Costs about $250k per person - https://oceangateexpeditions.com/tour/titanic-expedition/ (Site looks to be down at the moment, probably overloaded due to people searching after this news). I don't think it's particularly crowded, but certainly could become one day in theory.
Yeah I suppose that would be the ideal outcome. I was thinking of some kind of depressurization scenarios where they get crushed by 300 atmospheres worth of pressure.
We'd have to look at the details of the contract to see if half of the ticket price is refunded in the event that they bring you to the Titanic but don't bring you back to the surface.
"Goliath Awaits is a 1981 American made-for-television action adventure science fiction thriller... about an ocean liner sunk by a German U-boat in 1939 whose wreck is discovered in 1981, with over 300 survivors and their descendants living in an air bubble inside the ship."[1]
Watched it as a kid, and it definitely stuck in my head. Quite impressive cast.
You're right, Google showed $125k from other articles and some looking at this earlier (a year or so ago) and $125k sounded right. I guess they doubled it!
> Did it not occur to anyone that it might be a bad idea?
Of course the danger was considered, be realistic and stop letting class conflict cloud your judgement. Something being judged to be dangerous doesn't mean people won't do it, and people doing something dangerous doesn't mean they didn't consider the risks. People go skiing, base jumping down cliffs with wingsuits, cave diving and swimming with sharks. It's okay to do dangerous things if you know and accept the risks.
All of the things you mentioned are activities for the wealthy. Why does that matter? Because having a lot of money can make risk not as risky. Rich people know they will be rescued. They have insurance and fancy doctors. They can afford to be airlifted out of exotic places.
While it's not a conclusive link, it seems to me that people with a smaller financial safety net might not be as interested in such activities because they cannot stand the risk.
> All of the things you mentioned are activities for the wealthy
That's really the key aspect of this story for you isn't it? Screw them because they're rich; I get that, but just own it.
And for the record, you don't need to be rich to go skiing and break your neck on a tree. A whole lot of working class people save up money for a vacation then go skiing. A whole lot of working class people save up money for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Hawaii and go scuba diving. If you find it hard to believe either of those scenarios then believe this: a whole lot of working class people buy motorcycles and drive them fast. Hell, when I was a teen I used to pedal my $100 bicycle down steep hills as fast as I could. Taking risks for thrills is something that's broadly accessible to just about anybody.
Having been linked this elsewhere in the thread I don't quite like the fact that they're so brazen that they bought internal lighting from Camping World and drive it with a Logitech USB gamepad and using half-ass construction piping as a ballast.
Or the fact that they scrubbed a Titanic launch for the media due to weather (presenting from some kind of briefing room where they presented from a laptop on top of a Breville cooker box), went elsewhere, then scrubbed THAT launch while in the water because the launch platform floats detached...
As opposed to the professionals who went with a microsoft xbox controller? [1]
> Or the fact that they scrubbed a Titanic launch for the media due to weather
Yes? Weather is a thing. This is not a ride at disney land, of course they cancel the operation when the circumstances are not favorable. In fact doing the opposite would be foolish.
The company in question might be full of jokers, but your points don’t quite illistrate this well. They are about appearances and not substance.
> As opposed to the professionals who went with a microsoft xbox controller?
I think what's more telling is that they didn't even splurge on the actual Microsoft Xbox controller. They cheaped out with an unproven logitech gamepad. When you're already doing something in an unorthodox way at least don't half-ass it.
> The company in question might be full of jokers, but your points don’t quite illistrate this well. They are about appearances and not substance.
Your distinction is a bit arbitrary. Every point about this company will always be about appearances unless you have first-hand accounts or experiences. Otherwise, info on the company's technology, choices, strategies or anything else will always be based on appearance. In the absence of more concrete evidence, these small indicators can at least provide something to infer from.
> Your distinction is a bit arbitrary. Every point about this company will always be about appearances unless you have first-hand accounts or experiences.
Not really. Here is a substance based argument: there is no underwater FAA. This company, and any other private submarine company is setting their own quality level and then marking their own homework to see if they have met it. In a commercial environment they are incentivised to cut corners and there is no external force resisting this.
Then you can ask them about their tech and procedures. Do they have redundant means of communication? Do they have multiply redundant means to release the ballast? How many hull penetrations there are and how are they implemented? If they are unwilling to discuss these questions that is worse than a bad answer.
