A year later it is still mind boggling that they got as far as they did with fundamentally flawed decisions and logic. Carbon fiber as a material choice is the equivalent of a chocolate castle in a desert
Also fails to elaborate that commercial subs fall into two categories - shallow water for engineering or tourism, and deep water scientific, and they're worlds apart in terms of design, cost, and usage. What he tried to do was bodge the first category design and build into the second category usage. The bit that kinda baffles me a little is the passengers who never thought 'I wonder why this doesn't look anywhere near as substantial or over built as James Cameron's one?"
@duncanhamilton584 the entire premise of the company was to introduce deep sea tourism. To be profitable you have to take enough passengers. There are too many reasons to explain here why the traditional titanium sphere submersible cannot be built large enough to accommodate enough passengers.
The full quote is generally reasonable. Yes, every action in life is a risk-reward analysis, and the only way to absolutely minimize risk is to never leave your bed. You take a risk taking a shower, you take a risk cooking, leaving the house, etc etc. All completely true, at some point safety is just pure waste. Where he failed was at the part of "breaking all the rules being just as safe." The goal should be more efficiently follow the idiot-proofing rules, not throw them out...
@@giin97 yeah, exactly my thought: how can a guy be that smart, and not even realize the faulitness in his own "as safe while breaking the rules" analogy...? driving a car, there is always a rest of risk, yes. but it is lowered BY FOLLOWING THE RULES!!!! how on earth do you want to make it "as safe while breaking" if FOLLOWING the rules IS THE THING that makes it less dangerous????????? PRINCETON FFS!!!!!!!
Those ticket prices sure as heck weren't "low budget." Someone should have reinvested in his business. Could have had multi million dollar subs created by a total think tank of mental giant engineers which would have made his business safer and far more sustainable. And ultimately over time far more profitable. The man indeed had those billion dollar clients, all the more to reinvest in his equipment. I mean...a PS1 controller?
I love he added the caveat of commercial Submarines which are few and far between. The Navies of the world have and still do bear the brunt of submarine fatalities.
They're statistically the safest because there is significantly less of them and experts control them. Put as many subs as there are cars in the ocean and let regular men and women control them, and they'll be the most unsafe.
@@Blxz It truly amazes me when people see an activity with low rates of injury or death while also having a lot of regulations and rather than assume the regulations keep them safe, they assume the regulations must be unnecessary.
The OceanGate people failed for the same reason Enron did: they were smart enough to get around the rules but not wise enough to realize why the rules were there in the first place.
Rush knew the dangers involved but insisted on using his unproven design, I'm guessing because it was quite a bit lighter than steel- But as we found out also weaker than steel. Of course when lives are on the line you MUST go with a tried & true design. Period.
there's something so eerie about watching a man talk on his own hubris knowing he's been just.. vaporized. like my brain can't make that make sense almost
Just makes you almost wish he was somehow able to see how foolish he looks now, I would've been happier if he wasn't on the sub when it exploded so he could deal with the fallout from this disaster, and see how his narcissism and hubris killed people
These people don't care. If they did they wouldn't have done it in the first place. He'd have just blamed someone else and moved on. I just wish he was alone, those people he dragged with him were the real victims. @@oliverfrots9300
This was his second attempt, after being incredibly confident he could probably just hold his breath wayyyyyy longer than 'none genius' humans - and simply swim down to the Titanic.
It wasn't just that. He was trash talking all of the other sub builders about their materials choice while spewing BS. I don't understand how he had engineering partners and they decided to go with a material that needed to be in tension to work and that would fatigue.
@@nicolethomas1674 Money is a great motivator. As long as the paycheck is huge and they are not forced to participate in the ride you will always find people ready to built death traps.
People with that much money live in a different universe where actions cannot have consequences that money cannot solve. Unfortunately, the ocean will not accept a bribe to delay crushing you into a human bread ball, and he probably genuinely hadn't thought of this until the Wii mote ran out of batteries.
Doesn't mean that's not a true statement though. There is definitely a point of diminishing returns when it comes to safety measures. There is also a point where the "safety gains" are so minuscule relative to the cost increase that it becomes pure waste. This is true in just about any industry one can think of.
