The Titan Submersible Disaster. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing
wired.comDavid Lochridge, who oversaw marine operations at the company and who needed to sign off on the transfer, became convinced that Titan was unsafe. 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.)
How is that legal in the US? It is insane that someone who clearly was acting in the interest of the public (albeit the rich, fee-paying public...) should be found at fault for doing something that is clearly morally correct.
I don't normally read Wired, bu this article is both morbidly fascinating and a great tale of human hubris.
It's a bummer Lochridge tried to halt progress and be fined 10k for opening his mouth. Damn
The word "found" implies judicial discovery of truth through due process. This was a settlement. Nobody was found to be at fault, the information was highly dangerous and therefore valuable, if you want to eliminate the market of buying silence reform due process protections so they cannot be subverted by so called plea "deals" and so called settlement "agreements".
If I read that right, Lochridge was not compensated for silence at all, he paid them $10,000 ?
That's not right.
"Settlement" does really say a judge oversaw the entire thing while a corporation bullied somebody working for the public interest into silence.
The lawsuit was settled out of court (https://www.wsbradio.com/news/national/documents-detail/VUTB...). Reading between the lines, I'm guessing OceanGate (a company with substantial financial resources) would have buried Lochbridge (an individual with substantially fewer financial resources) in lawsuits if he had not settled. (Not to mention the stress, hardship, and real-or-perceived threat of jail time for Lochbridge, should the court find him to be guilty.)
If you're implying that the judge was somehow complicit in helping OceanGate ('oversaw', meaning presided over and made decisions concerning), then please provide evidence of that?
> OceanGate would have buried Lochbridge in lawsuits
So it's not a single judge, but the Judiciary Power collectively was absolutely complicit on the deed.
One interesting thing about this saga is we learned just how much of a badass James Cameron is.
James Cameron put together the team that designed the DeepSea Challenger, which he took to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, far deeper than Titanic. One interesting tidbid (IIRC) is that they spent 3 years just designing the pressure vessel in software before they ever built anything, so precise the engineering had to be. And even then they did have some system failures on that dive but nothing catastrophic.
OceanGate was an exercise in hubris from people who didn't know better and didn't want to know better. It was pure ego from the uninformed. I personally found the general reaction to be fascinating too: it's like a whole bunch of people discovered class awareness and solidarity.
Surprisingly the DeepSea Challenger was only $10M as well. Thats certainly a ton of money, but it's in the same ballpark as what ocean gate spent.
i guess the difference was that ocean gate needed to recoup the expense and make a profit as fast as possible whereas the deepsea challenger didn't. so they could take their time and do it right without pressure.
If you get the chance to watch Deepsea Challenge[1], it's worth the time. They were under a lot of pressure, which James Cameron was very proud of and the source of. They had more problems then you think, but was able to make it work.
of course. i meant they weren't under pressure to cut corners and ignore problems in order to make a profit. it was a different kind of pressure, to make sure they didn't miss any problems and to eliminate any risks, and possibly they risked the project being aborted if they could not solve all the problems.
> They were under a lot of pressure
At that depth, I imagine they would be.
True but Ocean Gate were planning on multiple use, surely a higher bar.
> Ocean Gate were planning on multiple use,
FTA: "up to 10,000 times, according to internal design documents."
That seems like an absurdly high amount.
> surely a higher bar
was that a pun?
The whole idea was/is weird. I can understand undertaking a certain level of risk to get an amazing view of the Titanic, or some other wreck or reef, but that wasn't even what was offered. Regardless of who offered this dive and how it was managed, there would always have been some risk. That risk had to be stupid low for what was offered, a tiny window, offering a really poor viewing experience. It not even like the was a massive glass dome and you could pan around the wreck for hours just looking at it from a multitude of angels. Notice how all the videos and photos are always taken from the outside of the submersible.
The cost and risk, as compared to what was on offer never matched up.
I imagine the real offer was a certain thrill and uniqueness. People do base jumping, motocykle street racing, free solo climbing on skycrappers, and various other incredibly risky things for a reason. Maybe adrenaline hiy, maybe experience, but certainly not a well thought of risk/benefit balance sheet.
