The Titan Submersible Disaster Shocked the World. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing Than Anyone Imagined

The only shocking thing is that the rich idiot who said "fuck you" to all the safety standards actually suffered consequences.

Too bad he took a 19-year-old with him :/

In January 2018, Lochridge sent Rush a quality-control inspection report detailing 27 issues with the vehicle, from questionable O-ring seals on the domes and missing bolts to flammable materials and more concerns about its carbon-fiber hull. Rush fired him the next day. (Although Lochridge later made a whistleblower report to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about Titan, Rush sued him for breach of contract. The settlement of that lawsuit resulted in Lochridge dropping his complaint, paying OceanGate nearly $10,000, and signing an NDA. Lochridge did not respond to WIRED.)

Ugh

How can you hear “o-ring issue” and not shit your pants? Did we learn nothing from Challenger?
- I'm not a gastroenterologist, but I do believe when you have an o-ring issue you specifically do shit your pants.
He may have been sued unjustly, but he also isn't currently a paste at the bottom of the ocean, so who is really laughing now?
I hope he feels it was worth the trouble and the $10k to try to do the right thing and reveal the corruption in the system.
- i hope he at least feels vindicated by what happened
You can get sued for putting in a osha complaint? Doesn't that defeat like the entire purpose of osha?

My favorite part was the qualified engineer sending him the stress curve graph with the likely crush depth zone marked with literal skull and crossbones and he apparently just ignored it and chose to exceed those depths anyway.

hits the projected crush depth and doesn't crush*
"HA I knew it was fine!"
descends 12 more feet*
implodes*
- You think it was like a "glug!' sound? Or maybe more like a pop or a clap sound?

Shocked? Absolutely not. Disturbed? Nope, content that some rich no clue CEO idiot went yolo? Perhaps

I do feel for the 19 year old who was rightfully terrified of the thing but went on because his dad wanted to bond
- Wait, three rich ppl were there as customers?
  \ This thing is actually more efficient than I gave it credit.
- Yeah I feel for them as well, because the kid was essentially forced into a one way trip they will never come back from because of their father emotionally guilt tripping them into it
I mean, the only thing that shocked me, honestly, was that millionaires were willing to get inside that thing.
I mean. It looked like a giant fleshlite.
- Dildo actually. Not flesh light. But maybe during the implosion for a split nano second.

I love how the AI art understands that there should be more stuff in a sub. There's pipes and wires in that image, where on the now crushed sub, it was a smooth room into which they were bolted. Even the AI image controller has a wire on it.
Which character does James Earl Jones play
- He's the voice of the sub.
That's terrible. I love it.

I do like the idea of how the billionaires who died didn't understand that their own hatred of quality control standards applied to every other corporation including the ones they have to rely on for their safety.

Surprise surprise big tech company ceo turns out to be a self-entitled, I know it all, asshole. If only it always had negative outcomes on billionaires cause usually it is the exact opposite. Normally they float and common people drown.

These guys have lich levels of drive for success and living forever and yet can be so self absorbed in their clearly unjustified and uninformed ideas about very technical topics, that they can literally march themselves and their siblings to certain death. This just proves that they have the capacity to destroy the Earth in the most obvious way and yet not realize it. Like "I am sure a single nuke to China will be fine they have billions" level of stupidity I am talking about here.

Even when OceanGate decided to change the domes in the final design from carbon fiber to titanium, Rush didn’t commission models to test the interactions between the new materials; one former employee who was familiar with Rush’s decision says the CEO balked at the high price tag.

Bro, wtf. Then they also reused the same o rings from the first hull and ripped it off and moved it to the new hull. I'm surprised they didn't die sooner. Thing was a death trap.

Definitely need more of these!

I remember a lot of giggling, not as much shock.

I can't believe all the warning signs

Virtually all marine vessels are certified by organizations such as the American Bureau of Shipping, DNV, or Lloyd’s Register, which ensure that they are built using approved materials and methods and carry appropriate safety gear. It has been widely reported that Rush was dismissive of such certification, but what has not been made public until now is that OceanGate pursued certification with DNV (then known as DNV GL) in 2017—until Rush saw the price. “[DNV] informed me that this was not an easy few thousand dollar project as [it] had presented, but would cost around $50,000,” he later wrote in an email to Rob McCallum, a deep-sea explorer who had also signed Kohnen’s letter.

Later in article:

Reality was more prosaic. Like most startups, OceanGate was in constant need of funds. Rush was trying to save money wherever he could. Interns, who made up around a third of the engineering team, were paid as little as $13 an hour. (When a manager pointed out in 2016 that Washington’s minimum wage was just $9.47 an hour, Rush responded, “I agree we are high. $10 seems fair.”) Rush also downgraded the sub’s titanium components from aerospace grade 5 quality to weaker and cheaper grade 3, says one former employee.

I knew they were being cavalier about safety, but didn't realize they were penny pinching to this degree.

It's nice to see a billionaire die because he was a cheap cunt lol, also he took a few other billionaires with him, solid work buddy
- The dude in charge wasn't even a billionaire. He was just some founder whose company wasn't doing all that well, financially. I think his peak net worth was something like $25 million, and that was mostly in stock in his doomed company. $25 million is nothing to sneeze at, but it's also not quite enough money to explain the dude's arrogance.
$50,000 for that certification sounds cheap.

Did Stockton Rush at least get his Darwin Award? Or is that only for people who do not murder others?

Did he have kids?
- 2 according to Wikipedia
- I hope not!
Imagine turning yourself into pink mist for this idiot lmao

Behind the Bastards did Stockton Rush

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-stockton-rush-inventor-of-118084105/

This Wired article is an interesting read, well worth the time.

I wish we could see into the head of Stockton Rush a little bit more. The job of all entrepreneurs is to a large degree knowing who to listen to and who to ignore, as well as figuring out which rules you can break. Usually the lives of passengers and yourself is not on the line, though and that's why so many of the highly competent engineers left his team.

A lot of his decision making seemed money driven. He got quotations for testing services but declined because of the cost. Salvaging the old titanium rings from the old busted hull to use on the new hull was a risky choice but new ones were surely very expensive. Perhaps a much larger budget would have led to a more committed team of experts and the resources to test things to a higher degree of confidence.

As this article points out, OceanGate just never came up with a design that was good enough for the job at hand.

But what can you say. The ocean floor is littered with countless dreams.

But it's still as narcissisticly stupid as we already know it was.

I got a good laugh out of it. wouldn't call it shock.

I wished this happened to Bezos and Musk on their space penises. But I'll take these billionaires.