@@Withlovefrominterentwhat are you talking about. In what sector would this be true ? Safety rules always stem from previous faults. That’s why the rules were developed. Dude broke the first rule of engineering thinking he knew more than he actually did. Saying your an expert in aerospace is the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. I’m an aerospace engineer and I know little to nothing about aerospace.
If someone building a SUB?! says with full confidence "at some point safety is just a waste" you will never find me or anyone I love in that sub. That is a man who has not defeated his ego. This disaster was inevitable with an attitude like that. Especially with something so complicated.
I mean, it's a true statement, though. We do risky things every day, the biggest one being driving. It's one of the top killers, yet we do it. And even for free time activities, going to concerts is dangerous. Skydiving is dangerous. Hiking is dangerous. Going on a vacation is dangerous. There's a lot of things we do that have a little bit of elevated risk, something you can't account for, or something that would be exceedingly expensive to account for (e.g. we could make cars almost perfectly safe if we limit the speeds to 15mph everywhere! But that's not acceptable in most people's eyes, right?) But obviously Rush miscalculated the risk of his submarine, ironically with the one part that really needed to be safe, that he knew needed to be safe.
@@MeMe-gm9di personally I despise cars and think it'd be great if the US would get on the train train already.. so arguing about "we do it anyway" is a lil silly. we "do it anyway" because the oil and gas industry have us by the short hairs. but it's true, we do an awful lot that the average person never considers to be unsafe, because it's standard.
@@peachy_lili I mean, cars kill people in basically every country in the world. Though I do get your point, of course. I would love to limit cars, especially around humans, quite a lot! Limiting traffic to 15mph within city boundaries, if that was actually reliably enforced, would be a tradeoff I'd make. But the argument still stands! Currently, there's no political will for that.
He messed around, ignored safety warnings and found out the hard way WHY these safety measures were there in the first place. I mean, a video game console???
Just pure arrogance on his part. He was trying to disparage the actual experts in this field by suggesting they are too old to accept new advances in materials and mechanics. Turns out they were right.
@@JamesDBlanc Yeah. He is different. He's in a million pieces at the bottom of the ocean being eaten by marine animals. Along with his 4 victims I might add.
..and that commands common sense. Hard to understand. Sounds to me it was not a rare occursion, that one or two things were out of the ordinary with the titan...and therefore they came up with the three strikes rule. If you think about, that this might be the background, it becomes even more crazy.
My son is a flight line mechanic for one of the Air Force bases in town and if something's not right or even if they can't find a tool those planes don't fly
“When I started the business old timers told me I was nuts.” There’s a reason they are old timers, sir. They followed the rules and *lived* long enough to *be* old.
@@SpoopySquid Another good saying: "Be wary of an old man in a business where men die young". It doesn't 100% fit here, but I just really like that saying.
I hate that he never even got to learn his lesson. He went to the grave thinking he was smarter than everyone else, and he dragged the rest of the people in that sub down with him.
It’s more likely than not that he was aware that the hull was failing in the moments before he died. There was a hill failure alarm that detected damage. He had at least a few moments of terror and seeing the terror on the face of his innocent victims. It would have sounded crazy, like thousands of glass shards smashing. Loud and terrifying.
@@shambolicrhetoric6143most failures under pressure that extreme are catastrophic and occur in a fraction of a fraction of a second. They were almost certainly liquified before the alarm could even trigger.
@@philhiller-mn1gw Nope. The astronauts aren't really stranded. It's an intentional decision to stay in space and try to collect evidence of why they have a leak, so their next build can improve. But they don't need to fix anything to be able to return.
@@shambolicrhetoric6143 It's possible, but given that he apparently had heard cracking noises during dives before and completely ignored them, it's equally possible his last words were dismissing their concerns and insisting everything was going as planned.
The fact that his holy grail of safety was the "hull monitoring system" when the failure mode would be so fast you'd never even get the message the hull was failing.
@@josh___somethingnot really: remember that half the reason religion exists is people really HATE the idea that people they don’t like won’t KNOW they messed up…that evil people can “get away with it”
I'm just a chemical engineer but even I know that carbon fiber works great for tensile loads but is weak in terms of compression and shear stress a sub would experience underwater. It's great for gas bottles, maybe it's good for spacecraft but it's not supposed to go into a sumbarine. Also I don't get the problem with weight to buoancy ratio he speaks of. Why even care? Some styrofoam floaters cost nothing. You could even make a submarine using steel. It would be extremelely thick, heavy and big but it's possible.