>That risk had to be stupid low for what was offered, a tiny window, offering a really poor viewing experience.
The experience (whether worth the risk or not) was about the adventure and being down there, not the size of the view.
If you look at the passengers they seem to generally be people wholly obsessed with the Titanic. So I don't think these dives were ever going to be attractive to you and I — the more casually curious.
> amazing view of the Titanic
This is the sort of experience where I doubt the view was anywhere as good as what an unmanned vehicle that prioritized lighting and filming could capture. I suspect this was far more about being able to say “I spent $[huge amount of money] and got to see it with my own eyes” even though the view was probably pretty shit with everyone crowded around a small dome.
They didn’t offer just that, but also bragging rights for people for whom a few $100k is peanuts.
Basically the same reason people climb Everest and not peaks ‘nobody’ knows about that are a lot less crowded.
You don't understand the psychology of safari tourism.
A cramped interior and a small window, making the thing feel harder and less attainable, amps up the excitement.
As an product designer / inventor, I know that feeling well... that point when so many prototypes have failed, but you feel you are so close. You feel you've run out of time and that it will be too expensive to test another one, so you convince yourself to go into production with what *should* work, it has to right?!?... (well it almost never does, and it's 100% not worth the stress).
But to put your own life and others at risk making that move... whoooooooweeeeee, that's fully into batshit crazy land.
Tale as old as time: lack of safety culture due to reality denying executives causes people to die.
I don't think the executive going down in their own creation and using a video game controller before imploding is a tale as old time.
How about a nepo baby trying to achieve low orbit using wax wings?
Likely happened all the time during the feudal ages, when incompetent military commanders ordered their feudal subjects to engage in combat with disadvantage.
This event is just thinly veiled with a little bit more civility and tech progress.
It is too. But it's a very different tale from the one where the executive just orders other people to take the bullet.
It's a good thing that the development of general goal to action mappers is in the hands of more prudent and wise executives.
Respect the ocean, Space is somewhat mild in comparison.
I don't think space is milder, but to get up there, you first have to build a working rocket, which will make sure that you generally know what you are doing. The ocean doesn't have such a barrier, you can theoretically lower anything into the water and try to get to the Titanic...
The ocean, even the deep, is orders of magnitude easier and less dangerous than space...
As a former submariner (but not an astronaut, tbf), I think they’re on-par. They both actively want to kill you at all times.
In total failure mode, yes.
But with one of the two though there are other humans not far away to send help, and land/open sea to rise up if you see a problem emerging.
In space it can be nightmare to get any help or get back if something goes wrong.
You can’t always get human contact underwater. If you can’t come up to periscope depth, comms are extremely limited. Even when you can, the response is likely to be “fix it yourself.”
It was a strange and isolating feeling the first time something broke underway, and I realized there wasn’t someone to ask how to fix it. It’s also a great builder of grit and determination, or of hopelessness. People tend to go one way or the other.
Being awakened with a flooding alarm when drills were not scheduled, for example – I realized afterwards (as did everyone else, I assume) that if faced with an actual emergency, I could keep my cool and work the problem. [0] It’s a good feeling, especially when you know you can trust the other 100+ people around you to do the same. Incidentally, it was not technically flooding (unplanned water ingestion at a rate greater than the capacity of dewatering systems), but sure as hell looked scary when they demonstrated the flow rate seen later.
[0]: I personally think this is why Navy Nukes (especially submariners) make great SREs. The fact that a Nuke helped build Google’s SRE program probably helps.
>You can’t always get human contact underwater.
No, but it's 99% more likely than to get someone to help in space...
Until fairly recently, more people had been on the moon than at the bottom of the Mariana trench.
Yes, tictacs may as well be from the ocean....
"Move fast and crush people"
Is it "more disturbing," though, really?
I mean, privileged rich dude who thinks he knows better than experts wins Darwin award, and some people dumb enough to trust him got to go along for the (one way) ride.
I'm not any more disturbed by it now than I was a year ago, and a year ago it barely moved the needle. And then it was only about the 19 year old son of one of the passengers -- even at that age, a child ought to be able to trust his father to keep him safe, and Shahzada Dawood utterly failed on that count.
