Titanic tourist sub photos show wreckage being brought ashore

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66045554

by tartoran • 3 years ago

88 172 3 years ago

Wojtkie3• 3 years ago

The first image does show the porthole without any glass (acrylic) in it, but I'm sure an implosion would be violent enough to blow it out anyway. I'm going to be very interested in what they determine to be the critical failure point. Porthole is a possibility, but there were some other points of failure in the joining of the titanium domes to the carbon composite hull.

EA-31672• 3 years ago

I'm interested in seeing the skids, and learning about where they were found relative to the rest of the debris. Were the skids totally mangled, implying that they were attached when the implosion occurred? Is the debris field pretty contained, or very spread out? The former implies that the sub was close to the bottom, the latter implies that whatever happened occurred at a depth which allowed for currents and drift to spread the debris. If the skids are mostly intact then maybe there was some warning of trouble and the people in the sub tried to drop ballast. If the skids are destroyed then whatever happened is more likely to have been sudden and without warning.

KineticLensman4• 3 years ago

Yes, this technique was critical to understanding the break up of the space shuttle Columbia as it re-entered. The debris track stretched across Texas and Louisiana, and in general objects to the west were those that had broken off first. Although things were confused because differences in ballistic number affected how far fragments travelled eastward, and in some cases modules broke off, travelled east and then disintegrated into sub-components.

causality02• 3 years ago

From everything I've read, the entire carbon section of the hull could be considered a weak point.

KineticLensman4• 3 years ago

the entire carbon section of the hull could be considered a weak point

It is possible that the carbon fibre delaminated catastrophically, possibly as a result of stresses accumulated over multiple descents.

ortusdux• 3 years ago

This is my understanding as well. I'm not surprised to see that the titanium piece survived unscathed. IIRC, the companies goal was to provide more cost-effective trips by transitioning from the standard solid titanium hull to a Ti/carbon fiber composite. This decision was controversial. They fired their head of QC after he strongly opposed the change. One key argument he made was that the design prevented ultrasonic inspection, which would mean that they could not monitor the health of the composite over time.

ajross6• 3 years ago

To be clear, way too much of what I've read on this subject has been excessively confident tut-tutting with little to no real engineering expertise.

People want to imagine that the simple use of carbon fiber here was the sole mistake, I guess because it's easy to understand and makes us feel smart. But come on, engineering is harder than that. Carbon fiber pressure vessels have a long history. Composite material failure modes are for sure more complicated than metals but they certainly aren't a mystery. We've been using composites for more than half a century, we know how they work.

No, my gut says the root cause here (if we ever find one[1]) is going to turn out to be a more routine kind of engineering fuckup. It'll be just some weak point that the analysis failed to turn up.

[1] And sure, if we don't then the "carbon fiber death cylinder" theory will just become part of the folk truth, I guess.

TechBro86152• 3 years ago

Here's a video of hydraulic pressing carbon fiber to its breaking point: https://youtube.com/watch?v=xWTXeGiM8K8

mechhacker6• 3 years ago

I'll speculate that because they are pulling pieces of the Ti domes without signs of carbon attached to it that the joint there wasn't stiff enough, and that carbon separated during failure without plastically deforming the Ti at the joint.

But, that's speculation and I'd need to see more pics with more details.

UniverseHacker7• 3 years ago

I would speculate that all of the carbon basically instantaneously liquefied under the pressure after a critical threshold of fibers failed, leaving the Ti untouched.

I also want to mention that the large end caps you are seeing weren't bonded to the hull at all- there was a small Ti flange epoxied to the hull, and then the large domes were bolted to that. The front, with the window, was unbolted and rebolted every time for ingress/egress.

There is no way that CF epoxied to thick Ti is going to make a strong enough bond that it will deform the Ti when it detaches. In this case, the geometry of that "glued" joint was such that it was forced together by the pressure underwater, rather than pulled apart- so it was not necessary for it to have any real strength other than for holding the end caps on at the surface, and filling voids to make it seal.

UniverseHacker7• 3 years ago

The hull imploded, not the window, but the shockwave probably pushed the window outward or shattered it, as it was only held strongly against moving inwards.