@@alexmin4752 Styrofoam would deform too much. Also, the bigger problem with carbon fibers is that it's not an homogeneous material and it's very hard to test its aging and imperfection accurately.
A degree isn't proof of intelligence or competence, it's just proof that some place gave you a degree, which usually means just remembering the list of things they want you to remember long enough to regurgitate answers for a test. Or it could mean that your parents simply had enough money/influence to get it for you.
i liked the bit where "the sun will extinguish" as basis for establishing under-ocean bases. Bruh, when the Sun does its thing, there won't be any oceans left :D
Ya. He was lauded as a golden boy his whole life so no one challenged anything he said, that’s how he got away with stating his bizarre take on physics/astrophysics .. and submarines
@@nexaentertainment2764and for anyone who cares - as a hobby chemist/potter, I suspect the end game will be a ... big, glazed pot. Green/brown, semi transparent on the edges, and very sharp. Kind of like how they described Mandalore on that show except more dark. Here's some numbers. We are 92M miles away, from the sun, which could become around 100M miles in diameter when it becomes a red giant. bit of a margin of error, but let's assume it will be 92 ish, ie the surface of the red giant will be very close to earth's orbit. the red giants we know about, range between 4500-8500F at surface temp. Let's assume our sun will be the lower range of that. The Earth has some pure molten metals in the center, but outside, its full of refractory oxides - alumina, silica, and trace metal oxides. The boiling point temperature for all of those is quite high, around 4000-6000F. If we stay below that temperature, we will essentially have a very long (millions of years) kiln firing of the entire planet, the ingredients of which .. add up to terracotta clay. When you fire clay "as intended" it is fully opaque, but when you overfire it, it turns into a glassy obsidian substance (you can do this with an acetylene torch around 6000F). If the clay doesn't have too much alumina and iron, it will be transparent, but the iron gives it a green hue (thanks to boron), blue (thanks to titanium and phosphorus) or just brown (oxygen.)
That acoustic monitoring system was the most absurd safety feature they have. The moment even a single fibre broke, it means the strenght has been execeeded and shell is done for. On its max depth where it really matters, there is no way back from that single failing strand.
He said this after around 80 people died in a Argentinian submarine a couple years ago. I served on submarines for around 8 years and I agree that they are safer than most people would think. But the kicker is when something goes any bit wrong on a sub, it goes very wrong.
yeah the second I saw that (I had never seen that speech before) I understood just how deep his hubris went. Subs are used mainly by militaries, with trained people who follow strict rules. Not by the common man every day. Rhe fact he thought crash/casualty rates were comparable between the most common means of transportation versus a fucking submarine. is just ignorance. It's like people who think the A10 has a hogh Blue on Blue rate. Is it high? Yes, it is. Now compare it to planes that routinely called in to help soldiers with munitions within a hundred feet of soldiers. It's not comparable.
And you know, all those pesky regulations that Rush ignored might have been there for a reason, regulations are written in blood, the fact that they're safe is because of how strict the rules for them are.
Uplifting to know submarine rules have reached a golden state where, if you follow them, you can be at ease that they'll be safe. This man reminded everyone why the rules were so strict.
Yes, he maintained submarines were relatively safe vehicles yet abandoned the many regulations in his own sub that would include it in that safe group. Moron.
Rush is legitimately responsible for the negligent homicide of those passengers. Him being smug while saying “submarines are the safest vehicles on the planet” and then deciding that all of these safety measures are unnecessary is proof that he’s nowhere near as smart as he thought he was. Almost every story about the Titanic focuses on the hubris of man and the proclamation that it’s “unsinkable.” Not once did he appreciate the irony of his own ego.
I just pictured the ghosts in historical outfits walking around the ship and Stockton is just there in chinos trying to explain carbon fibre to a scullery maid
I don't think removing the fence was the issue. The issue was they never really tested the submersible. They should have made it do like 100+ downs then ups, then cut the thing in half and examined it. Engineers at the company wanted to do that, but were told it would be too expensive. There's nothing wrong with innovating, they just weren't checking their work. If you look at like a spaceX rocket, they're doing crazy new things, and destructively test vehicles to find out what to fix next. Oceangate could have done something similar and created a truly innovative vehicle. I'm sure the final thing would have been quite a bit more reinforced than the Titan, but it would have been safer. Oh well.
