The Titan Submersible Cataclysm: What we Know so Far (Special)

on June 18 2023 the small privately owned submarine Titan embarked in an undersea Voyage to explore the wreckage of the RMS Titanic a world famous ocean liner that sank in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1912. aboard the Titan or a total of five people Stockton Rush the pilot and chief executive of a company called Ocean Gate which owned and operated the Titan a Pakistani British businessman named shazada doward and his 19 year old son suleimanderwood a British businessman and tourist Adventurer named Hamish Harding and a deep sea Explorer and Titanic expert are named ball Ori nager lay the journey to the Titanic was routine the submersible had done six such Dives in 2021 7 in 2022 and one earlier in 2023. what happened to the Titans passengers on June the 18th was anything but routine a little less than two hours into their dive toward the wreck site all Communications with the Titan were lost and in the following days a frenzied surge to find the sub at its passengers captured International headlines sadly we now know that the Titan most likely suffered a catastrophic failure just boys into the dive and that its five passengers were almost certainly killed days before the search concluded discovered the talcone of the Titan submersible what March of the world still doesn't know are the circumstances that led to the tragedy the many alleged design flaws and past concerns about the Titan's safety the inherent risks of operating at such extreme depths and the points of critical failure that turned the Titans die from a fascinating Excursion into a catastrophe in today's special episode of Mega projects we're going to pull back the curtain as best we can on the Titan incident what went wrong and what the rest of the world can learn in order to do better [Music] [Music] so in order to understand the tragedy aboard the Titan we first got to understand the submarine itself the Titan was operated by the company Ocean Gate Incorporated out of the city of Everett in the U.S state of Washington Ocean Gate was founded in 2009 with the goal of providing crude submarines for a variety of uses from tourism to research to exploration and after getting their start with vessels known as the antipodes purchased from elsewhere and the Ocean Gate design cyclops one the company decided to attempt to design a third craft for their Fleet originally given the working named Cyclops 2 ocean Gate's next submersible would be an improvement of both their existing Subs featuring a series of design elements that set it apart from most undersea vessels designed in cooperation with the University of Washington's Applied Physics lab the new sub was intended to feature a hull made of titanium and carbon fiber the hull would be manufactured by the same company Spencer Composites that had built the Deep flight Challenger a one-person submarine that was intended to perform the first solo manned mission to the ocean's deepest known point the Challenger Deep in the South End of the Mariana Trench ocean Gate's new Club was intended to reach somewhat less extreme depths but still extreme nonetheless up to 4 000 meters or 13 000 feet that's well more than two miles beneath the surface of the ocean so now this is where we've got to take a second to explain just why that depth matters specifically because of pressure atmospheric pressure is something that our bodies are experiencing all the time the air at sea level exerts a pressure of 14.7 pounds per square inch on our entire bodies all the time the reason we don't feel that pressure is because our bodies exert the same pressure outward reaching a point of equilibrium where oh we don't perceive it but water exerts significantly more pressure on things that go below the surface and the deeper you go the more extreme that pressure becomes imagine having a two mile high stack of gallon jugs of water sitting on your chest which by the way works out to the total weight of about 67 tons now extend that to every square inch of your body all at once including the parts of you are that are pointing toward the sea floor after all those water molecules aren't just pressing inward on you but also on all the other water molecules around them these are the kinds of forces that Ocean Gate submarine or any other deep sea submarine would have to contend with six thousand six hundred pounds per square inch of force at its maximum intended depth to compensate the submarine's fuselage was built with a wall thickness of 5 inches assembled from two titanium hemispheres and a thick shell of carbon fiber cylinder the largest of its kind ever to be used and recruit submersible the craft was 22 feet long a bit over nine feet wide and bit over eight feet tall with an overall weight of about 21 000 pounds it had the capacity to carry another 1 510 pounds it could move at a top speed of just three knots that's three and a half miles per hour the sub named Titan in 2018 utilized four electric thrusters to propel it up down and from side to side and it was equipped with oxygen reserves that would allow a full load of passengers five people to survive for up to four days in case of emergency it's real time Health monitoring system long touted by Ocean Gate is a major Innovation used acoustic sensors to monitor Hull integrity and in theory given off early notice of problems so that the Titan could get back to the surface before anything went badly wrong uniquely for a submarine the Titan was controlled with a modified game controller A system that had been also used on cyclops one it featured a single portal as well as camera equipment LED lights and a toilet just in case a single ticket on the Titan would cost a client a quarter of a million dollars and as its owner described its passengers generally consisted of the very wealthy and a small subset of people who happen to be extremely passionate about the Titanic and willing to spend massively to witness it [Music] but along with the Titan's unique features they came with a rather long list of unique challenges we want to know before we get too deep into this section that at no point do we wish to disparage or speaker of the people who genuinely attempted to make the Titan into an Innovative submersible least of all the submarine's owner Stockton Rush who was killed in the tragedy but setting ocean Gates good intentions aside the Titan did have a number of alleged flaws and safety concerns that were well known in the Years prior to its last dive many of which are believed to have contributed directly to the submarine's eventual failure first and perhaps most outwardly shocking for a person just learning about the submarine was that it was steered using a repurposed Xbox game controller in fact it wasn't even a new controller design the one Rush revealed during a prior interview was a Logitech f710 which was first made available in 2010. whether that device was modified and how remains unclear