People make a big deal about the acrylic glass not being rated for the depth, but I think it's almost impossible that it was the window, and think it must have been the hull:

  * The properties acrylic are well understood, and the strength of an acrylic disc is trivial to calculate, even if not "rated" you can easily calculate if it's strong enough
  * The window should fail visually with a lot of warning before rupture
  * If the window failed with the titanium end cap, there would be no reason for implosion of the carbon fiber hull

The hull on the other hand is an irregular/non-homogenous part that is impossible to model accurately. There was no way to know how strong it was without extensive testing on a number of identical hulls- which they never did. The solidworks modeling method they used to give a ~2x margin of safety was nonsense as it ignores the realities of stress cycles, defects, etc.

zardo2• 3 years ago

The monitor mounts screwed directly into the hull seem a likely starting point for the failure.

TechBro86152• 3 years ago

How was the window "connected" to the hull? Would that be a weak point?

nomilk• 3 years ago

The hull on the other hand is ... is impossible to model accurately.

Why is the hull difficult to accurately model? (assuming the exact materials and precise dimensions were known).

zaebal2• 3 years ago

Can we assume that if the acrylic was a point of failure, then the whole titanium end cap section would appear much more damaged, than what we can see on those pictures?

postmodest• 3 years ago

The window should fail visually with a lot of warning before rupture

The window would deform up to 2" during dives, according to passengers.

scotty794• 3 years ago

If the window failed with the titanium end cap, there would be no reason for implosion of the carbon fiber hull

I feel like if the window failed then the sheer momentum of inrushing water could detach titanium cap on the opposite end of the sub. A bit like you can break the bottom o a glass bottle by hitting the bottle from the top which causes the water in the bottle to separate from the bottom of the container and then come back down with enough momentum to break the bottom.

Pigo• 3 years ago

It seems likely much more effort will go into evaluating the failure than went into designing this submersible. It would be interesting to know how much more.

cityofdelusion• 3 years ago

Videos of the thing being built show a very sloppy epoxy job of joining the titanium ring to the carbon fiber hull. There seems to be no dust control, no climate control, and no attempt to make sure the epoxy is free of voids. I've honestly seen more care go into random youtubers making "river tables" than the epoxy job that went into this critical structural junction.

mechhacker6• 3 years ago

Not surprising that the Titanium parts are coming out what looks like whole.

No sign of the composite cylinder in those pictures.

jtriangle2• 3 years ago

The composite cylinder likely turned into physics

mhh__• 3 years ago

I think it was physical to start with

barbazoo• 3 years ago

and his son, Suleman Dawood, 19 [...] died in the incident.

I wonder what the liability waiver said that made the father think this wasn't a terrible idea.

danpalmer4• 3 years ago

The waiver was apparently quite thorough in communicating the risk of death. From my reading of coverage of this though it sounds like while the waiver was probably correct from a legal standpoint, the communication of the likelihood and factors contributing to that were not communicated to customers.

Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and Hamish Harding, two of the other victims, were somewhat experienced in this, the former having travelled to the Titanic on other deep sea submersibles with basically flawless track records (Mir? I think, and Alvin), and the latter having travelled to the challenger deep in DSV Limiting Factor which seems much better built.

Should they have known better? Maybe. This makes me wonder if they were actively mislead, rather than being left to make their own mind up.

kayodelycaon• 3 years ago

DSV Limiting Factor which seems much better built.

Understatement of the year. Limiting Factor is the only manned sub to make multiple dives (4!) into the Challenger Deep.

dghlsakjg2• 3 years ago

I think that waiver fatigue is a real thing.

I get warned about the dangers of death on basically every waiver I sign. I just checked, and I was warned about death on the waivers I signed for: bumper cars, a sauna, the local rec center, etc... I get that death is technically possible at any of these activities, but how are you to differentiate between the actual likelihood in the real world.

The waivers have gotten so comprehensive as to not actually warn you of the real dangers you might face.

ramesh31• 3 years ago

Should they have known better? Maybe. This makes me wonder if they were actively mislead, rather than being left to make their own mind up.