"Your lights can go-" Perfect ending. That's exactly how 'long' it took for five people to turn into pasta sauce. It's weird to think about. Literally faster than our brains can process. So much violence, unfathomable to experience.
If it really happened without warning in an instant, i can think of much worse ways to die. For example uncountable numbers of refugees drowning in the mediterran sea wihle every captain who wants to save them from drowning gets sued. Stockton and the people with him, knew (more or less) what they were up, took the risk and lost - not time to cry, just move on and remember to not use a thin resin hull as only life insurance against very high pressures.
Yeah, when he started yammering on about how safe subs are, all I thought was "tell that to the U-boat crews". The submarine fleet had one of the highest mortality rates of any job in the war, where 8 out of every 10 men who joined the Kreigsmarine to fight on a u-boat would end up dead. Hell, there are several post-war incidents involving submarines where something went wrong and the whole crew went down with the ship.
When this accident happened my lecturer said exploring the ocean is more dangerous than space just because humans are familiar with the ocean so they often underestimate how dangerous it is.
Oceangate, specifically the Titanic expeditions, is a great study on why safety is more than just a set of "rules." Safety is a culture, whether it's on a job site or at the bottom of the ocean, and a failure to uphold that can and will cost lives. Stockton Rush is a testament to what happens when arrogance meets ignorance.
Funny enough, it's way easier to build a spacecraft than submarine. Spacecraft doesn't need to handle any pressure, only radiation really. Tricky part is getting it into space and keeping it there.
This actually makes me very sad in hindsight, he clearly began to realize his dream would not come to fruition in his lifetime so he rushed it, taking others down with him in sheer arrogance
I remember in an interview, James Cameron talked about diving in experimental subs he’d built. He emphasized that the crew was him and a qualified engineer who knew the risks. When you listen to Rush talk, he’s talking in the language of pure selfishness. He had zero concern for his passengers
hell, we can even give credit to Cameron for knowing the damage to his legacy and reputation if he's wrong about stuff like that. Rush had no such concerns, totally believed he was 100% right. that's just sad. never believe your own hype
@@peachy_liliSometimes I believe these "billionaires" are like those carnival hype men that forget what they are saying is a lie and start to believe their bs.
@@RandalfElVikingoI guess that happens if a person is too used to solving every problem with money and don't want to listen to people who aren't as "sucessfull" as him 🤷♂️
"When the Sun extinguishes, there will still be hydrothermal vents." Uh, no, there won't be, because there won't be oceans at that point. They'll have evaporated around five billion years before that.
Lol right? The earth will be vaporized, along with Mercury and Venus. I forget if Mars is inside the circumference of the sun's expansion before it peters out and becomes a white dwarf, but regardless, the earth is going bye-bye.
@@WobblesandBean We do not know Some models show the earth surving because as the sun enlarges it will lose mass allowing the earth to move further away
@@Michael-sb8jf even if Earth physically survives the Sun's red giant phase, it won't have water at that point. Liquid oceans on Earth will be pretty much gone in about a billion years, long before the Sun even leaves the main sequence. And in any case, Earth's geological activity will fade over time, which would turn off most hydrothermal vents too. Any way you slice it, there's no way going underwater would help humans survive the death of the Sun. Maybe there's some way we could escape, but that ain't it.
No worries. It takes maybe a thousand years to fully terraform Mars with the right technologies. 5,000 years to terraform Venus. If we only have a billion years left on Earth, by that time we can drain the oceans and transport the water, along with everything, to another star system, to a planet so similar that life will not only survive, but thrive there. We'll take the soil and the trees and the bees too. Everything and everyone.
@@andyjasso3050 Not only that, but it's useless when it comes to compression stress. Carbon fiber is unbelievably durable, but for tensile strength only.
Also, from my understanding, the deal with carbon fiber is that it's not as easy to find flaws or cracks in the haul unlike steel. On steel hauls they can use X-ray sensors as well as other methods to find micro cracks withIN the steel itself, cracks that might not be visible on the surface but is present within the metal itself. I also heard that basically the very first dive is pretty much the strongest the haul is ever going to be (with microfiber), but after repeated dives ANY micro cracks in the microfiber haul are _WAY_ more dangerous to the structure because of the characteristics of MF. Micro cracks aren't wanted at all, but if they showed up in steel then at least the structure is still very strong. In micro fiber it's critical.
