I am a materials scientist working in another highly, highly regulated field, and part of my job is working on how to accelerate materials discovery and qualification for next-gen technology. Part of that means working with codes and standards bodies and regulatory agencies to get their acceptance in the new tech. It's going to take some time, but it's worth it.

Thus, the Titan story touches a particular nerve for me.

This entire tragedy could have been avoided if codes and standards were followed. The 2018 whistleblower was concerned about flaws in the carbon fiber composite that could grow and cause implosion failure after repeated pressure cycling. It looks like this is exactly what happened.

Let me point out that the pressure at 4000m is about 100 MPa: that's above or near the yield strength of many common alloys. It's a lot. Let me also point out that carbon fiber composite doesn't yield, it just fails catastrophically, and also let me point out the idea of Weibull statistics, which look at the variation of things like yield and ultimate strength for brittle materials - there is generally a large range of measured strength based on the internal flaw structure of a component. Whistleblower asked for non destructive examination of the material to understand its flaw structure: an extremely usual request and generally something that everyone is on board with doing. Why not here?

Multiple people raised concerns about the safety of this sub. Rush ignored them all, or refuted them all with BS arguments. He said they didn't need to qualify the sub because commercial subs were so safe over the last 35 years that it's just human error these days, ignoring that the reason subs are safe is BECAUSE they are qualified, leaving ONLY human error as a problem source! It's like saying "I don't need to vaccinate against measles because no one catches measles anymore"... Because everyone is vaccinated against measles! But look what happens when vax rates drop: we get measles case clusters.

Regulations are written in blood, and this was ignored by Rush. The first thing drilled in to you in engineering school is that you must protect the safety of the people you are engineering for. Rush abandoned this principle out of greed and hubris. And now a teenage boy is dead who didn't even want to go on this trip. It sickens me.

The more that comes out, it begins to seem like an extended murder/suicide pact. On the other hand, he likely just believed in his hype and really thought he could slap it all together. Tragic.

Rush said: "While there's obviously risk it's way safer than flying in a helicopter or even scuba diving. There hasn't been even an injury in 35 years in a non-military subs."

He also apparently said something like "almost all sub accidents are the result of pilot error".

These are both because almost all subs are certified for safety. A certification he specifically chose not to get, because of his belief about pilot error. The risk of mechanical faults is all but eliminated, leaving pilot error as the only likely risk - without the certification, mechanical faults are much more likely and, in this case in particular, almost inevitable.

They could save a lot of words by just saying that he was a capitalist.

If it was predatory, then why was he aboard, risking his own life?

Not sure how much of it is "predatory" behavior and how much of it is just a combination of being a masterful salesman + being really, really dumb, "drinking his own Kool-aid"... The dude was piloting the sub on every expedition after all

Hopefully this serves as a cautionary tale going forward and dissuades other misinformed people about the purpose of regulations. All loss of life is tragic but hopefully it can serve as a warning.

Guess he shouldn't have done that.

Lucky that mission was squashed

it's sounding like this guy was pretty awful

Okay, can we talk about this headline for a sec? It kinda sounds like we're about to hear from an expert 'predator' :'D "Yeah I've been ripping off investors for over a decade now and I can tell you this is exactly the sort of thing I'd do. Usually I don't die from it, though."

Yo, did something happen here or is my connection all messed up?

It looks like a bunch of comments disappeared from this thread, and even one I made is missing from my comment history.

loads of wicked smaht people after the fact. funny that. how about raising the alarm before he killed people ?