For the record I am a mechanical engineer with experience in both aviation and high pressure applications. This story is reading less like one of the "Brave Intrepid Explorer" and more like "Jackass - Deep Sea Edition"
First item to be addressed, the use of carbon fiber in the hull design. Fiber matrix components are goto material for light weight and areas where tensile loads dominate. This material not to be put under compression as it has only minimal load capacity. Fiber matrixes are also not to be exposed to environments where fiber delamination via the environment can occur.
Second item to address, is the lack of testing. A vessel design for 6000psi has to be physically tested far beyond that pressure (likely 1.5 to 3x the design load). This is to account for variations in the environment, flaws in material, and flaws in fabrication. For craft that are critical for human safety its best practice to test at least one article to complete failure.
Third item to address, is the lack of peer review. If you come up with a design that is outside traditional approaches it is extremely important to have outside parties review your work. This is done because it is very easy to get tunnel vision as a designer and miss an important detail. Refusing to do so is frankly arrogant.
Last item is LCF - Low Cycle Fatigue. I suspect this is the primary failure mode. When you repeated load a vessel to its close to its design limit you incur damage to the structure. After each cycle the absolute limit of pressure the vessel can take becomes slightly less than the previous cycle. Then eventually as the operator takes the vessel to a pressure limit they previously had descended to multiple times before, the material fails. This failure when it happens is catastrophic and completely unexpected.
In many ways, many or most of the pathologies of contemporary society have a common thread: ever-increasing risk-aversion and insistence that others share your aversion. At my own Substack (graboyes.substack.com), recent pieces have concerned college safe spaces, kids passing their childhoods confined to their own yards, the FDA's increasing resistance to drug and device approvals, resistance to self-imployment, rush to regulate AI. A friend's father worked on the Shuttle program at the time of the Challenger disaster. He said that the mistake in the run-up to Christa McAuliffe's flight was implying that spaceflight had become routine. Every flight, he said, was effectively a brand-new experimental vehicle and should be viewed as such. ... ... In discussing the submersible catastrophe today, I named someone who truly defied contemporary safetyism in the most iconic way. Barbara Morgan was McAuliffe's backup teacher for the Challenger mission. On YouTube, you can find a gut-wrenching video of her watching McAuliffe and their other six friends blown apart in the sky. And yet, despite that indelible memory, Morgan spent years reinventing herself so that, in 1998, she could qualify as a mission specialist and, in 2007, orbit the earth for 12 days. More like her, please. ... ... Make no mistake, what seems like mere virtue signaling by safetyists is really much worse. It is a concerted effort to shame those who take risks and to inform others that risk-taking is morally unacceptable. Unfortunately, as we know from a generation of cloistered childhoods, this social pressure works all too well.
Glenn, you’ve made me change my opinion on this. I’m a little ashamed now of how indifferent I was to the fate of what I took to be foolish thrill seekers. But you’re right, sometimes the difference between hubris and courage is just luck. I wouldn’t welcome a world where thrill seeking and pushing the envelope was banned.
I am a longtime fan of your writing and, I must say,this Substack effort is so worth it to me. Thank you for an excellent posting on a sad ending to a complicated adventure. Arm chair critics will have plenty say and that’s fine. But the long, long, view, the one where curious explorers go down to the sea in ships, will always be praised. And needed.
My reaction wasn’t to the submersible or the people in it, my reaction was to the bloggers who called these people ‘intrepid explorers’.
No, they weren’t. They were sightseers who had the cash to go gawk at the Titanic. Which is fine.
It’s their money and their lives. Go for it. I’m sure they knew there’d be some risk. There are lots of boring way to die, so dying instantaneously while doing something exciting and risky isn’t so bad.
But it is highly unlikely there would be any new groundbreaking discoveries made. So I don’t think explorers is the right word.
I don’t imagine there was anything like a ‘black box’ that could be recovered and used to find out what went wrong. That might be useful information.
Ultimately, I just feel bad for their families and friends. I hope their wills were in order.
Also: I had a very close friend who rode the Space Shuttle twice as an astronomer/payload specialist. That was probably comparable in terms of risk, but at least he was involved in some groundbreaking research, using UV and X-Ray sensitive telescopes above the Earth’s atmosphere.