This is why true believers are the most dangerous kind of idiot. They will lead otherwise reasonable people off a cliff.

symlinkk• 3 years ago

If you believe the NY Post, the CEO straight up said the sub was “safer than crossing the street” - https://nypost.com/2023/06/23/doomed-sub-ceo-said-it-was-saf...

pasttense01• 3 years ago

I think it was probably that they were told the submersible had made a number of previous successful trips so assumed it would continue to do so--not realizing that the carbon fiber material could get weaker and weaker each trip.

zardo2• 3 years ago

Liability wavers don't give you an idea of how likely death and injury are.

meepmorp• 3 years ago

Right, they only let you know about possible outcomes, not the likelihood of any particular event happening during your dive. Russian roulette with 1 vs 5 chambers loaded have the same set of possible outcomes, but very different odds w.r.t. which is most likely when you pull the trigger.

pengaru• 3 years ago

I wonder what the liability waiver said that made the father think this wasn't a terrible idea.

Fathers often subject their sons to unnecessary risks in the interests of making them more "manly"...

mrguyorama3• 3 years ago

When even a theme park will have you "be aware" that "death can occur", how seriously will you take the same warnings in another waiver?

People similarly have signed their souls (ie literally) through EULAs as a demonstration that nobody cares.

Hell, we can't even get people to read and acknowledge a one sentence error message in software.

quags• 3 years ago

I wouldn’t have done this not because I knew anything about the company but think it’s inherently risky at those depths. But trampoline parks, indoor skydiving, kids school 5k run and ropes course all are wavers I signed that stated there was chance of death for the activity.

watwut2• 3 years ago

Afaik the waiver talked about death and trauma and so on.

The CEO and company also put in a lot of effort to make it look safe. The "waiver is for liability but you are totally safe" kind of game.

Going by stories of people who went, company was plain manipulative in this regard. I genuinely think that millionaires on board were victims prayed on by the overconfident guy who died with them.

sdeyerle• 3 years ago

From what I've been able to find, there were never any actual pictures/sonar scans of the debris field released. Does anyone know any particular reason to not be releasing that to the public?

vkou• 3 years ago

Because it would be morbid and inappropriate for tourists to gawk at a shipwreck.

hyperbovine• 3 years ago

There are literally thousands of people on wreck dives as I write this...

curiousgal• 3 years ago

There's pictures or even footage of sinking migrant ships all over the internet.

mcculley• 3 years ago

Which was OceanGate's business model.

sigstoat• 3 years ago

to the other commenters: there’s a difference between a week old wreck still being investigated and one a hundred years old.

same way there is a difference between photos of dead bodies undergoing forensic investigation, and those undergoing archaeological investigation.

jackmott42• 3 years ago

because of a false flag conspiracy reason of some sort of course. probably aliens involved.

KineticLensman4• 3 years ago

probably aliens involved.

Sigh. Shea and Wilson conclusively documented [0] the primacy of Leviathan, a direct continuation of the Ugaritic sea monster Lôtān, one of the servants of the sea god Yammu defeated by Hadad in the Baal Cycle.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy

hguant• 3 years ago

1. Generally photos from active investigations aren't released until the investigation is completed. These are active records, and could potentially become part of civil or criminal hearings, so the agencies in charge of them tend to keep them close until they've finished the report.

2. The US Coast Guard is a part of the Department of Homeland Security; the sonar and pictures they take could reveal capabilities they deem important to US national security (ie how good the sonar is, resolution of photos, etc.).

3. It's generally considered poor taste to post disaster photos before the families have had funerals. Naval institutions tend to be more tradition focused than other entities.

basisword• 3 years ago

What would be the reason _to_ release that to the public?

TomK32• 3 years ago

So the next "adventurers" can learn from the mistakes made, have a think about it and stay on dry land or wear seatbelts if they insist on a recovery of their bodily remains...

irrational• 3 years ago

Morbid curiosity. Like rubberneckers driving by a crash scene.

badrabbit8• 3 years ago

Unpopular sentiment, but: The comments and memes I've been seeing at just about every corner of the internet regarding this disaster is downright shameful and disgusting. I don't care if they had it coming or they were terrible people. It is fundamentally shocking for me to see so many people who I guess were just never brought up or taught to have some minimal value and sanctity for human life?

I always thought it was sort of a joke when people said "eat the rich", especially when they're living in developed countries.

People are the scariest monsters out there.

Celebrating someone's death means you would have killed them yourself if there was no consequence, am I wrong in saying that?

It's not like I am rich or have some sort of billionaire-fetish. But a human being is a human being right? And it's a horrible thing to celebrate a person's death right? Even with bin laden's death, I understood celebrating defeat of an enemy but not death of someone's child/family.