I’ve always liked the aviation expression “There are old pilots and bold pilots but there are no old bold pilots” Guess that applies to submarine pilots as well.
@@wolpertingera5829 this comment is even more hilarious when you realise the Cyclops is named after the real life Cyclops sub made by OceanGate 😂 Like they even acknowledge the trademark in the games credits lol. (Commented this before it got the section about the fucking cyclops, goddamnit lol).
Actually, there could be. If no outside factors change it, the Sun will swallow Earth but then it's too small to go supernova. So it will go into a blue dwarf and finally go out. The Earth is a big ball of magma with a thin crust. The Sun will likely extinguish all life and melt the rock but once it burns off all helium the outside of Earth could cool off and become a rock again.
The scientific consensus is that the Sun will expand so as to envelop the Earth. The Sun will be very sparse at this point and my understanding is that it will slowly vaporize the Earth, though it will take a long time.
what about gravity, would it work the same way after the sun extinguishes? its density would change... I'm pretty sure we won't be able to just keep going.... what the hell, to each day its trouble.
@@crimsondynamo615 Rapture wasn't a real place. Its rise and collapse has literally no significance, because it was all written as a narrative. A narrative that has far more to do with commentary on the failings of Randian, hypercapitalist philosophy then on the practical viability of an underwater city.
Right?! And what they showed on screen was obviously just an ad-hoc list of issues they had identified (including some guy's workbench being cluttered...), rather than any sort of systematic procedure. Excel is a terrible tool for either task, anyway.
No one's walking around with clipboards anymore. It's all done through hosted software that shares the checklist with the entire company, something like bluebeam
Whoa - when he says "There hasnt been an injury on any commercial vessel even though 15 million have gone down in them"-- note how he tries to rely on the safety of all the previously proven and certified conventionally built TITANIUM subs who had no problems to make his own craft seem safe - what a sneaky way to try and make your own UNCERTIFIED vessel seem safe - what a blatantly deceptive arrogant jerk playing with others lives. Also I dont think 15 million people have been that deep before as he claimed.
But ask yourself how they got the number of 15 million... Probably by including "submersibles" like the 4 that operated at West Edmonton Mall for 20 years. Not really comparable.
He even came up with the excuse that the over 50 something year olds with 20+ years of experience in like the NAVY or maritime stuff wasn't "inspirational" to him. which means ANYONE with experience took one look at that thing LAUGHED hysterical and said HELL NO.
The reason deep sea submersibles are as safe as Stockton was proclaiming them to be, is because of the very regulation he was trying to get around. Did he really think submersibles and the deep sea were naturally harmless??
@@superspies32 There was also an Argentinian sub lost a few years prior in 2017 and an Indian sub in 2013. Then there was the Kursk disaster at the beginning of the 2000's. That is beside the minor incidents (e.g. subs running aground in shallow waters or surfacing below ships), that didn't cause hull loses.
Morgan Freeman narrator: "God did indeed sink this submersible. Much like the people who dubbed the Titanic unsinkable, the opposite would come to pass."
Stockton seriously used the fact that safety regulations had kept submariners safe from serious injury for 35 years as his reason for not following them. The man was completely deluded.
Survivorship Bias. It's strangly common. It was even practiced by the US military throughout WWII when re engineering aircraft based on strike patterns.
That was the biggest red flag for me. Another way to say what he said: "For the last 35 years safety regulations have kept millions of lives safe under water. None of those regulations have passed on my sub."
Yet touts the safety of submarines, which do follow the rules, as an argument why HIS submarine was also safe. Hey submarines are super safe, they transport millions of people with barely any deaths, due to their strict safety regulations. Anyway, I build my own, and ignored those safety regulations, so come hop on, submarines are safe, so so is mine!
@@DrewPWeenie1 I haven't run the numbers, but I presume that that type of rapid compression would have briefly brought the temperature of their remains up at least 800C where, yes, molecular bonds are going to break.
