Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

"The Titan began its descent Sunday to explore the wreckage of the Titanic, located about 13,000 feet below sea level in the North Atlantic Ocean, with an estimated 96 hours of life support. The expedition was billed as “a chance to step outside of everyday life and discover something truly extraordinary” and cost each participant $250,000, an archived version of OceanGate’s website shows.

"However, the cramped vessel lost contact with its mother ship about 1 hour and 45 minutes into its dive, did not surface as expected and has not been heard from since.

"Aboard the Titan were Rush, the OceanGate CEO and founder, along with Harding, a British businessman; Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood; and Nargeolet, a French diver, according to relatives and social media posts.

"Earlier Thursday, the US Coast Guard said it found a “debris field” in the search area near the Titanic that, according to a memo obtained by CNN, has been assessed to be from the external body of the submersible." [1]

The ocean is very, very deep. The Titanic is 13,000 feet below sea level, and the submersible was scheduled to take 2.5 hours just for the descent.

EDIT: corrected feet/meters

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/22/us/submersible-titanic-oceang...

From that same article, I guess he got the recognition he always wanted.

Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, told a Mexican travel blogger in 2021 he wanted to be known as an innovator who broke the rules.

“I think it was (US Army) Gen. (Douglas) MacArthur who said, ‘You’re remembered for the rules you break,’” Rush told Alan Estrada, who documented his trip to the Titanic, including an aborted attempt in July 2021 before a successful visit in 2022.

“And you know,” Rush added, “I’ve broken some rules to make this.”

You can't break the rules of physics.

Well, it worked, a few times. The problem isn't so much the rules of physics it is the materials science underpinned by those rules of physics. This particular material for a hull is in my opinion a mis-application if you plan on using it repeatedly or for carrying people.

Carbon fiber is notorious for sudden unexpected failures due to invisible cracking inside it after it gets loaded too much. Definitely a bad material choice. Even steel can form stress fractures under those kinds of pressures,

pressure in Pa = water density x depth x gravity

if they lost contact at around 1h45m in a 2hr descent, maybe they were at 3000m depth (approx)? Therefore:

29341710 Pa = 997 x 3000 x 9.81 = 4255.6 lbs per square inch

Wasnt MacArthur the one who wanted to start a nuclear war with China during the Korean war and got sacked by Truman or Eisenhower?

MacArthur's solution [0] to every military problem after 1945 was to drop a nuke on it:

> On 24 December 1950, while responding to a formal request from the Pentagon, specifically Major General Charles L. Bolte, about a hypothetical question regarding which targets should be bombed with atomic weapons if the Soviets got directly involved in the Korean War or if the Chinese military sent bombers to bomb UN forces in Korea and Japan from mainland China, MacArthur submitted a list of "retardation targets" in Korea, Manchuria and other parts of China, for which 34 atomic bombs would be required.

And from that same link, here's a direct quote from an interview with MacArthur which was published posthumously:

> Of all the campaigns of my life, 20 major ones to be exact, [Korea was] the one I felt most sure of was the one I was deprived of waging. I could have won the war in Korea in a maximum of 10 days.... I would have dropped between 30 and 50 atomic bombs on his air bases and other depots strung across the neck of Manchuria

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relief_of_Douglas_MacArthur#Nu...

It's a little weird to avoid quoting the rest of the passage:

> In January 1951, MacArthur refused to entertain proposals for the forward deployment of nuclear weapons. On a similar note, showing MacArthur directly rejecting the use of weapons of mass destruction when he had the power to answer a subordinate, in January 1951 he immediately rejected Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgway's urgent request to use chemical weapons on Chinese and North Korean soldiers. Though MacArthur made many statements regarding nuclear weapons after 1951, there has never been evidence, like memos or transcriptions of meetings, provided by anyone that MacArthur ever requested to use nuclear weapons or tried to push Truman or other Pentagon officials to use them during the Korean War while he was the UN Commander.

MacArthur may have been pro-nuke in public statements, but I think it's telling that, when the actual, real-world opportunities presented themselves, he actively refused to entertain the idea of nuking anything. He wouldn't even authorize the use of chemical weapons.

I don't know a lot about MacArthur, and have no dog in this race; I'm just reading more at the link you provided.

Move fast and break things.

I think you meant 3800 meters which is about 12500 feet

> The ocean is very, very deep. The Titanic is "relatively" shallow, only 3800 feet below sea level

It's 3800 meters, 13000 feet as you wrote in the first paragraph.

Nothing shallow about 3800m deep, that's abyssal plains level, it's basically the bottom of the "normal" ocean (the abnormal ocean being the hadal zone of the trenches). It's a land of no light, little to no oxygen, and literally freezing cold.

Something about this comment is terrifying even beyond the story itself. I'll stay a dry land lubber

Space is safer. I'd fly to the ISS and back long before you could get me into something like this.

Either way no one will hear you scream.

Your edit is wrong. The Titanic is 13,000 feet below sea level, not 3,800 feet.

The Titanic also began its descent on a Sunday.

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