This stuff combined with sentiment/hatred towards people who are politically hostile/disagreeable paints a picture of a bleak future for this society.

thorncorona• 3 years ago

It's a different type of humor is all.

Celebrating someone's death means you would have killed them yourself if there was no consequence, am I wrong in saying that?

The right word is probably contempt. For example, contempt towards the rich and corporations for being responsible 1/2 of the inflation in the EU, while people are struggling.

tailspin20192• 3 years ago

Totally agree with you. I've found this very surprising too. (Perhaps I was naive).

Edit: The {at the time of writing} downvotes of your comment kind of further illustrates your point, sadly.

UniverseHacker7• 3 years ago

Agreed, the amount of hatred and us vs them mentality between groups that is forming online is really saddening. Different groups have their preferred target- "immigrants," "boomers," "billionaires," etc. to justify dehumanizing people, and blaming them for things based on some arbitrary category, rather than judging people by their own actions, and having empathy for people even if they did something you don't like.

Rush was arrogant, and made some big mistakes, but I don't wish death on him or his passengers. I do hope this example will serve as a warning for engineers in the future to be less arrogant, and more safety conscious.

soneil• 3 years ago

I honestly haven't seen much of that on HN at all.

There's really three things that make this a hugely curious story. One is that it's relatively unique. The same way that car crashes don't make the news but plane crashes do - effectively, this is to plane crashes, as plane crashes are to car crashes.

Next, it's frankly interesting from an engineering point of view. Especially as it doesn't need to be your wheelhouse to understand the enormity of 2.7 tons per square inch. It's On with an 'n' that's obviously enormous.

And thirdly, the fact that the CEO appears to have ignored the experts and YOLO'd it, is hugely vindicating to anyone who considers them an expert in their niche. That's the closest this gets to schadenfreude for me.

The only thing really interesting about the people inside, is that it removed said CEO from the story so he can't answer for himself.

tailspin20192• 3 years ago

I honestly haven't seen much of that on HN at all.

I read the parent comment as more a general commentary on the overall internet-wide reaction to this rather than being specifically about HN.

I agree with all your points. You summed up why this is interesting, relevant to this audience and worthy of analysis to see what we can learn from it.

I also agree with the parent that many (online and in media) seem to be showing very little respect for the deaths of fellow humans, based on arbitrary labels/assessments, when most of these "commentators" had never even heard of these unfortunate individuals before last week.

it removed said CEO from the story so he can't answer for himself.

Yes this is worth repeating too. We're getting one side of the story from what has been rather sensationalist reporting all round. It looks on the face of it like he made some pretty terrible mistakes, but we don't know all the facts yet. I think inquiry is appropriate at this stage, but assassination of character before they've even finished recovering the debris [0], not so much.

[0] I would have said "buried the dead" but of course the families and friends have nothing to bury. If people can't feel empathy for the dead, perhaps they could at least spare a thought for their families.

jareklupinski• 3 years ago

I honestly haven't seen much of that on HN at all.

dang is an excellent moderator :)

gjulianm3• 3 years ago

It's not as much as "celebrating someone's death" (you can't really celebrate the death of someone you didn't know even existed) as much as pointing out the idiocy of paying 250k dollars to see the Titanic in what can be only described as a MacGyvered cylinder of death, ignoring regulations, advice from experts, and even basic engineering. People being killed by their own hubris has usually been a source of comedy.

This stuff combined with sentiment/hatred towards people who are politically hostile/disagreeable paints a picture of a bleak future for this society.

Well, something that might add context for you is that a lot of people already think the future for society is very, very bleak; and they think that the ones to blame are just like the ones in the submarine, specially the CEO. So it's no wonder there's not much empathy going around for them.

badrabbit8• 3 years ago

It's not as much as "celebrating someone's death" (you can't really celebrate the death of someone you didn't know even existed...

I have seen many posts wishing elon and zuckergerg would also make a similar trip in this same context, not just celebrating but begging for more bloodshed.

Well, something that might add context for you is that a lot of people already think the future for society is very, very bleak; and they think that the ones to blame are just like the ones in the submarine, specially the CEO. So it's no wonder there's not much empathy going around for them.

