OceanGate was warned. They knew. They were told. They fired the people that would have kept them from this. Fired them and ejected them from the property. This was all foreseeable for anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of engineering. It was the largest craft ever built to attempt to get to that depth and it folded. The larger a submarine is the more pressure you are asking it to take. Let me show you what it is supposed to look like:
James Cameron had his submersible pressure tested extensively before he used it to dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The submersible, called the Deepsea Challenger, was subjected to a series of pressure tests in a variety of facilities, including the National Deep Submergence Facility (NDSF) in the United States and the Japan Marine Science and Technology Agency (JAMSTEC) in Japan.
Ignore the grinning director in the foreground, take a look at that beefy steel on the hatch! That is some thick stuff! Several inches of steel. The good stuff. Cameron designed his one person craft to be safe to take to the very bottom of the ocean. Compare that to this:
See the lip of the edge on the right. An inch of steel/titanium or thereabouts. The Coast Guard ROVs said both end caps blew out on the Titan, meaning it failed center line as you imagine a cylinder under pressure might. Which means everyone was extruded through the ends in a millisecond. Ground human goop before they realized they were even in trouble.
They made a bigger craft than Cameron’s but with thinner metal. They wrapped some carbon fiber around it, but wrapped carbon fiber is not great for the type of stress that a couple miles of ocean weighing down on you produces.
So what they learned, at high cost, is that 2.5″ of steel (as Cameron’s craft had) is better than 1 inch of steel and 4″ of carbon fiber wrapping.
The bottom line is they could have tested their machination.
The National Deep Submergence Facility (NDSF) in the United States is a large pressure test facility. The NDSF can test submersibles up to a depth of 12,000 meters (39,370 feet).
But they were too daft, or too cheap, or too proud to have it tested and preferred to test it in the ocean with paying customers aboard.
Stupid.
I am just a lowly combat engineer. Right at the very bottom of engineers in general. Mobility, counter mobility and survive-ability. What OceanGate did was stupid, reckless, and truth be told, grossly negligent.