Some comments are criticising their choice of carbon fiber for the middle section of their pressure vessel. I don’t know enough about the engineering there to decide for myself if that criticism is fair or not but that is an argument about substance not appearance.
I think this is the big thing for me. David Pogue, when he went on a dive with them last year, pointed out that the vessel has no beacon [1]; yet the door bolts from the outside. Apparently there was a five-hour period where the company did not know the location of the sub after it resurfaced.
To me, that seems crazy. Having a GPS beacon seems like a no-brainer for safety purposes. It feels indicative of the engineering as a whole.
>In a commercial environment they are incentivised to cut corners and there is no external force resisting this
Please if you are incentivized to cut $10 on the main control interface of your expensive sub that also is to drive your business, you have some fundamental cultural problems beyond "commercial environment".
>In a commercial environment they are incentivised to cut corners and there is no external force resisting this
Please if you are incentivized to cut $10 on the main control interface of your expensive sub that is incredibly low volume production, you have some fundamental cultural problems and its not a business decision.
Can’t you say the same thing about the logitech one? My point is that using an off the shelf solution is not necessarily a bad one. Probably there are differences between the reliability of the different controllers within that category but not to the level where choosing one over the other is a clear sign of engineering mallpractice.
There are far more Xbox controllers in use than Logitech. In the gaming community, the Logitech controllers are known to be janky and less reliable.
The PlayStation controllers are more popular globally, but have not had a great track record when it comes to operation with anything but a PlayStation.
I get what you're saying, though, and I'm not faulting them for using an off-the-shelf product. I'm faulting them for using a substandard product.
I think you have unreasonable expectations. Off-the-shelf components may be more reliable than custom developed products (especially since you can afford a backup or two).
Also, with respect to emergency ballast - cheapness is a virtue. You're supposed to drop it in an emergency, and hesitating because "I don't want to lose my expensive weights" could kill you. This is a consideration for recreational scuba too, instructors recommend buying cheap weight belts (and the companies selling expensive ones usually advertise "free replacement if you use them in an emergency").
Yeah. I'm not sure having Boeing design and build me a $10,000 LED lighting array is necessarily a big improvement and, if you're worried about the reliability of your game controller? Buy two maybe of everything maybe, even three? There can be reasons to use expensive bespoke coffee pots on commercial flights. But going with the gold-plated aerospace version isn't always the answer.
Though choice is still important, why that gamepad? Especially if it was the wireless version.
Building the controls with wired arcade buttons and an arcade joystick would be a little pricier but you'd get parts designed to take a beating, plenty of real world usage to demonstrate this and no potentially flaky usb/wireless stack that you have no control over to deal with.
I could take some guesses. It's cramped with a lot of people; wires invite tangles or damage if someone accidentally yanks on it. Especially if you want to operate the vehicle from both sides of the interior.
Those controllers have millions of hours of playtesting by people that are sensitive to the slightest twitch. I'd trust them more than most automotive components.
I'm more curious to know how they run the control lines. A thruhull at 400 atmospheres must be something special. Or maybe it's wireless to the machinery outside? But the carbon fibre and titanium enclosure would be a problem.
I would not actually trust them more than an automotive component, I think most accelerator pedals use Hall Effect sensors (usually two of them in the good designs) that are much less likely to wear out and cause spurious inputs or failure than the basic potentiometers on a game console, especially a very cheap one. Get an X-box controller at least, and have a couple spares wired in, in case the wireless one fails.
Does a submersible like this only drop ballast weight in an emergency, or every time they’re ready to go home? I know submarines tend to use diving planes and pneumatic ballast tanks (flood with water, or inject air to push water out), but I don’t know if that’s an option down at 400 atm.
I heard an interview this afternoon on NPR with David Pogue (the bbc guy who filmed a ride). He said there are 7 different ways of surfacing, including several that do not require electricity and don't even require consciousness. For example, some of the ballast is attached by mounts that dissolve after a certain number of hours in water (presumably less than 96).
Thanks for posting that link. However, I came to the opposite conclusion - I was rather impressed. I respect someone who is prepared to make a financial loss whilst breaking new ground technically more than someone who's trying to cut corners on something conventional. (Assuming of course that Stockton Rush is telling the truth about losing money, of course.)