Stockton Rush is not eligible for Darwin award because he had two children.
The 19-year old son is eligible, though he won’t win the award because he was peer-pressured by his dad.
I wanted to ask if the Darwin Award is also possible if you manage to get yourself and your child killed but the father had another daughter which is still alive
I was mistaken, I just rechecked the rules and apparently having an offspring no longer disqualifies a candidate since the offspring only inherits 50% of the nominee’s genes.
So everyone in the sub are eligible now.
Well, fair.
I wouldn't perhaps have expressed myself as callously as you, and I think the 'Darwin award' is a silly concept that doesn't deserve referencing but I do agree with your general sentiment. To directly reference the sensationalising Wired headline, no, this incident did not 'shock the world' and it is not really very disturbing (because the failings of those involved are very well known human traits).
I personally paid scant attention to this story, mostly only observing how much of a media frenzy there was around it. Sure, it's fine to write up a story on what led up to the failure of the sub and fine for ppl to be interested in that story. But it's not a 'world shocking' nor particularly disturbing story. (I can think of things going on right now that are both shocking the world and truly disturbing, but I won't go there. Suffice to say that we devalue language when we use it sensationally.)
I was disturbed reading about all of the back-pedaling by the contractors.
I didn’t delve this story, I just remember I saw a five minutes info at some tv channel in France, which was interviewing a guy who refused to for the ride just before the launch as he estimated the safety level he was expecting was not there. I don’t know if other riders were aware of that fact, which should have been communicated to them as a big red alert.
Sad story, really. These people at least died while actively pursuing a dream, though it finished in a dramatic way. This is unlike so many people in Gaza or Ukraine just to mention what pop out of my mind. :’(
Something I learned from this story is that a whistleblower Rush fired who could have prevented Rush from ever taking passengers on his fated dive instead ended up having to pay a $10,000 settlement and sign an NDA. The legal system utterly failed to protect society from a dangerously reckless man.
> I don’t know if other riders were aware of that fact, which should have been communicated to them as a big red alert.
As I understand it, the passengers were made aware of the risks.
https://www.businessinsider.com/read-oceangate-waiver-titan-...
"the passengers were made aware of the risks"
From people asking them to sign this who otherwise hand-waived the risks away?
I hadn't heard that before. Did Oceangate lie about or understate the risks?
It's easy (and legally advised) to have a waiver mentioning all the risks, while also totally downplaying them in your sales pitch and live communications that go on before such a thing gets signed.
Sure, but did they do that? I've seen plenty of reporting about the extensive and blunt waiver but nothing about them misleading passengers or, as you said, hand-waiving the risks away.
I'm pretty sure they did exactly that, seeing the way the owner talked about their "innovations" and blatant disregard for safety. James Cameron also alluded to that.
I mean, did you read the article?
No, it's under a paywall.
But I have read several articles on the story and show a dozen or more videos, so.
I was replying to the guy suggesting they were honest about the risks, not you. I think you and I agree.
Reminds me of Vonnegut's line from Jailbird (without the stuttering of the character who uttered it), on the principal cause of a massacre:
"American amateurism in matters of life and death"
I'm a Canadian. As a Millenial of the "just watch a Youtube video and figure it out" generation, and somebody who has watched some things (like housing) get strangled by regulation, I can see the appeal of American libertarianism on a lot of subjects.
But as Vonnegut said: matters of life and death.
A news story is making the rounds of a badminton racket that killed a poor, unfortunate child. Matters of life and death are extremely broad, and even negligible probabilities mean that terrible things happen.
Wait wait wait, how does a racket kill someone? I get that it snapped, but how did the handle get to somehow pierce a child's skull? Why was her head in the path of the swing? This story makes zero sense.
“Seriousness of outcomes” is a bad way to approximate the appropriate degree of regulation. We have many examples of very serious industries (e.g. pharmaceuticals, autonomous vehicles) where overly cautious regulation results in many more deaths on net.
Better rules of thumb are “whether externalities are internalized”, “asymmetry in upside vs downside”, “ability to measure outcomes”.
> overly cautious regulation results in many more deaths on net
How do you know this?