Otoh, when then-Senator Bill Nelson wangled a ride on the Shuttle, he was merely a gawker riding along for the thrill. His trip into space served no purpose, had zero scientific use, and he made no new discoveries.
Jun 24, 2023·edited Jun 24, 2023Liked by Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Your first point struck a chord with regard to your recent column on AI.
The dangers from extinction by superintelligence boil down to the fact that we seem much closer to automating intelligence than we are to automating empathy. An artificial superintelligence that has agency but no empathy is exactly what you would expect to kill us, not through animus but just because we are irrelevant and potentially obstructive.
This difference is sort of expectable, as intelligence evolved over a relatively short time; it is a thin veneer on our total nature, notwithstanding its revolutionary consequences. Moravec noted decades ago the surprising fact that the things we think of as hardest, like chess, are in fact much easier to duplicate than the things we think are easiest, like walking and seeing.
The alignment of customer and business in wanting a relatively safe vehicle is the key point. The founder of the business died. I'm pretty sure, as a passenger, he wanted to survive. So the idea that key safety features were glibly skipped to make more money makes no sense.
I heard reported today that the Coast Guard is going to carry out the investigation. I object to this use of tax dollars. Of course I'm curious to more more about exactly what happened, but my curiosity doesn't justify tax expenditures. I'm fine with the NTSB doing detailed studies of downed aircraft but we have a public interest in airline safety and that's a legitimate role. I'm also curious about exactly what happened to cause deaths on Everest and other high mountains but I wouldn't remotely consider expecting US tax dollars to do the investigation.
I agree with you. There should be an investigation but it should be paid for with private funds. If the company still has the money, the checks to pay for the investigation should start there.
Yes, stories like this reveal the psychopaths among the left. In fact, maybe they are the driving force of today's "tolerant" left. The worst I read was the New Republic's revelation that Stockton Rush often donated to ... Republicans! What kind of sickness is it to dive into the election records upon hearing about a man's death, to see if the dead adventurer had it coming?
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that there may be negligence involved on the part of the company. According to the new republic, the original pilot and person responsible for safety ended up in a lawsuit with the company over the safety of the sub and specifically the hatch. It’s a tragedy, either way.
I’ve seen a ton of different opinions. Really sad that there are people out there that want to either politicize this or wish the worst on people they don’t necessarily share the same values with..
I've been thinking lately on the Challenger disaster and President Reagan's speech that evening. The aquanauts didn't "slip the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God," but they died in the service of pushing the boundaries of science and human potential. It's a worthy goal.
Having worked with the stuff, the composite bothers me. Otherwise, it's hard to feel sorrow over people I don't know: it is sad they died and the craft failed, but they, like the pilots you mention, knew the risks. But to actually be glad someone died who isn't actively threatening you suggest to me you have somehow failed as human.
And there are worse ways to go that pushing the limits of things.
Wasn't Donne who said all deaths lessen us? God grant them mercy.
I think you missed one perspective which is that they were spitting in the face of engineering and physics and suffered the inevitable result when you do that and we shouldn't shed any tears for them nor should we pretend that they were explorers or innovators. If you put a loaded gun to your head and pull the trigger you're not advancing the field of gun design or probability or whatever. You're just committing suicide. By all appearances this sub was just an elaborate and expensive route to the same outcome. The kid dying is sad but big picture this is just what happens when hubris mixes with deadly reality.
Correct. They were not explorers or innovators. They wanted to get their jollies by looking at a mass grave site through a window the size of a large-capacity washing machine, while inside a small tube subjected to unfathomable pressures. It is sad that they died and I don’t begrudge them their wealth, not even a little bit. But our sympathy is best offered elsewhere. Comparing these people to Amelia Earhart or Sally Ride is right at the pinnacle of nonsense.
Nope. And if they are, good for them. Someone has to take the first step(s) into unknown territory.
Flying "outside the envelop" is how we discover that yesterday's limits are not todays. Amelia Earhart knew the risks, including death, but she risked all anyway. If she is a hero, so are the Titanic 5.
Take # 2 needs to be expanded upon.
