It was all about controlling the narrative. Well, that and extra eyeballs on their dying networks. 'Titanic' filmmaker James Cameron calls the search for Titan a 'nightmarish charade', says he knew on Monday the sub imploded
It was apparently a better story than the IRS whistleblower talking about the sabotage of the Hunter Biden investigation.
Cameron has much experience with traveling in a submersible. He has visited the remains of the Titanic 33 times, and he also holds the record for the deepest dive of 35,787 ft in the Mariana Trench. He referred to the search for the then-lost submersible as a "nightmarish charade."
The US military detected the acoustic evidence of the implosion at the time it happened. They notified the Coast Guard that day.
James Cameron, who isn't associated with either of those groups, but does know people in the commercial submarine community, knew on Monday.
"Monday morning, when I first found out about the incident, I got on a whole bunch of calls and emails. It's a small community. Within an hour and a half, I had the following information: They were on descent. They were at 3500 feet. They lost comms and tracking. The last one being the critical one, because the transponder that's used to track itself during descent on the bottom is a fully autonomous system."
"It's in its own pressure housing, and it has its own battery power. So for them [those within Titan] to lose comms and tracking at the same time, sub it was gone. There was no question in my mind. For days, I tried to run other scenarios that could account for it. I could come up with nothing."
Click thru for details on the problems of using carbon fiber for submarine construction as opposed to titanium or steel. Warning: engineering concepts are at that link.
This brought to mind the song "Vicarious"" from the 2006 album 10,000 Days by Tool.
Eye on the TV
'Cause tragedy thrills me.
Whatever flavour
It happens to be like:
"Killed by the husband",
"Drowned by the ocean",
"Shot by his own son",
"She used a poison in his tea"
That is the opening of the song. Here is a bit from farther in.
The universe is hostile, so impersonal
Devour to survive, so it is, so it's always been
I'm pretty ignorant of the world of going to the bottom of the ocean to look at shipwrecks. But I have been a certified scuba diver and certain things are so branded in my brain I wouldn't know how to get rid of them. Things like 1 atmosphere, 14.7 PSI more every 33', and that's immutable. It never stretches out or eases up. They were going 12,500 feet deep (at least I've read that's how deep Titanic is). Call it 380 atmospheres pressure, or 5585 PSI. That is a LOT of pressure.
ReplyDeleteThis vehicle they were riding seems spectacularly poorly suited to this dive. It's hard to know what's true, but I've read reports it was never certified deeper than 1/3 as far as they planned to dive. Carbon fiber composite instead of titanium or steel just seems, well, stupid. Fatigue, separation of the fiber and resin, and complications that just aren't there with a proper metal design become life or death priorities.
It's really a sad story.
I haven't seen anyone say that carbon fiber is a great choice for this application. Starting with the fact that there is no way to non-destructively inspect it for defects. (You can't x-ray it to find cracks or voids.) It has a severely limited cycle life through this kind of pressure situation before delamination will become an issue.
DeleteBut those are all engineering concerns, and engineering relies on math, and math is racist. ("2+2 = whatever the party says it does.")
Also, to get that kind of engineering expertise on the project you would probably have ended up employing a bunch of old white men, and that isn't Woke.