There's no comprehensive answer that's going to fit in this textbox but: For self-driving cars, it arises from (a) there are 30k American deaths per year from normal cars, (b) the number of deaths from self-driving cars is negligible (a few per year if you include Teslas, and zero per year if you focus on the best technology from Waymo and Cruise), and (c) everything we know about R&D points to significant acceleration possible by testing and iterating more at larger scale. For pharmaceuticals, it's a longer answer but it still starts by comparing the deaths caused by the marginal approved drug (relatively few) to the long-term benefits of trying out more drugs (high). The root cause, ultimately, is that the regulatory agency gets blamed for every death caused by something they allow but do not get blamed for deaths from the absence of things that were not allowed.
How many thousands of regular cars are there for every self-driving car?
It's a few hundred thousand regular cars per self-driving car. If you think my argument rests on the current self-driving cars being safer than the current regular cars, you didn't understand it.
You're right, I read it again and I missed the ending the first time.
Deep-sea experts criticized OceanGate’s choices, from Titan’s carbon-fiber construction to Rush’s [CEO] public disdain for industry regulations, which he believed stifled innovation
Seems a remarkably similar sentiment to the e/acc types currently loudly influencing tech and business discourse on various media.
Wouldn't the e/acc analysis here be that if people, or our entire species, has to die in the name of progress then that's a cost we should be willing to bear?
I'm not super familiar with the space, but I don't think technology that nobody can use captures the "effective" part.
End the human race by transferring all our consciousnesses to the immortal AI mainframe? A-OK!
End the human race for a fancy new sub design? Not effective. :(
One shouldn’t conclude that regulations lead to positive outcomes from this. In addition to having a disdain for regulation, OceanGate was doing bad engineering. Projects that follow regulation strictly can fail due to bad engineering too.
> Projects that follow regulation strictly can fail due to bad engineering too.
Which in the world of regulated engineering disciplines usually translates to new regulations to prevent the newly discovered failure modes. The point of regulation isn't to eliminate 100% of bad engineering, it's to rigorously define and enforce the current standard of good engineering so that the vast majority of cases don't fail.
Arguably we're seeing bad engineering by OpenAI leading to their superalignment team quitting and raise the alarm.
No.
Re-wind the clock:
- A google engineer says "google has AGI"... this leaks and is dismissed.
- MS writes a paper that says GPT has hints of AGI.
- OpenAI signs deal with MS saying they can have everything OpenAI does till they hit AGI.
That last one. Thats not a bet you make if you think AGI is a decade away. Its a bet you make if you think your close.
OpenAI thought that they were close. They fell for the classic AI trap of "if only we had a bigger model". They got high on their own supply and thought that some sort of tipping point would come with size or scale. That a bigger model with MORE data and MORE information would have AGI, sapience or sentience emerge.
It was a bad bet. Q* isnt going to get there, the LLM line is dead.
Why do you need to worry about safety or super alignment if you arent going to get to AGI. They left because there is no THERE, there..
> They left because there is no THERE, there..
They left because they lost the power struggle.
That makes zero sense.
If your safety oriented, and your company is close to AGI you stay regardless. Your boss isnt going to push you out because you leave and scream "it will kill us all"... All the safety people have been doing that for years, now they are quite.
If you aren't close, or realize "we're never getting there" leaving, vesting makes sense. There's NO existential risk.
Talk of AGI is hubris, vanity and snake oil.
Philosophy majors judging bad engineering and making grand stands.
Rules and regulations are not designed to ensure good products. They are there to prevent disastrous ones.
Regulations is a scary word for rules.
Can you imagine a world without rules? Awful.
Some people had extremely bad relationships with their parents. It's difficult for them to accept rules of any kind.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman, commenting on the Challenger disaster
The 'Inside' Story Is More Disturbing
Is this a tasteless pun ?
Given that this as a pun would be applicable to anything with an interior and exterior, I'd say no, it's not meant as such.
The Wired article clearly paints Rush as someone who was irresponsible and cavalier about even the basics of good engineering before testing a complex thing with real human lives that trusted him too much.
In the essence of that argument at least, they're right. His using a prototype he knew to be a failure to then explore the ocean with customers aboard, under the same conditions as those that caused its test failure, is criminally negligent.
