I worked at SIO for 5 years around the mid 2000s, but not on FLIP. Many of the folks there were remarkable people. One such person was one of the people who got FLIP started, Walter Munk.[^1]
He was an interesting guy. He left Austria during the Anschluss and started working on his doctorate at SIO. When the US entered the war he put his PhD on pause to enlist in the US Army Ski Corps. As a native German speaker and former ski instructor, he thought it was a good fit.
A little over a year later, the Department of War found out from Roger Revelle and Harald Sverdrup that they had a talented oceanographer deployed to the front lines. So they pulled him out to help with submarine warfare and the planning of some upcoming amphibious landings in Africa, and later, Normandy.
He was still working at SIO into his 90s. And, as was the case with all the scientists and staff at SIO, he was an all-around nice person.
SIO was a chill place to work. A good portion of the folks kept surfboards in their offices so they could surf before work. You weren't going to get rich working there, but the people and the location were hard to beat.
I visited SIO briefly in the late 80s, and my most vivid memory is of a long haired dude in a Hawaiian shirt bursting into our meeting to announce "surf's up!", at which point everything stopped and everyone left. Back then it all seemed impossibly exotic to a PhD student from London.
As someone who recently started surfing, I understand the cultural timing a lot more now.
Good surfing requires pretty particular types of waves. Which in turn requires particular wind. Even at good locations, these are transient conditions that can appear and disappear at the whim of nature (even over the course of an hour).
Ergo, surf's up = drop things that don't need to be done ASAP
They'll be there later. Good waves probably won't.
Oof, those are some gnarly waves. Wave structure as a surfed experience is my favorite part so far: there are so many wave nuances I never noticed before.
Australian slabs - the big ones out of the polar south tend to have waves within waves and can even "triple curve" over; I'm in the west The Right (last of the three) was my local for a few years.
I used to surf near Scripps Pier while in college and I remember there were always a couple people sitting outside in beach chairs working on their laptops.
Here's a video of someone walking all around the ship. With the number of ladders to climb it seems like everyday was leg day for the scientists aboard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shPATcV9Dzw
Zero emission vessel by design using wind generators and solar panels with battery storage to power things. So much has changed over the years. It really is a great time to be a researcher since all your computing gear fits in a much smaller space and can be powered by options that don't force you to breathe diesel smoke.
In contrast, FLIP used 3 diesel generators. I watched the 27+ minute video from 1969 linked by someone else and was struck by how much it reminded me of offshore O&G platforms and drilling rigs with steel walls and diesel generators screaming. The guys in the video wore no hearing protection in the generator room. It was loud on the video and from wandering thru a generator room on land I know it had to be deafening. I have tinnitus from all the loud machinery that I worked around and it does impact your quality of life. As a service company hand you always got the bunks in the cabins closest to the noise sources so there was no way to escape.
When you combine the generator noise with the noise from those dot matrix printers you get a nice wide-band noise source. Since the FLIP was studying acoustic signals they must've overcome the constant noise from the platform by filtering. I know from some ocean bottom receivers that I worked with that you can hear individual boats entering and leaving a recording area through a water column that is thousands of feet thick. Since the generators ran 24 hours a day they likely needed some signal processing to mitigate the constant noise.
And back in 1969 what OS would they be using? CP/M? The rack they loaded in the FLIP video looked a lot like an old DEC Vax rack-mounted computer that we scrapped back in the 1980's.
Another thing I noticed about FLIP is that many of the ladders used to access the different levels appear to be hardware store aluminum ladders as opposed to built to purpose ladders. I think the POD will have the benefit of experience gained with the FLIP to hone their design so that access issues are streamlined and efficient. In their ePOD course (very cool stuff there) about the living quarters you can see that ladders are fixed in position.
Thanks for this link. For those that watched the video of FLIP I recommend walking through the courses in the ePOD part of this POD link.
In 1969, CP/M (and the 8080) didn't exist, and the first PDP-11 was released in 1970. I'd think they would have started out with something like a PDP-8 (or the LINC-8 variant). I'd hope that computing hardware has been updated multiple times over the lifetime of the ship.
I suspect there is very little justification for a manned platform anymore.
It requires are crew of five (not including the up-to 11 scientists). Much of the science would probably be better off without noise introduced by crew and the generators.