B.s.! Everyone making such posts is living in the best time to be alive in human history and most of them in developed countries which at a global scales makes them the filthy rich people! To me these are all spoilied rich brats with iphones whining about billionaires because they hate their shitty lives. In a way they earn their misery by showing their true hateful and pessimistic nature. Their parents voted badly and they vote badly and then blame anyone but themselves in this democracy. Can't even blame billionaires controlling the media because everyone has a smartphone now. They all stay in their bubbles and hate each other and everyone outside that bubble and blame anyone but themselves.

hotpotamus2• 3 years ago

I feel like every English speaker has seen or read one of the versions of "A Christmas Carol", so you'd think the idea that a wealthy miser would be hated by his community would be a fairly fundamental idea.

badrabbit8• 3 years ago

Hate and dislike are different things. Hate means you wish harm on them imo. In this case people are not only glad someone died, they are joking about more people like them dying. And i guarantee the majority are not even joking.

You can disapprove of people's decisions and dislike them for it but life is sacred and loss of it is not a cause for celebration.

crote• 3 years ago

I think you're reaching a bit.

I'm not seeing very many people "celebrating their death". I am seeing people making fun of the complete absurdity of the situation: a couple of billionaires are spending the equivalent of two Starbucks coffees to visit a mass grave in an untested discount submarine known to have safety issues, fully aware that it could mean their death and just... not caring?

When you are a minimum wage worker, seeing people spend several years' wages on something as silly as this, it just feels like you are living in a completely different reality. It is so absurd that I wouldn't have believed it if it was written in a science-fiction book. It is so detached from normal life, it just doesn't feel real.

I always thought it was sort of a joke when people said "eat the rich"

It is both a joke, and not a joke. Some people are literally starving, and wealth inequality is worse than it was during the French Revolution. I don't know anyone who wants to literally "eat the rich", but it is getting increasingly obvious that the status quo isn't sustainable either.

you would have killed them yourself if there was no consequence

No, that's not how it works. Very few people actively want other humans to die, but that doesn't mean they will mourn the death of every single stranger either.

mrguyorama3• 3 years ago

fully aware that it could mean their death and just... not caring?

The reality is that these people have ZERO proper understanding of risk, because they've never actually been allowed to fail in life, so they regularly make stupid choices and dumb mistakes that normal people with normal experience would not, because many normal people have functioning risk management.

Then also remember that "for some reason" these kind of people run everything.

Ekaros• 3 years ago

I'm not sure about celebration. But not being particularly sympathetic when few ultra-rich die by essentially playing russian roulette for entertainment...

There are each day huge number of bigger tragedies. From people starving to death or more rarely by being murdered by someone. Like for example drone-strikes. Both of those should be considered infinitely larger disasters than this.

Blackthorn2• 3 years ago

You should see what the newspapers of the time looked like after the Titanic sank. Jokes around rich people dying are a classic source of humor in the English language.

Generally the easiest way to be obscenely wealthy and avoid having people celebrate your demise is to make your vanity projects acts of public good. A few of the billionaires of the previous century figured that one out.

badrabbit8• 3 years ago

Then those people back the sucked too.

Are you familiar with the fable of the fox and the grape? That's what these people are like, the bitter fox who hates grapes only because it believes it can't have it.

lamontcg• 3 years ago

As a cave diver it just pissed me off when people take completely unnecessary risks and then after they die we can't discuss that they were idiots after the fact. I've read so many accident reports of people dying while scuba diving on dives that should be easy.

James Cameron has been down on the Titanic 33 times. It can absolutely be explored safely over and over by human submersibles.

The only reason for this entirely avoidable accident is the hubris and overconfidence of the OceanGate CEO.

The fact that it imploded on a dive to a monument to engineering hubris is almost like Nature is trying to put a period on the end of the sentence here.

And there's a lesson to be learned here about silicon-valley-esque "move fast and break all the rules" counterintuitive/contrarian decision making. The blog article on why Titan isn't Classed is a good example of this kind of thinking, which has now been decisively marked-to-market:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230619161930/https://oceangate...