@@firstnamelastname9918 I haven’t thought of that. Haha. I was a little lit earlier (chemo). At 6000 psi… yeah I’d probably say you’re correct after thinking about it for a bit hahaha.
he keeps going back to the fact that no one has been injured in a submarine in forever, but also says that he has to break all the rules to do what he wants to do. maybe, perhaps, there is a chance, that the lack of injuries were from the very tight regulations that You are choosing to ignore
It's also important to note, when you're over a thousand feet underwater there's no in-between from perfectly fine and crushed like a tin can. You don't get injured from a submarine, you either live or die instantly.
@@hjohnson966 When you're that rich, you start genuinely, literally thinking you are above consequences. You can pay off every legal system put in place to keep the lesser folk in line, so surely you can pay off the very laws of physics to prevent this submarine from crushing you, right?
I think the families of the crews for the Kursk and the San Juan would disagree with his statement that no one has been injured or killed on a sub in the last 35 years.
No one makes titanium casting this big, so it would have to be made from many parts. I think the grid fins on Falcon 9 is the largest single piece of titanium manufactured.
There is a Futurama scene where their spaceship is being pulled underwater and the professor says “dear lord that is 150 atm of pressure” and Fry asks “how many atm it can take” and the professor answers “its a spaceship so anywhere between 0 and 1”
eh I know nothing about the deep sea and titanic and yet when I heard about Titans design and construction I thought nope I do not want to die in that death trap so never even considered trying to get a ride on it and now I am glad I followed my belief it was a death trap made to kill people because Stockton's dead and I am so much still alive
@@deanobeany if I wanted to go on it yes but the idea of a sub made from carbon fiber which breaks down plus the construction video were a moronic guy was touching the titanium with his bare hands after cleaning it told me yeah it's a death trap even if the carbon fibers good what was the point of cleaning it just to make it dirty again with oils from your hands which weaken the glues holding the carbon fiber to the titanium when it's going to need maximum strength to not implode I knew if some rich dipshit did not care about his own safety that much my money is better spent on other things then a piece of trash like titan💀💀
You people never get off your couch, lazy and scared, It was experimental. Type experimental into google see how many people changed the world and some died.
The fact that he purposefully cites no sub injuries in the last 30 years when purposefully going outside that safety envelope should have been a huge red flag.
"This would qualify as a sub injury under the guidelines of sub safety...LUCKY WE CHOOSE TO OPERATE OUTSIDE THOSE GUIDELINES! ZING! Man, safety and physics is just like settin' up a company: you can choose where you operate, and, bam, the rules of other places don't apply!"
It was a huge red flag for most people with a brain and everybody in the sub community. All the necessary information was out there and The only thing that differentiates the common village idiot from multi-millionaires like Rush and billionaires like Dawood is the number on their bank and offshore accounts. Nobody was forced into that pringles can and everyone signed a waiver that mentioned death multiple times on the first page. No regard for their own safety, no critical thinking, not even some basic survival instinct just a padded wallet and blind trust for a guy who openly bragged about cutting corners and breaking 'over the top' safety rules every chance he got. You didn't need the vast resources of a billionaire before the incident to gather all the necessary information online about OceanGate, Stockton Rush and CyclopsII/Titan to realize that Titan is a ticking suicide capsule. You just needed some common sense or a relatively good judge of character like 20 year old Sean Bloom and his friends had which resulted in his father giving up their seats which were then taken by Dawood and his wife who then gave her place up last minute and stayed on the mothership with their daugther because the son really wanted to go. It would be interesting to know how many people actually decided against a trip with OceanGate.
23:20 "...safest part of the expedition will be the submarine part.."🤥🙄Numerous people called him out on it, yet he was still able to garner support & funding to proceed.😳
I don’t think he really understood how immense 6,000 psi is. He’s talking about strength to buoyancy when he should have been thinking more about strength to time.
This is a stupid comment. The guy was a Princeton graduate and very intellectually gifted, but somehow this video gets flooded with a sea of redditors, being probably one of the stupidest breed of human beings alive, coming in to joke about how stupid he is or how they know better. The guys' calculations worked, he made 13 successful trips to the titanic ffs, what he didn't account for is how the psi would induce heavy wear and tear on the carbon pressure vessel. I'm assuming this is because the data on this phenomenon was not readily available. But to act like the guy was an idiot is truly peak dumbfuckery that only redditors can accomplish.
