James Cameron went down the Mariana Trench, much deeper than titanic’s depth. E we 100% have safe, tested, and proven submersible design. But none of them are made from more than one contiguous metal casing and none use carbon fiber. Stockton Rush looked at the submersible industry and thought to himself “what if we fucked with the design and made it mostly carbon fiber??” This is why the moron died, not because of submersible depth.
Stockton Rush died because he didn’t have the money to test new technology. There’s a reason why the research primarily comes from the US military, they have man power and funding. He didn’t even have the money to buy additional carbon fibre that would end up as waste but is necessary to lay the fibre straight, or to take the safest measures that prevent bubbling in the carbon fibre resin since that takes more time, and time is money. He had to “fuck with the design” because he was doing something never done before, which is bringing down multiple people. Iron can’t do that right now, too impractical. He didn’t safety test because he couldn’t afford to waste carbon fibre, an expensive material, in destroyed subs, or really anything else required to test these subs such as a boat that could hold the vessel.
It’s really a simple lesson in the scientific method, and that safety procedures are not annoying bureaucratic impediments, they are written in blood.
I find it very interesting, just info dumping some stuff about the materials used and the lesser known issues for those curious. Shows from day #1 the mindset they had was doomed and had no business trying any of this on any type of slim budget.
The problem with its carbon fiber structure is that it it just doesn’t have the durability to sustain that much compression decompression like steel and titanium have.
True. But it does have promise for this use case, it might be a dud but I’d find it interesting if someone tested it fully. Oceangate did literally
none of the basic testing eg submersing a sub repeatedly and to failure (well they did, but it wasn’t a test, and it turned them into soup). The research just hasn’t been done on carbon fibre and it’s crazy to think they decided to use it knowing they couldn’t afford this research.