For the record I am a mechanical engineer with experience in both aviation and high pressure applications. This story is reading less like one of the "Brave Intrepid Explorer" and more like "Jackass - Deep Sea Edition"
First item to be addressed, the use of carbon fiber in the hull design. Fiber matrix components are goto material for light weight and areas where tensile loads dominate. This material not to be put under compression as it has only minimal load capacity. Fiber matrixes are also not to be exposed to environments where fiber delamination via the environment can occur.
Second item to address, is the lack of testing. A vessel design for 6000psi has to be physically tested far beyond that pressure (likely 1.5 to 3x the design load). This is to account for variations in the environment, flaws in material, and flaws in fabrication. For craft that are critical for human safety its best practice to test at least one article to complete failure.
Third item to address, is the lack of peer review. If you come up with a design that is outside traditional approaches it is extremely important to have outside parties review your work. This is done because it is very easy to get tunnel vision as a designer and miss an important detail. Refusing to do so is frankly arrogant.
Last item is LCF - Low Cycle Fatigue. I suspect this is the primary failure mode. When you repeated load a vessel to its close to its design limit you incur damage to the structure. After each cycle the absolute limit of pressure the vessel can take becomes slightly less than the previous cycle. Then eventually as the operator takes the vessel to a pressure limit they previously had descended to multiple times before, the material fails. This failure when it happens is catastrophic and completely unexpected.
In many ways, many or most of the pathologies of contemporary society have a common thread: ever-increasing risk-aversion and insistence that others share your aversion. At my own Substack (graboyes.substack.com), recent pieces have concerned college safe spaces, kids passing their childhoods confined to their own yards, the FDA's increasing resistance to drug and device approvals, resistance to self-imployment, rush to regulate AI. A friend's father worked on the Shuttle program at the time of the Challenger disaster. He said that the mistake in the run-up to Christa McAuliffe's flight was implying that spaceflight had become routine. Every flight, he said, was effectively a brand-new experimental vehicle and should be viewed as such. ... ... In discussing the submersible catastrophe today, I named someone who truly defied contemporary safetyism in the most iconic way. Barbara Morgan was McAuliffe's backup teacher for the Challenger mission. On YouTube, you can find a gut-wrenching video of her watching McAuliffe and their other six friends blown apart in the sky. And yet, despite that indelible memory, Morgan spent years reinventing herself so that, in 1998, she could qualify as a mission specialist and, in 2007, orbit the earth for 12 days. More like her, please. ... ... Make no mistake, what seems like mere virtue signaling by safetyists is really much worse. It is a concerted effort to shame those who take risks and to inform others that risk-taking is morally unacceptable. Unfortunately, as we know from a generation of cloistered childhoods, this social pressure works all too well.
"A Chicago Saturday night with only five deaths would be a triumph of nonviolence" slew me.
Glenn, you’ve made me change my opinion on this. I’m a little ashamed now of how indifferent I was to the fate of what I took to be foolish thrill seekers. But you’re right, sometimes the difference between hubris and courage is just luck. I wouldn’t welcome a world where thrill seeking and pushing the envelope was banned.
I am a longtime fan of your writing and, I must say,this Substack effort is so worth it to me. Thank you for an excellent posting on a sad ending to a complicated adventure. Arm chair critics will have plenty say and that’s fine. But the long, long, view, the one where curious explorers go down to the sea in ships, will always be praised. And needed.
My reaction wasn’t to the submersible or the people in it, my reaction was to the bloggers who called these people ‘intrepid explorers’.
No, they weren’t. They were sightseers who had the cash to go gawk at the Titanic. Which is fine.
It’s their money and their lives. Go for it. I’m sure they knew there’d be some risk. There are lots of boring way to die, so dying instantaneously while doing something exciting and risky isn’t so bad.
But it is highly unlikely there would be any new groundbreaking discoveries made. So I don’t think explorers is the right word.
I don’t imagine there was anything like a ‘black box’ that could be recovered and used to find out what went wrong. That might be useful information.
Ultimately, I just feel bad for their families and friends. I hope their wills were in order.
Also: I had a very close friend who rode the Space Shuttle twice as an astronomer/payload specialist. That was probably comparable in terms of risk, but at least he was involved in some groundbreaking research, using UV and X-Ray sensitive telescopes above the Earth’s atmosphere.
