Past its shelf life
When you’re going to do an extremely dangerous thing, the key is to find cheap parts that are cheap because they’re inferior. Yep, that’s the ticket.
Arnie Weissman, the editor in chief of Travel Weekly, nearly went on that fatal trip on the Titan. He had a chat with Stockton Rush the night before the dive.
Weissmann said Rush told him how he had gotten the carbon fiber used to make the Titan “at a big discount from Boeing.” Weissmann wrote in Travel Weekly that Rush said he was able to get the carbon fiber at a good rate “because it was past its shelf life for use in airplanes.”
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…
Rush had hailed the lighter carbon fiber as an innovation in a field that has long relied on more expensive titanium and claimed the company had worked with Boeing to make sure the pressure vessel, the carbon-fiber tube that keeps passengers alive, was safe. But the carbon fiber and the shape of the Titan had raised concern among maritime regulation experts and experienced mariners. And Weissmann said he felt that the man who he thought was going to lead him on a 13,000-foot dive to the ocean floor came off as “cocky” when talking about safety.
Boeing says it hasn’t found any record of selling the carbon fire to Ocean Gate.
The Post includes a rather telling clip of Rush boasting of breaking some rules.
H/t Bruce Coppola
There’s a well known comment from the space program that’s been around since the days of Project Mercury, where an astronaut (either Alan Shepard or John Glenn) quipped about sitting on top of a rocket made up of hundreds of thousands of parts, all made by the lowest bidder on a government contract. When the story is retold, the astronaut is being darkly ironic, verging on gallows humour. With this sub, the sourcing of cheap bits and corner-cutting on safety and certification is presented as a mark of pride and cleverness, putting one over on over-cautious, red-tape eggheads standing in the way of entrepreneurial innovation and daring. You might impress an audience of stupid people who think that such cockiness and hubris are virtues, but you can’t impress the ocean. It rather goes all the other way. The ocean is not an audience, investor, or passenger you can fool with swagger and bravado, but mindless tons of water relentlessly pushing on every square inch of whatever you dunk down deep enough into its cold blackness. But the sea’s thoughtless implacability is a known factor that must be accounted for and designed against, not gambled with. Who knew that sometimes regulatory oversight is a good thing, standing between you and instant death 12,000 feet beneath the surface of the sea? Pretty much everyone else who sends vessels to that depth, apparently.
It’s one thing to gamble with your own life, but to encourage others, and take their money to join you in your reckless stunts, passing them off as within acceptable levels of risk, is evil and tragic. You don’t expect your pilot to be a crash test dummy eager to have others join him in the wreckage. Rush’s paying victims unfortunately mistook his confidence to join them as a good sign, rather than a mark of brash stupidity. He might They were signing up for some high-end adventure tourism, not being recruited as collateral damage in another data point marking the bounds of materials engineering and human folly.
One of my sisters has been down to the floor of the Pacific in Alvin collecting samples. It sounds like a hellish ride–three people cooped up for eight hours, barely able to move, no bathroom. They draw designs on standard styrofoam cups and attach them to the outside of the craft; when they resurface, the cups are the size of a thimble (I have one of them).
Alvin’s been around for almost 60 years, been down more than 5000 times, and as far as I can tell no one’s ever died in it. A lot of amazing science has been done thanks to Alvin; it’s taught us what little we know about the deepest parts of the oceans.
But yeah, what we always needed was a cheap knock-off Yugo version.
In theory, that lowest bidder stuff is supposed to be the lowest bidder that can meet the needs and specifications of the project, not the lowest bidder overall. In practice, the cheapness of legislatures and taxpayers leads to a lot of lowest bidder without the thing of making a comparable product.
That’s why our school has too little band width for a school that is taking so much online. That’s why I have never worked in an office that had quite the right stuff. But…our administration building? Oh, yeah. They don’t cheap out on that. I taught a lab in a room with no running water, in a building that probably fails to meet several other standards. When they made plans for a new academic building, it did not include the science department…because it is expensive to build science buildings, we were told.
Meanwhile, the artwork in the administration building is (ugly) expensive.