However, pointing to all sorts of mistakes and gambles small or large as narratives towards a full blown condemnation of extremely dangerous efforts is mistaken I think:
In the world of exploring extremely harsh environments, some heavy risk is inevitable even if you do everything you know of right. In such contexts, something could go catastrophically wrong just as easily as it could all end successfully and a narrative will be constructed for why either was the case even if either outcome was interchangeably plausible..
Pushing immediate blame on someone for something going wrong in an inherently risky activity is to fall into this above narrative trap. It also implies the idea that people who do dangerous but potentially worthy things are wrong for doing so because they didn't have perfect foresight.
> In the world of exploring extremely harsh environments, some heavy risk is inevitable even if you do everything you know of right. In such contexts, something could go catastrophically wrong just as easily as it could all end successfully and a narrative will be constructed for why either was the case even if either outcome was interchangeably plausible..
That implies that what they were doing was somehow pioneering. It wasn’t. Deepsea explorers and the oil and gas industry have used submersibles at those depths for decades and their safety profile is very well understood. There are facilities to test them and procedures to make sure they’re safe before anyone risks their life. All Rush did was make a poorly designed, poorly tested submersible with the wrong materials where he cut corners left and right. TFA is just a laundry list of criminal negligence.
The Titan passengers make up the bulk of the fatalities from civilian submersibles this century. Save for military submarines and the occasional industrial accident, they’ve been extremely safe.
I don't disagree. In the case of Thurston Rush, what he did was absurdly negligent, in multiple instances across a long stretch of opportunities to simply do basic due diligence with testing and redesign. For whatever reasons of his own, he didn't and died horribly along with those others.
My wider point was more about how in certain fields, those who strive for certain achievements often do similarly risky things and only get called out if there is a catastrophic failure. If they succeed, they're often lauded. Also, in some areas it really is impossible to avoid mistakes, and those who get criticized for making them are often only those who got unlucky instead of actually negligent. This doesn't apply in the case of Titan though, since he made multiple glaring mistakes that he could have corrected and was urged to do so by known experts in parts design.
> Save for military submarines and the occasional industrial accident, they’ve been extremely safe.
And even then, USN submarines are absurdly over-engineered. Or more aptly, they’re engineered to survive a massively hostile environment, even under multiple worst-case scenarios. FFS, the USS San Francisco slammed into an underwater mountain at flank speed at a depth of over 500 feet, and still managed to surface and get home under her own power. New sonar dome, ballast tanks, etc. and she was released for duty for another eight years.
This is only possible when you have multiple, redundant systems for everything.
He already got punished by life, no need to blame him posthumous.
He is like one of the inventors of the parachute (Franz Karl Reichelt), still wanted to try because he believed in it.
Unfortunately believing is not enough when it comes to reliability.
Effort was good though, as apparently it worked at some point.
> This submersible design, later renamed Titan, eventually made it down to the Titanic in 2021. It even returned to the site for expeditions the next two years. But nearly one year ago, on June 18, 2023, Titan dove to the infamous wreck and imploded, instantly killing all five people onboard, including Rush himself
which could explain why they sell tickets.
I'm sure SpaceX already knows the rockets won't make it back intact, but they still launch anyway (despite the losses).
Falcon 9s have 2 failures and one partial from 354 launches, so they're proving to be an extremely reliable vehicle on the scale of rockets. The current model is 289 of them and has a perfect record so far.
That's substantially more successful than Soyuz which crashed a lot more and killed someone by parachute failure and crew by depressurisation (and another crew escaped the exploding rocket by launch abort system and another abort subjected the crew to a 21G descent) in the early days and is still considered one of the safer rockets ever (Soyuz-U, the rocket, had 22 failures out of 786 launches, and Soyuz, the spacecraft on top, made 153 missions).
There's still a long future in front of us for SpaceX to screw it up by skimping on things or run into some very bad luck or unforseen issues, but at least as it stands now, pointing at test launches going bang, when they're weren't ever expected to not go bang, and calling the production rocket unreliable is not well supported.
