Humans have scuba dived deeper than 663ft. This isn't even remotely comparable to what the last sub went through. I'm guessing this location was chosen as an easy win for the publicity.
The original guy in that company had such hubris that it amazes me that he was an engineer at one point. Choosing materials for a submarine that didn't fit the role (carbon fiber sucks at compression), going cheap on those parts (Boeing QC-lot rejected carbon fiber lol), over-reliance on commercial-grade components like the gamepad for submarine control, and the general "safety is overrated" mentality that eventually hoisted his own petard.
The submarine wasn't designated seaworthy by any third party organization and even independent engineering analysts said years prior that structural failure was less of an if and more of a when.
The off the shelf commercial parts (game controller, computer monitors, etc) weren't that bad of an idea... the bad idea was to not get anything that was fire safety rated. That whole submersible was a fire trap.
I agree, definitely for those safety-related critical components.
Got a separate sonar monitor that needs a controller to navigate menus? Sure a Logitech F710 would work for that. For actually controlling the entire sub? Definitely not.
There is a good reason engineers specify single points of failure so as to mitigate them in the design phase.
Move fast and break things isn't the right philosophy to have when you're leagues under the sea and a failure can be absolutely catastrophic lol.
Off the shelf controllers aren't a bad idea, but why Wireless? The US Navy switched to xbox controllers at one point because new recruits could use them with minimal training.
Honestly its impressive it did multiple trips before failure, if it had been an unmanned drone or something it would've been brilliant. But instead it turned people into fish food, what a fucken waste.
Also I misspelled drone initially as Dorne and now all I can imagine is Rogal Dorne being slowly lowered towards the Titanic on a crane.
The USN has been using gamepads for years to control submarines. It's just a more intuitive interface for most people. They do however use corded controllers rather than wireless, because wired works. I'm unsure of what manufacturer they use, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that they got a proprietary X-box 360 controller that was made exclusively for them.
Right, but at the very least the government goes through a commercial grade dedication screening for these types of things. It's not like Norfolk Naval Shipyard just goes "eh let's just put a X-box 360 controller from Amazon on it and call it a day."
Guillermo Söhnlein founded OceanGate in 2009 with Stockton Rush — who was one of the five killed during last June’s doomed dive — but left and started another deep-sea company, Blue Marble Exploration.
This year, Söhnlein plans to descend in a submersible on a danger-filled expedition into “Dean’s Blue Hole” in the Bahamas — one of the world’s deepest ocean sinkholes.
He will be joined by scientist Kenny Broad and chief medical officer and former NASA astronaut Scott Parazynski on the journey “in search of unprecedented findings.”
So he's taking a real scientist and a former astronaut on his yet unscene submarine to an actual unexplored part of the ocean. While this could just be a hype game for future commercial BS, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt for now. Given the Oceangate reputation, I'll assume that Scott Parazynski will bail if the ship is unsafe. The Oceangate deigned was notorious in the private submersible community for being an unsound design. Light weight, "Space Age" materials makes no sense when you want the vessel to sink.
my oceangate told me the ocean keeps imploding his billionaire clients so i asked him how many billionaires he has and he said he just goes to the hedge fund and gets a new billionaire afterwards so i said it sounds like he's just feeding billionaires to t̴̥́ḫ̶̌̀e̶̩͎͂ ̴̧̩́̈́d̸̲͈͌e̴̯͐ệ̵͔p̶̮̞̃͘ and his financial advisor started crying
Would it be possible to do a crowd found and buy Musk a seat? And also bezos? And sabotage the submersible? On second thought, fuck that, let's just buy a guillotine.