Scientists might be better off with an unmanned battery powered platform. Or unmanned ROVs.
And if you do need a manned platform, the deep sea oil industry now operates hundreds of them. It might be cheaper for scientists to simply piggy-back on those.
>And if you do need a manned platform, the deep sea oil industry now operates hundreds of them. It might be cheaper for scientists to simply piggy-back on those.
Not that much cheaper. At least in the US based oil companies I have worked with, the cost of sending even one person to an offshore platform can easily exceed 20k USD. Everyone on the platform has to have extensive safety training. Only a few training facilities are setup to do things like Helicopter Underwater Escape Training [1] so the cost is pretty high.
I think there are probably dozens of things like this(not exactly but random things) that could use also millions. Like that observatory. And there is only so much willingness to spend money.
A sad commentary no doubt. But, it is always tough to get donors to cough up sustainment funds. The glamor is in the new. Might be easier to get more if the naming rights are offered up. Newer isn't always better but one can hope the same foresight and build quality can be brought to a future design.
Is it only about money or could it also be about its usefulness? I have no information on this, but like when Arecibo collapsed, there were discussions about how much it would cost to fix it and how useful it could be. Maybe it has made a lot of research, and some new research directions would better make use of another kind of tool?
The FLIP was a novelty, and there's really not a need to switch orientation now that ROVs are common. It lived and died as an outlier. Rest in peace, RP FLIP.
It's one of those things that dates from a period in the 1960s when the oceans were seen as worthy of exploration as the Moon. People talked about undersea cities. But only a few very tiny undersea research habitats were ever built. There just wasn't a use case.
More specifically it dates from that Cold War period where submarine related activity was disguised as "Ocean Research" and slathered with pictures of dolphins.
FLIP was all about those undersea sound waves, thermal gradients and sloping ocean bottoms.
- Nuclear power
- Access to Earth orbit
- GPS
- Mapping of the world's oceans
- Miniaturized circuits
- The Internet
- Interstate road systems
- Hubble Space Telescope
- Earth observation satellites
For such a horrible technology, humanity seems to have made out okay.
I think R/V FLIP was also the inspiration for the Operation Hennessey underwater sea laboratory in Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou that Zissou's crew steals an espresso machine from.
The spirit of FLIP is inspiring to me — it emphasises the importance of doing things and gathering data.
In our field of technology, ideas, performance, growth, and debugging there’s only so much value talking and so much more value in measuring. Data and experiments have driven my projects forward so many more times than ideas and meetings.
I find it amusing how prudish the article is about its purpose, ie. support "U.S. Navy [ocean modeling] research objectives". that pretty much means submarine and acoustic warfare.
From Wikipedia [1]: "When flipped, most of the ballast for the platform is provided by water at depths below the influence of surface waves, hence FLIP is stable and mostly immune to wave action similar to a spar buoy." Its mass wasn't sitting on the moving surface, but largely surrounded by water that wasn't moving much.
I think that the reason is that waves only move water close to the surface, and FLIP's drag is centered way below it. It's clear to me how this should reduce rolling and lolling, but am less certain how it should affect bobbing.
You can see on the pictures that the ship is very narrow in the middle (that becomes the stairwell/elevator shaft for going down into the undersea researchy areas), so when it stands on end, the waves cause relatively small changes in the buoyancy. The big forepeak that provides reserve buoyancy so the thing doesn't sink outright if a big wave hits it, sits well above the water surface.
He was an interesting guy. He left Austria during the Anschluss and started working on his doctorate at SIO. When the US entered the war he put his PhD on pause to enlist in the US Army Ski Corps. As a native German speaker and former ski instructor, he thought it was a good fit.
A little over a year later, the Department of War found out from Roger Revelle and Harald Sverdrup that they had a talented oceanographer deployed to the front lines. So they pulled him out to help with submarine warfare and the planning of some upcoming amphibious landings in Africa, and later, Normandy.
He was still working at SIO into his 90s. And, as was the case with all the scientists and staff at SIO, he was an all-around nice person.
SIO was a chill place to work. A good portion of the folks kept surfboards in their offices so they could surf before work. You weren't going to get rich working there, but the people and the location were hard to beat.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Munk