For all that I personally like to dunk on Musk, SpaceX follows majorly classic incremental engineering pipeline, and there are people who check things thrice. Some of it because as "new" product in aerospace they can't just skirt things like Boeing did with airliners. Some of it being customer due diligence.
And even Musk personally acknowledged that he nearly tanked SpaceX early on - because they didn't have experienced engineering lead to take the project - and he ended up hiring one when they scraped enough on government money to get there.
> I'm sure SpaceX already knows the rockets won't make it back intact, but they still launch anyway (despite the losses).
I'm certain they don't have this attitude with manned trips.
Their attitude for crewed flights is to put pictures of the astronauts on every work order generated for the mission.
Is this true? I googled and couldn't find it. I'd really like to read about this.
Pretty sure the inventory of the parachute didn't take paying guests on his tests...
The inventor of the parachute probably didn't take several people with him on false premises.
Yeah that is what the bummer is. And I read somewhere that the contract for passengers explicitly stated they could die, and that it was an experimental vessel approved by nobody.
always read the fine print...
#DearMoon (though, hopefully was cancelled instead of rushed, otherwise people would have died according to current state).
Pioneers can go to great lengths to overpromise safety, budget, and timeline to secure funding.
They wouldn't launch that until the vehicle is human rated though...
In practice: a hard deadline/budget + customers who already paid can lead to a disaster.
Not saying this is wise, but at least he went with the customers, so he was all-in with them.
Stockton Rush himself during his public interventions made it clear such explorations were scary and dangerous:
"it made a lot of noise, which is a very sphincter-tightening experience".
I think the value of money is well established, it doesn't justify killing several others.
With how rich this guy was, and based on the article, it was probably hubris anyways.
What are you talking about? They tested a prototype. It failed. Anyway, they built a full size thing based on the prototype that failed. They charged a lot of money to unsuspecting rich guys. Then, eventually it failed, just as the test suggested it would.
Even worse: the first full size thing had a large-scale delamination that made it obvious that it would be unsafe to use it again, then they ordered a second carbon fibre hull from a different manufacturer, used a different manufacturing process (several curing phases instead of only one), and reused the end domes and connecting rings from the first thing that had been pretty inseparably glued to the failed cylinder, then tested that insufficiently, and eventually it failed.
This is where it's actually interesting, it's not prototype -> live and boom.
It's the fifth mission or something, and worked for two years.
They actually went to the Titanic with that sub and previously succeeded to reach the Titanic, then it's later on, that the vehicle started to become fragile due to multiple reuses.
> This is where it's actually interesting, it's not prototype -> live and boom.
> It's the fifth mission or something, and worked for two years.
Interesting how? I'm reminded of a quote from a famous failure analysis:
> We have also found that certification criteria used in [Mission] Readiness Reviews often develop a gradually decreasing strictness. The argument that the same risk was [deployed] before without failure is often accepted as an argument for the safety of accepting it again. Because of this, obvious weaknesses are accepted again and again, sometimes without a sufficiently serious attempt to remedy them, or to delay a [mission] because of their continued presence.
>Rather than warning of failure, Green explained that the sounds indicated “irreversible” damage. “It is my belief, substantiated by many years of experience, that composite structures all have a finite lifetime,” wrote Green, who died in 2021. “While I do not intend to be an alarmist, I did not sleep well and arose early to send this message.”
There sure does seem to be a lot of strong expert advice that was willfully ignored, per the article, that their materials choices, testing methodology, and damage monitoring system were setting them up for exactly the disaster that occurred.
And this exact failure mode of carbon fiber was well known and understood by engineers – and ignored by Rush.
The only comparison we should make of Stockton Rush is Icarus.
Notably, he was also warned not to fly too low over the ocean.
“Beneath the waves” was right out.
> He already got punished by life, no need to blame him posthumous.
There absolutely is.
Hubris, stupidity, learning from the mistakes of others.
Blaming him is a giant, flashing sign.
DON'T BE THAT GUY
> Effort was good though.
... was it? They didn't test enough and the tests they could be bothered to do, failed. Then they shipped anyway and he got himself and several other people killed.
A non-charitable interpretation of these events could be made that it was an elaborate and long-term murder/suicide.