It may be crass, but it's also true. Contrary to what many folks say, this is the exact time to be talking about these deficiencies. Putting it off to later, is simply an attempt to memory hole them.
The company lost a submersible for four hours on a previous dive. They don't talk about that. In fact, they killed the internet so the reporter that happened to be onboard couldn't report it. (That's what we call, a "cover up".) Putting much weight into a company declaring their commitment to safety is a bit of a fool's errand. Even the most reckless company says that safety is paramount.
Isn't visiting places filled with dead and decomposing people a fairly normal tourist activity? Various catacombs, graveyards, temples, battlefields, memorials, Pompeii...
I've got no real thoughts on the "stupidity" of doing this, but visiting the wreck of a famous ship doesn't seem an obviously unsympathetic thing to do compared to visiting the ruins of a city.
Even in the ocean, human remains may be partially preserved if the conditions are right for it. They found human remains in or around the Vasa, a Swedish warship that sank in 1628. Mostly just bones, but also a little bit of soft tissue more than 300 years later.
> Organic materials fared better in the anaerobic conditions, and so wood, cloth and leather are often in very good condition, but objects exposed to the currents were eroded by the sediment in the water, so that some are barely recognizable.[43] Objects which fell off the hull into the mud after the nails corroded through were well protected, so that many of the sculptures still retain areas of paint and gilding. Of the human remains, most of the soft tissue was consumed, leaving only the bones, which were often held together only by clothing, although in one case, hair, nails and brain tissue survived.[44]
Yes...but those are places where where the dead received "proper" burials. (Excepting Pompeii, and maybe some battlefields. Pompeii tends to get a pass because "ancient", "technically buried", and "A-listed Roman cultural site".)
And generally, visiting ~none of those other places is a brag-worthy way to show off being one of the modern 0.1%. (Which, these days, gets very little sympathy in many quarters. Even without the "vultures draped in diamonds" aspect here.)
It's very common for recreational divers to visit ships with bodies still in them. Maybe it's morbid, but it's common and generally you don't need to be "0.1%" to do it. If this story were about some working class people who died while scuba diving around a wreck in shallow water, would you still be trying to vilify them for it?
I'm trying to explain the sentiments which user paganel originally voiced - which I suspect are kinda common. My sense is that the strong negative feeling are tied to how much of a "just too many emotional points against it" corner case this is. A famous & famously tragic shipwreck, the dangers inherent in their extreme tourism, how very few people can imagine "it coulda been someone like me in that little sub", the "mass grave" scale of death, the kinda-mythical "forbidden underworld" aura to the site, etc., etc.
I think some of the pushback that I feel to that is that it seems like a socially acceptable guise for just wanting to hate rich people. I'm fine if your opinion is "screw rich people who spend this much on weird things", or even "Rich people who died doing something this frivolous deserved it." But just own that.
If this had been the original diving expedition to the Titanic to find the wreck for the first time, or even the followups, and people had potentially died then, I doubt we would have had this many people out in the comments about how its distasteful and they're hoping it would dissuade anyone from doing it again.
At least "I hate rich people" is a consistent view whether you agree or not. Trying to make that view more socially acceptable by adding new and inconsistent layers on top about how visiting a place people died is inherently something that makes them unsympathetic just feels weird.
> I think some...socially acceptable guise for just wanting to hate rich people.
Yes, some. But my feel is that if a similar number of even-richer people had (say) died in the crash of a luxury helicopter ferrying them to Everest Base Camp, then the negative reaction would have been far less notable.
Yes, it’s a combination of hating the rich people (which is a very valid sentiment, btw) and of invading a sacred “burial” space. If they had somehow gotten there on their own dime, like those divers you mentioned, then, yeah, it’s a little too morbid for me but whatever suits them.
But to sell tickets (worth a staggering 250k) in order to visit the burial place of a couple thousand people is just not ok, it destroys the place’s sacred aura.
Just imagine if they had left the ruins of the Twin Towers in place, including the dead and decomposing people under those ruins, and if they had started selling tickets in order to visit said place. Totally not ok.
Oh sure. I'm not arguing this is a good idea or not a way to show off your money, just that it's kinda a weird assertion that visiting a place where people died and weren't properly buried at some point in the past is uniquely distasteful.