And there's a lesson here about the fact that otherwise smart and intelligence people (which he must have been to found the company) can be utterly stupid at times, and even over the long-term. There's a very common fundamental attribution error / correspondence bias / actor-observer asymmetry going on here where people cannot decouple someone's traits from their actions. You see this as well in some of the recent discussion around Prigozhin where people assert that he is not a stupid man (okay) therefore it is impossible that the whole explanation for the recent coup-attempt-whatever was that he got angry and make a dumb mistake--so it must be some kind of overly-complicated ruse. Also that buying Twitter could be really dumb, and that invading Ukraine could be really dumb. Lots of intelligent men being royally stupid in public lately.

badrabbit8• 3 years ago

I understand if you criticized their decision but saying they deserved to die or that it was a good thing or even wishing more rich people would have the same fate is what my comment is about.

fullstop6• 3 years ago

Celebrating someone's death means you would have killed them yourself if there was no consequence, am I wrong in saying that?

Yes, I think that you're wrong -- I do find some of the memes amusing, but I'm not celebrating a person's demise. I find humor in the absurdity of it all. Most, but not all, of the memes that I've seen have been making fun of the sub itself and not the passengers. Yes, I find a photo of a ps2 controller attached to a propane tank amusing, but that's about the sub and not the passengers.

HN is a a bubble, and the people here live in a different world than a lot of the rest of the world. On the same page, the ultra wealthy live on a different plane entirely. Surely you can see how a person struggling to make ends meet might laugh at the short-sightedness of a person willing to spend as much as they earn in years on a deadly weekend excursion?

badrabbit8• 3 years ago

Surely you can see how a person struggling to make ends meet might laugh at the short-sightedness of a person willing to spend as much as they earn in years on a deadly weekend excursion?

No. That is hypocrisy. I guarantee 99% of people if they had the same amount of money they would something adveturous. Maybe a balloon trip in the alps, a visit to antarctica, sailing the pacific whatever. And if an accident befell them they wouldn't want people to treat their memory and their loved ones who are survived by them this way.

Honestly, I look at shit like this and I absolutley do not want to help anyone in need in this society at all except maybe children. The people who are not scammers pretending to need help are hateful and bitter. Well good luck, you earned your position life by hating on others simply because they are not helping you because they can.

Don't get me wrong, I get the sentiment that if it was I, I would give a lot more and help people but the idea that simply because you have lawfully earned money you owe people shit? How ridiculous! That is theft! These people want to steal money that isn't theirs simply because they are many and that person is one and they can take that money that does not belong to them. And why exactly should a bunch of theif-at-hearts be helped?

I don't hear any starving third world kids demand americans "struggling" with obesity owe them food. Even post-colonial countries at most demand debt forgiveness not an outright transfer of wealth.

watwut2• 3 years ago

Celebrating someone's death means you would have killed them yourself if there was no consequence, am I wrong in saying that?

No it does not mean that, obviously. In your quest to righteous anger you have just wrote nonsense.

kareemm• 3 years ago

Curious how this is recovered. So they send down another submersible that is able to attach a cable to debris that can be pulled up by a winch?

jtriangle2• 3 years ago

Yes, it's done via ROV's with manipulator arms that attach salvage cables to them. Way less failure prone than trying to bring them up with the ROV's directly because the ROV's are normally tethered via a fairly light duty tether that's connected to a base station that raises/lowers the craft. That keeps things much more maneuverable because the ROV doesn't have to drag around thousands of feet of cable, and, it provides some damping from any movement of the host ship operating it.

Additionally, the ROV can stay submerged, looking for other things to grab, while salvage cables are raised/lowered. Doubly important because those sorts of winches run at ~1000ft/hr, and the wreck is ~12.5k feet down, so over a full day for one recovery.

luzer7• 3 years ago

They have 12k feet of cables?

lb1lf5• 3 years ago

I have never hauled submersible wrecks from the seabed, but have recovered lots of other stuff from the same place.

Depending on the weight and bulk of the component, you'd likely do one out of three (at this depth; in shallower waters, you have more options)

a) Small-ish items are simply dropped in a basket attached to the ROV doing the recovery, then brought back to the surface with the ROV.

b) Larger items may be handled by the ROV to a basket suspended from a winch, then hoisted to the surface.

c) If the items are too large for the ROV to handle, it will be used to attach a sling to the item, which is then in turn attached to the hook of a crane/winch, before being hoisted to the surface.

dbancajas• 3 years ago

and why did they do this? who paid for this recovery?

jayrot• 3 years ago

The Navy also has the FADOSS, though it wasn't needed here I believe. It can lift insane amounts, at insane depths.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyaway_Deep_Ocean_Salvage_Sys...

mrlonglong3• 3 years ago

When are they going to recover the bodies, does anyone know?

pprotas• 3 years ago

Is there anything left to recover?

