To be crystal clear - NASA/Space Ex conversation is off topic. A number of comments have been flagged/hidden and now deleted. Start a new thread to continue the conversation. Further posts on this thread about NASA/Space Ex will be deleted.
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Just had drinks with some acquaintances who do some pretty dangerous stuff for a living: making some really, really nasty chemicals on pretty large scales. They all were livid about the recklessness of the Titan’s creators. Safety and innovation are not “either or.” The guys said they read something about someone else experimenting with carbon fiber composites and finding then unsuitable for high pressure applications. Have to look for that… stay tuned.
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Worth watching. A carbon fiber composite manufacturer discusses the material:
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The video embedded in this article is worth watching.
https://www.iosconews.com/news/nation/video_2dc8901a-7f70-5208-b450-b6bfee3321e1.html
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My parents live in PA and near their home is a hike that always had warning signs that people have died. At the top of the waterfall people would inevitably get too close to the edge and fall - some would die and some get severely injured. The trail was closed a few years ago because of the cost of the rescues.
Glen Onoko? If so, I think someone died last year, a few years after it’d been closed. They still have to keep rescuing people 
Yes - we hiked it many times when it was open, even when the kids were little. It’s an awesome trail. A shame that those with a lack of common sense can wreck something for the rest of us.
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Then there’s my husband who ignored all the huge posters at the edge of the Grand Canyon and hiked all the way to the bottom with our son. There was even a life-sized poster of a female marathon runner who attempted it and died when she got lost. They were supposed to go only halfway down. I was filing a missing persons report when they finally returned. Still makes me angry, 13 years later.
And now our tax dollars, having already paid for a big expensive search and rescue operation, are going towards an after-the-disaster investigation, as if this had been a commercial airline crash! The man did everything possible to evade US regulation, oversight, and taxes, cut costs to run a patently unsafe operation. His submersible imploded, because the design and materials were never meant to be used at this depth. Case closed. WHY are we spending even more on an investigation? Are we now going to mandate that Bahamian-flagged operations deliberately operating out of a Canadian port in order to evade US oversight are subject to US oversight, in order to protect billionaire deep-sea adventurers?
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Other article behind a paywall for me.
The video talks about acoustic (ultrasound) testing which Rush did do. Others thought actual physical testing was necessary (like several of his engineers apparently). Making air plane wings, tails out of carbon fiber composites has been brought up in a few articles too–mostly questioning the longevity of the airplanes that use them since the material weakens under repeated stress. Who knows? Maybe this accident will send others back to their engineering drawing boards to re-think and save a lot more lives in the long run.
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The hull needed to be tested and thoroughly examined after every dive… apparently, that was not done.
You need chemists here to design composites that will not delaminate with the catastrophic failure. What works in aerospace will not necessarily work at abyssal depths. Expansion and contraction of a composite tube are not equal processes. Geometry/curvature also plays a role (a small tube versus airplane parts). Most importantly, it is the pressure differential: less than one atmosphere of pressure pushing on the airframe from the inside versus about 400 atmospheres pushing on the tube from the outside.
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and Materials Scientists/Engineers
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Of course. Interdisciplinary approach.
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Heavy salvage equipment is being sent back by the US Navy, but Navy will assist the US Coast Guard in the recovery efforts.
This article might be behind a paywall (cookie clearing might help?). It discusses the subject of who pays/should pay for rescue efforts when adventure seekers get in trouble.
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In an interview this week with Anderson Cooper for CNN, filmmaker and veteran Titanic diver James Cameron pointed out a sad parallel between Stockton Rush and the captain of the Titanic.
“I think there’s a great, almost surreal irony here, which is Titanic sank because the captain took it full-steam into an ice field at night on a moonless night with very poor visibility after he had been repeatedly warned by telegram,” Cameron said. “The arrogance and the hubris that sent that ship to its doom is exactly the same thing that sent those people in that sub to their fate.”
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WHY? Why are we doing this recovery??? No lives to be saved, and for what purpose? To learn that material and components that were never designed, tested, or approved for this purpose cannot withstand the pressures at 13,000 ft down? What is to be gained by this, that warrants the expenditure of taxpayer dollars for this salvage operation, on a joyride that was deliberately designed to evade US regulations and taxation?
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