.com/CatchUpFeed/status/1671372796876984320?s=20

This guy's team is a bunch of young, impressionable diversity hires. He's explicitly avoided anyone with experience because they are old and white and men. They're not very inspirational, and so they don't have a place on Rush's team.

Anyone who has worked on an engineering project before knows that any engineer with less than 2 years of practical experience is a massive drain on the project and need to be babysat constantly, ESPECIALLY if they might kill someone. They're usually worth investing in because they'll give you a great return in the long run, but boy are those first couple of years hard.

I didn’t hire experienced people because I’m a racist

oh no my boat sank, how could this have possibly happened

This is going to go a long way to explain why what happened did happen, so buckle up.

Frick-up #1: Carboat-Fiber

Let's talk materials for a second. Carbon-fiber is what's called a composite material, because it's made from a couple of different types of material. You have the carbon fibers themselves, which are really resistant to being stretched in-plane (like pulling apart a sheet of paper), but have very little strength out of plane (like poking a hole in paper) or off-axis (they're woven into almost a cloth, if you pull at a 60 degree angle to that weave, they lose 80% of their strength).

Carbon fibers are usually set in place with solidified plastics, like epoxy. It solves a lot of problems as far as directional strength goes, but you still need to be careful with it. In a specific configuration, it has similar material properties to a common aerospace aluminium alloy (T-6061), while being a fraction of the weight. Great for airplanes and race cars, where mass is a factor.

Steel is the best material, and the only reason you use anything else is either because you don't want it to rust, or because you can't use steel. It's cheap, strong, and (crucially) it can be stressed over and over again without building up stress fractures. If you keep it under a certain limit, it will never break. NO OTHER MATERIAL DOES THIS.

This makes ideal for something that you're going to put under pressure, and then remove it from that pressure, over and over and over again, in a scenario where weight isn't a factor. Like, say, a submarine.

Stockton Rush, however, is way too cool for steel . He has instead decided to build his submarine out of the super cool airplane material, without understanding why its there in the first place. Composite materials are generally vulnerable to snapping if they're loaded repeatedly, which is why the company that built this refused to endorse it after finding out it was going to be used like it was.

It's never been used on submarines before, and with really good reason. It's not just not an optimal choice, it's literally the worst one possible. From the Business Insider article:

The Titan sub was never checked to see if it was up to standard because of its "innovation," OceanGate said in 2019. The sub features a carbon fiber hull that had never been used on submersibles before, according to the "Unsung Science" podcast.

Rush managed to bypass safety standards yet again by using completely different materials and then claiming that the standards aren't relevant. They make you sign a massive waiver when you sign up. No one has actually checked if this thing is safe. There's no standard it's being held to, there's no regulation, no third-party review. No matter how good you are, you can always frick up. Their cavalier attitude towards safety has now probably killed the CEO and four other people.

From their blog:

Maintaining high-level operational safety requires constant, committed effort and a focused corporate culture – two things that OceanGate takes very seriously and that are not assessed during classification.

But it's ok, because they have a corporate culture of safety.

Frick-up #2: Electronixed

So this is an interesting note that I found is that the submarine has no onboard navigational system,. Yes, you read that correctly. They operate it by having a different ship monitor its position, and then send it text messages telling it where it is.

Journ*list David Pogue, who rode in Titan to view the Titanic in 2022, noted that Titan was not equipped with an emergency locator beacon; during his expedition, the surface support vessel lost track of the Titan "for about five hours, and adding such a beacon was discussed. They could still send short texts to the sub, but did not know where it was. It was quiet and very tense, and they shut off the ship's internet to keep us from tweeting."

These people are all going to die

That's part of the reason they can't find it, is because the submarine doesn't know where it is, and can't tell anyone even if it did. It even failed before, and they still didn't fix it. That's not just stupid, it's criminally negligent.

The controls of this thing consist of a single button, and is piloted by a PlayStation controller. I'll point out that the idea of using a gamepad as a submarine helm control is not necessarily a bad one, and was actually implemented by USN submariners to great success. It's intuitive to zoomer helmsmen, really easy to teach, and was actually a way better control scheme than what they were using before. That being said, USN submarines are extremely well designed, very redundant, and extremely well-built. This stupid thing has none of that.

Because of the lack of navigation and emergency beacon, these people are very likely going to die, and it's going to be very unpleasant. It's really hard to find submarines even when they want to be found, and there's still no means of even rescuing these people even if they're found. They've got anti-submarine-warfare aircraft searching and everything, but still nothing.

Frick-up #3: Oxy-Constants

I can't think of a good pun for this. There's no real good source on this that I've seen because it's kind of an obscure problem, but they also fricked up the gas lines on the ship.

When maintaining an atmosphere for people to breathe, you have to be pretty careful with the gas composition. You need gas cyclers to remove CO2 buildup, and replace it with oxygen. Nitrogen doesn't need to be replaced because it's not consumed. This is standard on airplanes, submarines, spacecraft, anything sealed. Failure to do this was infamously the cause of the Apollo 1 disaster, where a pure, high-pressure oxygen atmosphere caused a dramatic fire when some nylon started to overheat.

Can you guess what OceanGate have done?

That's right, they've been injecting pure oxygen into the cabin, with untested electronics on board.

Jesus Christ, guys. You get so many startup CEOs bitching about safety standards, and every now and then when they push the limits, we all get a very public reminder of why they're there in the first place. And it usually costs the lives of people who were tricked into getting onto that stupid butt vehicle in the first place.

!effortposters