0xffff2• 3 years ago

Mythbusters did a test at one point where they exposed a dead pig to a mere 9 atmospheres/300 feet of water pressure. The result is... not pretty. It's safe to say that no matter what happened to the Titan, there are no bodies to recover.

mrlonglong3• 3 years ago

I've now seen it. OMG.

MrFoof• 3 years ago

Yes. The term James Cameron likes to use regarding catastrophic failures from an implosion is, "meat cloud."

Regarding 9 atmospheres, I've not seen the Mythbusters episode, but I'm assuming that was an attempt to recreate the Byford Dolphin incident?

Clamchop4• 3 years ago

Isn't the mechanism of destruction in that test driven by the pig corpse sealing against the openening of the rigid helmet, creating a pressure differential that the body gets forced through?

There shouldn't have been any of that for our adventurers here.

I've been perplexed by some of the descriptions of what would happen to the bodies and other things on board, so I'm looking forward to reading an expert analysis on the topic that I assume will show up eventually.

A lot of descriptions characterize an implosion as a misspelling of the word explosion, with things turning into a "mist", but this doesn't make any sense to me on its face, with the force being inward.

There are theories about vaporization due to compressive heating, but how this would work doesn't seem cut and dry to me, either, because of thermal conduction in such a short span of time before being immediately quenched by near-freezing water.

Some level of disintegration seems reasonable so there may not be bodies per se to be found, but it also seems plausible that there would be identifiable remains. We were able to locate parts (and verify the identities of) most of the passengers aboard United 93, for example. The pieces were small but they didn't "become physics" in some exotic way.

The fact that it happened in the deep ocean makes collection of any remains somewhere between impractical and impossible, no doubt.

I feel a little guilty indulging this morbid curiosity, and yet I am curious.

dgrin91• 3 years ago

There are no bodies left to recover

mrlonglong3• 3 years ago

UPDATE They've said there were remains within the wreckage recovered.

netsharc• 3 years ago

TBH I can't imagine anything more than a smear of goo on a piece of wreckage, especially after it's been dragged through 3.81 km of water.

mrguyorama3• 3 years ago

One thing I've completely missed in all this drama: WHY a carbon fiber hull? Carbon fiber is not known for being easy to work with, or cheap, or strong in compression, or good for water, so WHY would you use it on a submersible as "new" technology?

I must have missed some discussion.

etrautmann• 3 years ago

Also, there’s seemingly little benefit to low weight in this application?

lacksconfidence• 3 years ago

In an interview with Stockton Rush, and sure we should take his insights with a grain of salt, he stated that in deep sea submersibles it's not about weight, but buoyancy. The carbon fiber is significantly more buoyant than titanium, meaning they didn't need very special foam and ways to mount it like is used in Alvin.

suprjami• 3 years ago

The carbon fibre was apparently cheap second hand because it was ex-aviation gear past its service life.

opwieurposiu• 3 years ago

If the hull were made out of metal it would be much heavier and require a much bigger support ship to launch and recover. This would increase overall system costs.

The lower density of carbon also removed the need for syntactic foam floats.

The CEO had aircraft experience so he liked carbon fiber.

belorn• 3 years ago

The official reason given by the company is that carbon fiber allowed the submersibles to be positive buoyant. This in turn allowed them to use electromagnets to hold onto ballast, and in the case of a failure the submersibles would loose its weight and go back to the surface. It was also considered cheaper and smaller than using steel in combination with syntactic foam to achieve the same result.

nwallin• 3 years ago

Money.

A heavy sub requires heavy support equipment. Heavy support equipment requires a large boat. Large boats are expensive. It's cheaper to spend a little extra on the sub and save a lot on the support ship.

jdean2• 3 years ago

I've seen nothing about the absence of bolts, on the retaining flange. If endcap failed, why would the two pieces of that component not be still together? Seems that the mating joint would fail, before all 17 fasteners. Nobody questioning bolts fatigue or even maybe the wrong grade used...? It's happened before in the aviation field.

Titanic tourist sub photos show wreckage being brought ashore

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