It's not as if they're going to look at the dead bodies, and as someone else points out, there's almost no chance there's intact remains left at that depth after all this time. There's plenty of less-deep shipwrecks all over the Caribbean or other coastal areas where people probably died that are normal enough to scuba dive into and I'm not sure people think that that's distasteful.
The "you spent how much on this" part is something I'm absolutely fine with people taking issue with, but it doesn't seem that much more gauche than flying to space or just flying your private jet around.
Also crass, but the eat-the-rich crowd might applaud the concept of finding more people willing to pay $250k for a thrill ride and imploding the vehicle at the bottom of the ocean or in space.
OceanGate: "We use military grade equipment! It's risk-free"
Billionaire: "Sign me up"
Jokes aside, I wonder if billionaires do assess more thoroughly the risks than any normal person. They can easily dedicate a team to assess the risks to their various activities.
I don't know any, but my guess is that multimillionaires and billionaires asses risk much like most normal people. This isn't like a business venture or medical treatment where you can put a team together to assess the risk for you. It's more like skiing or scuba diving where there is some inherent risk and you decide to do it or not.
Based on their results from helicopters, I’d say they have a higher risk tolerance than many would be comfortable with. Helos seem to me to border on being a natural predator of billionaires.
Rush also said during the interview, "You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed."
"Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything," he added. "At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk/reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules."[0]
I don't think it's stupid to expect that submersibles are well-engineered.
I'd also imagine that the tourists trusted the reputation of the operator. Both the state of the equipment and that their safety checks and processes were stringent. Especially since they claimed to aid in the science.
There aren't many priors for civilian submarine disasters.
I'm not sure there's any particular reason to think that this is an extraordinarily dangerous activity relative to things like mountain climbing--even on many less extreme peaks.
I don't see any reason to think why it isn't. Unless you don't have a basic understanding about the most primitive laws of physics. Even the slightest mishap at that depth and you're in more trouble than you would be if you were stranded on the ISS.
Some mountains like K2 have an extremely high kill rate and it still happens almost every year. Probably higher killing rate than all the Titanic exploration missions that did not explode in the past. It's not so much about physics but just looking at probability
I'm sure they do. But the chances of dying on board of an experimental submarine which is subjected to absolutely insane pressures are probably quite a bit higher still than the chances of dying on K2. But whether it's higher than the Titanic exploration missions is not the same as the manned Titanic missions of which there have only been very few.
Those things work right up to the moment that they do not, this stuff is at the cutting edge of technology and tourists simply have absolutely no place there. The only reason those rich folks tend to do stuff like this is because they like to brag about such stuff, not because they're interested in the science behind it (if they were they likely wouldn't go). The Titanic is less accessible than space.
More Darwin award candidates then. I fully support them in their choices but I find the fascination with such endeavors hard to understand. If it is a first then I get it, that's exploration and somewhat interesting. But if it is just for kicks or bragging rights then I don't get it. To me the risks don't outweigh the benefits.
You don't even need the Everests and the K2s. I won't characterize things I've done in the 6000m range or even just peaks with tricky rock sections as dangerous per se (or I probably wouldn't have done them) but people do develop serious altitude-related conditions, avalanches happen, and people just mis-step.
The particular reason is “450 atmospheres of water pressure.” This is a lot. You don’t have this type of threat to the structural integrity of your gear at Everest, etc.
It is not. The article mentions that the submarine is bolted from the outside so that even if they surface, they can’t open it from the inside. This is in the history of bad designs, the worst. We have “doors must be unlocked when the building is occupied” signs all over the country, yet, no one thought a safety hatch the can be opened from the inside in emergencies could be useful?
> no one thought a safety hatch the can be opened from the inside in emergencies could be useful?
It’s quite possible that they considered it and felt that it would compromise the structural integrity and the risk would be higher than not having it.
Yes, very much so. There are very few of them made and most of them are ROVs not manned for very good reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-submergence_vehicle lists about 30 of them (manned ones, there are far more ROVs), each and every one of these should be considered experimental. Typical uses are scientific exploration and navy. Tourism is definitely not a main driver behind their development.
Nuclear submarines can maintain a safe atmosphere internally with electrolytic cells and special candles, working with the wider gas management system.