Otoh, when then-Senator Bill Nelson wangled a ride on the Shuttle, he was merely a gawker riding along for the thrill. His trip into space served no purpose, had zero scientific use, and he made no new discoveries.
Your first point struck a chord with regard to your recent column on AI.
The dangers from extinction by superintelligence boil down to the fact that we seem much closer to automating intelligence than we are to automating empathy. An artificial superintelligence that has agency but no empathy is exactly what you would expect to kill us, not through animus but just because we are irrelevant and potentially obstructive.
This difference is sort of expectable, as intelligence evolved over a relatively short time; it is a thin veneer on our total nature, notwithstanding its revolutionary consequences. Moravec noted decades ago the surprising fact that the things we think of as hardest, like chess, are in fact much easier to duplicate than the things we think are easiest, like walking and seeing.
The alignment of customer and business in wanting a relatively safe vehicle is the key point. The founder of the business died. I'm pretty sure, as a passenger, he wanted to survive. So the idea that key safety features were glibly skipped to make more money makes no sense.
Thanks for your comment re the difference in response between male and female. Not entirely unexpected on my part, but interesting.
I heard reported today that the Coast Guard is going to carry out the investigation. I object to this use of tax dollars. Of course I'm curious to more more about exactly what happened, but my curiosity doesn't justify tax expenditures. I'm fine with the NTSB doing detailed studies of downed aircraft but we have a public interest in airline safety and that's a legitimate role. I'm also curious about exactly what happened to cause deaths on Everest and other high mountains but I wouldn't remotely consider expecting US tax dollars to do the investigation.
I agree with you. There should be an investigation but it should be paid for with private funds. If the company still has the money, the checks to pay for the investigation should start there.
I'm not so sure the 20 year old was an experienced adventure traveler. Reports are he was terrified, and only went to please his dad on father's day.
Yes, that's a good point.
Yes, stories like this reveal the psychopaths among the left. In fact, maybe they are the driving force of today's "tolerant" left. The worst I read was the New Republic's revelation that Stockton Rush often donated to ... Republicans! What kind of sickness is it to dive into the election records upon hearing about a man's death, to see if the dead adventurer had it coming?
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that there may be negligence involved on the part of the company. According to the new republic, the original pilot and person responsible for safety ended up in a lawsuit with the company over the safety of the sub and specifically the hatch. It’s a tragedy, either way.
I’ve seen a ton of different opinions. Really sad that there are people out there that want to either politicize this or wish the worst on people they don’t necessarily share the same values with..
I've been thinking lately on the Challenger disaster and President Reagan's speech that evening. The aquanauts didn't "slip the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God," but they died in the service of pushing the boundaries of science and human potential. It's a worthy goal.
Having worked with the stuff, the composite bothers me. Otherwise, it's hard to feel sorrow over people I don't know: it is sad they died and the craft failed, but they, like the pilots you mention, knew the risks. But to actually be glad someone died who isn't actively threatening you suggest to me you have somehow failed as human.
And there are worse ways to go that pushing the limits of things.
Wasn't Donne who said all deaths lessen us? God grant them mercy.
I think you missed one perspective which is that they were spitting in the face of engineering and physics and suffered the inevitable result when you do that and we shouldn't shed any tears for them nor should we pretend that they were explorers or innovators. If you put a loaded gun to your head and pull the trigger you're not advancing the field of gun design or probability or whatever. You're just committing suicide. By all appearances this sub was just an elaborate and expensive route to the same outcome. The kid dying is sad but big picture this is just what happens when hubris mixes with deadly reality.
Correct. They were not explorers or innovators. They wanted to get their jollies by looking at a mass grave site through a window the size of a large-capacity washing machine, while inside a small tube subjected to unfathomable pressures. It is sad that they died and I don’t begrudge them their wealth, not even a little bit. But our sympathy is best offered elsewhere. Comparing these people to Amelia Earhart or Sally Ride is right at the pinnacle of nonsense.
Nope. And if they are, good for them. Someone has to take the first step(s) into unknown territory.
Flying "outside the envelop" is how we discover that yesterday's limits are not todays. Amelia Earhart knew the risks, including death, but she risked all anyway. If she is a hero, so are the Titanic 5.
F4GIB