2y ago

TITANIC SUB SEARCH | USCG concludes missing Titan sub met 'catastrophic implosion'

The U.S. Coast Guard confirmed the discovery of debris from the sub, and that the five people aboard are believed to be dead.

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The silver lining here is that the world has gained an extremely compelling argument for regulations.
- I'm not sure how much you can regulate a company that fires the people telling them it's an unsafe design.
  
  Independent safety inspections and certification of designs. You don’t pass, you don’t sail.
  
  The law can't be fired, government inspectors can't be fired.
- Not to be callous, but why? We have four people here who willingly signed up for this knowing what the potential consequences could be and one who just threw caution to the wind as far as safety was concerned. I am sure more people have died on the roads while I was typing this. Besides, they were in international waters where according to all the news stories I read nothing you could pass would apply. I feel like this should just be a cautionary tale for others and thats as far as it needs to go. Oh, and let what's left of the company pay back the people who went out searching, assuming there are any funds left. I mean they obviously spent money on nothing but the best equipment.
  
  I don't know what the right level of risk is, but I do agree that if you're engaging in extreme tourism, you have to understand that there's going to be a level of risk associated with it. You want to visit Antarctica, you're going to inevitably be exposed to more risk than if you visit the park down the road. Same thing with space travel. Same thing with deep undersea stuff.
- If this was international waters maybe there are no regulations.
  
  The company is registered in the US. US law can therefore apply. In fact USA claims jurisdiction where it's very shady to do so (for example just for payments made in USD)
  
  That's the idea, I think. Of all the submarines that could reach that depth it was the only one with no certification.
  
  That's what needs to change. If there was enough support internationally, the UN could facilitate a treaty being signed between nations with uniform regulations on submersibles. Then it wouldn't matter if it was international waters.
The estate of the billionaire and the multi millionaire should have to pay for a significant part of the search and rescue costs. The company should be liquidated for that as well.
- Since the founder was onboard, this might actually happen, at least partly.
Most likely scenario was always this one. Quite possibly around the time that they lost contact, was also the time of the implosion.
- Yup, that’s what I’ve been saying since the beginning too. It’s kinda good news that they met a probably very fast death, instead of the slow suffocation people were talking about.
  
  Would certainly be much better to go super fast with as little time to freak out. Rather than to be sitting in the dark trying to not wast air on panic attacks while waiting to even be found (let alone rescued). Would suck to know you were found, but then run out of air before you could reach the surface. Though I am glad that they didn't also implode into the actual wreak. Still super close.
- The people involved with the search had assumed this was the case all along. Sudden loss of both navigation and communication strongly indicates a catastrophic event.
Why did they go with carbon fiber anyway? It's light, but in a leisure submarine like that you could always just add more buoyancy if the thing gets heavy. Is this a case of an aerospace engineer thinking "everything looks like a nail"? It's poetic he was on it when the composite did the composite thing and became plastic again if so.
At the depth they were at - would they die from the pressure before drowning?
- Implosion of the pressure hull at that depth would take less than 100ms, killing them instantly.
- Lol. The thing would have imploded near the speed of sound. They were the compressed version of pink mist and wouldn't have even perceived it coming.
  That being said, if not applied catastrophically the human body is incompressible and can withstand any level of ambient pressure we've managed to put it in alive. Dives are limited by all possible breathing gasses becoming narcotic or otherwise toxic at high enough pressures, instead.

32 comments