It’s not about being a disruptor
The New Yorker has an in-depth piece on the recklessness of the amateur Let’s Make a Submersible guy. It’s like reading an in-depth piece on why the Challenger exploded. Spoiler: he was determined to go ahead, safety be damned.
Until June 18th, a manned deep-ocean submersible had never imploded. But, to McCallum, Lahey, and other experts, the OceanGate disaster did not come as a surprise—they had been warning of the submersible’s design flaws for more than five years, filing complaints to the U.S. government and to OceanGate itself, and pleading with Rush to abandon his aspirations. As they mourned Nargeolet and the other passengers, they decided to reveal OceanGate’s history of knowingly shoddy design and construction. “You can’t cut corners in the deep,” McCallum had told Rush. “It’s not about being a disruptor. It’s about the laws of physics.”
But Rush went right on thinking it is about being a disruptor as opposed to the laws of physics. It’s weird when people do that.
Rush had grown up scuba diving in Tahiti, the Cayman Islands, and the Red Sea. In his mid-forties, he tinkered with a kit for a single-person mini-submersible, and piloted it around at shallow depths near Seattle, where he lived. A few years later, in 2009, he co-founded OceanGate, with a dream to bring tourists to the ocean world. “I had come across this business anomaly I couldn’t explain,” he recalled. “If three-quarters of the planet is water, how come you can’t access it?”
The same kind of mistake, in a different form. It’s not about business, it’s about the laws of physics. You can’t “access it” because it’s water and humans evolved on land. We can swim, but we can’t just move into the deep ocean and stay there.
“He wanted me to run his Titanic operation for him,” McCallum recalled. “At the time, I was the only person he knew who had run commercial expedition trips to Titanic. Stockton’s plan was to go a step further and build a vehicle specifically for this multi-passenger expedition.” McCallum gave him some advice on marketing and logistics, and eventually visited the workshop, outside Seattle, where he examined the Cyclops I. He was disturbed by what he saw. “Everyone was drinking Kool-Aid and saying how cool they were with a Sony PlayStation,” he told me. “And I said at the time, ‘Does Sony know that it’s been used for this application? Because, you know, this is not what it was designed for.’ And now you have the hand controller talking to a Wi-Fi unit, which is talking to a black box, which is talking to the sub’s thrusters. There were multiple points of failure.” The system ran on Bluetooth, according to Rush. But, McCallum continued, “every sub in the world has hardwired controls for a reason—that if the signal drops out, you’re not fucked.”
Also:
Rush eventually decided that he would not attempt to have the Titanic-bound vehicle classed by a marine-certification agency such as DNV. He had no interest in welcoming into the project an external evaluator who would, as he saw it, “need to first be educated before being qualified to ‘validate’ any innovations.”
That marked the end of McCallum’s desire to be associated with the project. “The minute that I found out that he was not going to class the vehicle, that’s when I said, ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t be involved,’ ” he told me.
You don’t want to do your wild n crazy innovating thousands of feet under water.
The director of marine operations handed in a report containing a long list of design flaws, and so he was fired. Yes that’s the way to fix design flaws.
McCallum tried to reason with Rush directly. “You are wanting to use a prototype un-classed technology in a very hostile place,” he e-mailed. “As much as I appreciate entrepreneurship and innovation, you are potentially putting an entire industry at risk.”
Rush replied four days later, saying that he had “grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market.”
There is is again – instead of treating safety as its own thing, he treats it as a rival to “innovation.” Innovate shminovate: you can’t innovate your way out of the laws of physics.
People who know better do this. NASA did this with the Challenger. Mountaineers do this when they get within sight of the summit of Everest too late to reach the summit and get down again. They know it’s too late but they keep climbing anyway.
He understood that his approach “flies in the face of the submersible orthodoxy, but that is the nature of innovation,” he wrote.
So he imploded himself and four other people.
Annoying as Musk is in many ways, at least he has the sense to do a lot of *unmanned* flights with any innovation SpaceX does, before risking any lives on his new equipment.
Funny Rush being so confident in the perceived direction of “education.”
Recovering from a motorcycle accident has given me a renewed appreciation for the laws of physics, and safety gear. I see riders out there without helmets or gloves and I just look at them the way I do smokers now that I’ve quit (9 years.)
Yes everyone dies. But what’s the hurry?
This sounds like “Donald Trump Builds a Submarine.”
If jealous rivals are “using” a “safety argument” to keep him from joining their club, then “safety arguments” are bullshit and used soley to keep him from doing what he wants to do.* They’re just a snooty, high-tech version of “That’s not how things are done!” “I’ll show them!” might not have been the wisest response. The ocean doesn’t read press releases or advertising brochures. plucky, upstart, rebel capitalist versus mindless, merciless, hammer of tons of water pressure per square inch isn’t a David and Goliath matchup you can win with a clever quip and a laugh. Unfortunately, the result of transgressing this “orthodoxy” was somewhat more consequential than that of having your elbows on the dinner table, wearing white after Labour Day, or defying the conventional investment wisdom on a daring stock deal. There’s no coming back from a fatal mistake.
* At the risk of crossing the streams, doesn’t this sound a lot like TRA’s dismissal of women’s safety concerns of predatory men using self-ID to accesss their single-sex spaces? “You don’t really care about women, you’re just out to get trans people!”
My dad was in the Navy; he had a healthy for the power of water. Rush could have used some of that respect.
Sort of a side-note, but: it’s practically a truism among those of us who are involved in dangerous activities that it’s “never the gear that fails”. That is, it’s human miscalculations that lead to accidents and death. It’s not snapped ropes or slipped gear or failed parachutes, it’s almost always a bad decision somewhere along the line. Of course, yes, sometimes it’s failed gear, but it happens so rarely in our highly regulated and tested worlds that the exceptions just serve to prove the rule. There’s an entire publication dedicated to analysis of climbing accidents in North America that is published each year, “Accidents in North American Mountaineering” and time after time after time it’s a bad human decision that leads to the accidents. Even when the gear fails, it is usually traceable to a bad decision, like the death of Todd Skinner in October, 2006: Skinner, a famous Yosemite pioneer climber, died when the belay loop on his harness snapped, on a climb just before which he acknowledged that his harness was over-worn and dangerous and should be replaced. Yes, the harness failed, but the real failure was Skinner’s decision to risk one more climb on a piece of safety gear that was past its usable lifetime–and he knew it.
Similarly, the real failure here was Rush’s belief in his own opinions at the expense of the certification of the gear that he was using. After SAR missions, we hold debriefings in which we try to determine what decision was the trigger that led to the callout. What human decision started the chain of events that led to us being out in the field trying to rescue a person, or worse, trying to recover a body? There is always something. The skier who decided to make tracks in the backcountry even though he knew that NWAC has predicted “extreme avalanche hazard” in the skier’s preferred area, perhaps. Or the climber who decided to climb one more time on a rope that had suffered too many factor-two falls and was beyond its usable life. Or the amateur submariner who didn’t understand materials science who thought that those people who did were all Chicken Little.
The fact is, reality doesn’t care. Reality doesn’t give a dry fart about anyone’s bloated opinions of themselves and their presumed expertise. At the risk of introducing levity where perhaps there shouldn’t be any this soon, I like to tell my mountaineering students (when I had them, as I don’t teach those classes at the moment) that reality is like a cat: we conform to its ways, it doesn’t change to fit our expectations.
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A whole culture of Positive Thinking. Theranos’ victims didn’t all die in a batch, but the reckless ‘pursue your dream against all adversity’ babble seems about the same. This is to be expected when people think that they can imagine their way into a desired outcome without regard for actual truth.