>Wow. What kind of hubris could look past that huge red flag?
The "bad-boy" disruptive innovator kind that doesn't play by the rules and that's worshiped in SV because he makes his wealth playing fast and loose around old stuffy bureaucratic regulations made by "evil old men" to gatekeep innovators like him from entering the naval market held by centuries year old corporations who actually know what they're doing.
The problem for him was that, unlike consumer tech, the laws of physics can't be disrupted. He'd tell you that himself if he'd still be alive. Shame that four other people had to perish to prove him wrong.
The billionaire dad should be shamed along too to drag his son along. He could easily call Cameron for professional opinion. Instead he thought savings of 150K warranted to risk his young son to play along his stupid game of death for a stupid prize of sudden permanent blackout. He won.
This is a dead person who isn’t here to defend himself. I am certain that if he had a chance to reclaim life and correct a mistake, he would. As in airplane accidents, though it is sometimes hubris or poor communication, it is more often a chain of incorrect decisions that were at the time rationalized as safe. Nobody is trying to die.
Well, Korean Air got a lot of flag, including dead air crews, after bad cockpit management let to hull losses. And OceanGate did fire people voicing concerns. They did ignore warnings from a lot experts. And Rush was actually proud of breaking rules and established design principles. He also decided to not certify Titan before taking paying passengers to the Titanic.
Well, as the first video in the submitted article points out, this move fast and braek things attitude, safety and professional standards be damned, is infecting the real world now. Besides my utter disdain for hype, that is the main problem I have with Musk, for me he is the main culprit in normalizing those otherwise unacceptable practices.
I hope it changes, bacause as we have seen it kills people, litterally. Titan was actually worse than Titanic, because the engineering of Titanic was actually sound for the time, saftey procedures and seamanship were not. The latter changed significantly after the Titanic, lets hope that this SV stained engineering culture will, too, after Titan.
It's pretty much 1/3 the depth which is suspiciously close to a 3x safety factor which is what I've always heard engineers use. They certainly seemed cavalier with safety, so it wouldn't surprise me if they reasoned about it in that way.
A rocket might have a factor of safety of around 1.1. This is because at 1.3, they’ll never leave the ground. This is why they are so carefully monitored and tested, and still fail.
It’s all relative. Good engineering doesn’t mean higher number.
No one knows what the FOS for this sub was. Given the information from the CEO, things like that were just slowing down innovation!
> What kind of hubris could look past that huge red flag?
I don't think it was outright hubris. I think it was commercial necessity, driven by the business model that OceanGate used: Rush needed rich tourists to fund the business, and he got rich tourists by offering them a close-up view of a famous shipwreck. To give his passengers a view that they were willing to pay for, he needed an oversized viewport.
He had already proven this business model with his earlier submarines, so it is understandable that he wanted to carry it on as he built vehicles intended to go deeper. Less understandable is that he set aside the reality that a large-enough viewport could not actually be safely procured. That's not really hubris though, just plain old profit-driven idiocy. The whole thing feels like it has less in common with the Titanic and more in common with the Ford Pinto.
> What kind of hubris could look past that huge red flag?
The same kind that is proud of saving money by buying carbon fiber for the craft at a significant discount from Boeing because it is surplus that is too old to be considered safe for aviation use, says “safety is pure waste”, etc.
Wow. What kind of hubris could look past that huge red flag?
Apparently the kind that thinks it is interesting that it deforms by several inches and not scary