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This is almost certainly what Rush told people and a refutation of this claim is exactly why I think stories like this are valuable.
It's all a matter of degree. When one or two people tell you your ambitious project is doomed or reckless, there's some room for doubt. At some point though the scale tips. When your chief pilot writes a formal document refusing to pilot your vehicle, the overwhelming majority of your close peers tell you in no uncertain terms that you are going to kill someone, a group letter from people ranging from the Coast Guard to other experts again implore you not to dive, then the scale has definitely been tipped.
It is especially frustrating to see the CEO respond to these concerns as "a serious personal insult" as this is an extremely common pattern for how safety gets compromised.
Even if you think that people's safety concerns are overwrought, the absolute worst reaction is to take it as a personal affront, especially if it's coming from all directions. You think they're naive, you think they're not informed, whatever sure maybe. But you think that by raising safety concerns they're insulting you? That is a blaring red flag to me.
Whether you think this story is overplayed or not, in isolation, this article is hardly irresponsible journalism. It is a sober look at how safety gets compromised in the real world.
The best evidence for recklessness would be a pattern of similar failures.
> the absolute worst reaction is to take it as a personal affront, especially if it's coming from all directions.
This is a good point. Especially if that's the response given to other insiders working on the project.
> The best evidence for recklessness would be a pattern of similar failures.
There was a pattern of similar failures though as the article points out. OceanGate had only been doing deep dives since 2021 and every year of deep dive operation there was at least one serious mechanical malfunction (at least that was caught on camera). In 2021 the system that was supposed to drop the sub's weights failed. This one one is not quite as egregious in that it only points at some engineering difficulties and therefore only indirectly at recklessness (although the fact that Rush seemed unsure that the mechanical backup would work and suggested the final failsafe of 24 hours at the bottom of the ocean before finagling the mechanical backup is worrying).
The 2022 malfunction is much more egregious. One of the thrusters on the sub was installed in the wrong direction. Not only was this not caught until the sub was on the ocean floor (which hints at a very worrisome pre-check procedure), the worst part was when it was caught Rush didn't abort the mission. This seems to be a level of risk-seeking far beyond what is appropriate for a deep-sea mission. When you have such a major mechanical oversight, which would easily suggest that other problems might exist, and decide nonetheless to continue, that is a level of risk-seeking I'm willing to say exceeds what is appropriate for manned deep-sea operations.
If you're looking for literally repeats of a manned sub imploding and people dying, well... that gets to happen once when your CEO is the one manning the sub so almost by definition you can't get repeats of that.
I think I know where you're coming from. Which is even if you had an extremely safe operation, with only a 1 in a million chance of failure, over a long enough period, you will have a catastrophic loss of life. And when that happens people are going to come out of the woodwork saying how unsafe everything was leading up to it and news articles are going to be written about it and it's going to seem like a fiasco after the fact, because people are going to come up with all sorts of post-hoc explanations talking about how obviously bad everything is.
This isn't that. All of the concerns that the article airs were "pre-registered" so to speak. They weren't people after the fact saying "oh yeah I definitely knew that was a bad idea" or people after the fact exaggerating how serious their warnings were to make themselves look good. These were all people putting in writing their concerns and telling Rush straight up that he's going to kill people without mincing their words.
> we as outsiders don't have enough information to make the conclusions you want to make.
There is a place for epistemic humility and recognizing that some things are beyond our grasp and especially that a news article is potentially just cherry-picking quotes to create a narrative, but you're swinging too far the other way. Insiders are not the only people who have the standing to have an opinion on what they're doing. Otherwise, e.g. fraud would be definitionally impossible (did they intend to do x? Well you'll never know because you're an outsider!).
There are companies dedicated to certifying maritime vehicles and standards against which they need to be built and tested, and Stockton Rush explicitly rejected them because he felt that they were stifling to innovation. Additionally, the people who told him that he was needlessly endangering people's lives were experts in their fields. And again, it wasn't just "someone", it was virtually everyone with experience in super-deep submersible operation.
The idea that just because there are often naysayers who claim some big projects are impossible doesn't mean that there aren't situations where they should absolutely be listened to and taking passengers on a submersible down to the Titanic is absolutely one of them. This guy played fast and loose with safety and if it had just been him down there, that would be fine, but he managed to bamboozle a bunch of innocent people into it as well.
Turns out engineers and other experts disagree with each other all the time.
I assume you are an expert in your field. Do you always get listened to?
> just because there are often naysayers who claim some big projects are impossible doesn't mean that there aren't situations where they should absolutely be listened to
I didn't say that. People expressing concern, is not enough evidence to say the management was wrong. All good managers consider criticism. It's then up to them to use judgement to decide what to do.
> This guy played fast and loose with safety
I guarantee if he spent 10x more on safety and still had the same outcome, the articles would be the same. Risk is just not easy for the public to reason about.
Maybe you're right, but once again the gossip the journalists dug up doesn't tell us that.
also when engineers disagree with each other you generally don't continue to use the topic of disagreement as a passenger vehicle. Finally, the guy making decisions wasn't an engineer and as far as I've heard no actual engineers who were well informed on the subject and experts in the domain were supporting this guy.... so what you should have said is "management disagree with engineers and dismiss their opinion all the time, often leading to high public catastrophes like the Challenger and the Titan"
Hearing something else would require a journalist to formulate an alternative narrative. Not only would that conflict with their peers, it's not very interesting for readers ("actually that guy with the sub took a sufficient level of care").
Have you every had insider knowledge about a public story? How different was it from reality?
> no actual engineers who were well informed on the subject and experts in the domain were supporting this guy.
How did it get designed and built then? I wouldn't own up to this project with bad press. Would you?