but it's a far cry from the video game-like but purpose-built control device is used for drone aircraft and other sea Vehicles according to Professor Steve Wright at the University of the west of England who was interviewed by CBS about the Titans controller the use of an actual video game controller would be extremely unreliable and they would almost definitely be a better mechanism of control aboard the craft as Wright put it I would expect the real submersible controller to have a reliability of about 1 000 times that of the game's handset but unfortunately there is no evidence to suggest that there was another type of controller on the Titan the submersible also used some shall we say creative ways of providing ballast using rusted old construction pipes that weighed it down and could be detached in order to help the Titan return to the surface its viewport at least in 2018 was only certified to work at depths of up to 1 300 meters a mere fraction of what he would have to survive in order to visit the Titanic and ocean Gate's practices for checking the Titan for wear and tear including the very normal very minor damage that a submarine is likely to sustain during any deep sea Voyage uh virtually impossible to confirm Ocean Gate allegedly also took direct precautions to ensure that their submarine wouldn't be regulated deploying it only in international waters where it did not need to register with any country or follow any pre-established rules of operation past Ocean Gate employees had warned that the Titan's Hull was too thin to be reliable at extreme depth a claim that one former employee David Lockridge claimed in court that had been fired for bringing to Ocean Gate's attention also important is that while the submarine's carbon fiber exterior affords it resiliency against shearing forces carbon fiber is nowhere near as resilient against forces that compress it inward for example the extreme pressures found at the depths of the Titanic lastly the submarine was built to have its hatch lock from the outside using a series of 17 deadbolts meaning that in the event of an emergency the crew would have to rely on outside assistance to be able to escape the craft even if they were able to bring it to the surface of the ocean if water were to start leaking into the compartments or afar broke out or someone suffered a medical emergency there would be no way out unless someone was nearby to help and even despite the risks in The Titan's design Ocean Gate CEO Stockton Russia allegedly had himself a history of outright dismissing safety concerns around the craft in November 2022 episode of the podcast unsung science hosted by journalist David Pogue a rushed out of his aircraft you know at some point safety is just pure waste I mean if you just want to be safe don't get out of bed don't get in your car don't do anything at some point you're going to take some risk and it really is a risk reward question the so-code sentiments Russia had expressed years earlier when he told Smithsonian Magazine that the U.S passenger vessel safety act of 1993 needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial Innovation Pogue had taken a trip aboard the submarine but even at that time had expressed his own safety concerns as a hesitancy to even board the craft partly because of how clearly improvised some of its components seem to be this too was a concern Rush had plenty of answers for it doesn't matter your thrusters can go your lights can go all things can fail you're still going to be safe and so that allows you to do what you call MacGyver stuff now Ocean Gate had already clarified years earlier that the Titan had never been evaluated to ensure that it met safety standards which they claimed was due to the submarine's Innovative design giving it features that those standards did not account for but despite ocean Gate's claims that Titan had met the standards that were applicable to it those claims were never formally verified Stockton Rush had previously asserted that regulations around submarine design and use were keeping sub-operators from pushing the bounds of what was possible even describing the process as obscenely safe even the Titans waiver clearly advertised that it had never been approved or certified by any regulating body and while it's not unusual for waivers to include a disclaimer that participating in an activity could result in physical injury disability or death it's certainly poignant in light of recent events the Titan had a history of accidents prior to June 18 2023 including an incident that took place during the aforementioned journalist David pogue's trip to see it in action though he wasn't on the Titan at the time Pogue witnessed firsthand from the control room of the surface ship sub was attached to his contact was lost with Titan for five full hours as was explained to Pope during the incident there was no way to track the submarine not even locate the emergency locator transmitter as would be standard for an aircraft according to Pogue the Personnel on the surface ship shut off the ship's internet service to prevent Pogue from tweeting about the incident in real time during the Titans made a voyage too it stopped external damage and had some problems with its batteries which would only come out when Ocean Gate was brought to court over the incident and in 2022 a Thruster was accidentally attached backwards causing the Titan to spin in circles when near the sea floor and in 2018 of all five years before the catastrophe that brought us to this point Ocean Gate was publicly cautioned by a collection of three dozen industry experts who expressed their serious concerns that the experimental approach the company was taking had the potential for disaster not just the sort of disaster the might cause some property damage but the kind that would end people's lives and tarnish the reputation of the entire submarining industry those experts call the third party inspections would go unheeded and now five years later we find ourselves here when will Conan chair of the Marine technology Society submarine committee and the person who drafted that 2018 letter was asked about the Titan's disappearance he put it bluntly hasn't surprised us [Music] the Titan and its five passengers set out on their Voyage two days before the dive on June 16 2023 from the port at St John's in Newfoundland Canada they traveled aboard the privately owned ice-breaking vessel the polar Prince which is generally used for Education and Research purposes a day later it reached the dive site in the following morning at 9 30 am the Titan began its dive operation by all accounts the dive went smoothly for over an hour and a half but after a last scheduled check-in at 11 15 the sub went quiet the first the incident wasn't reported to any external agencies as the Ocean Gate Personnel aboard the polar prints wanted to give the submarine time to resurface and check back in on its own but when the Titan didn't return at the time its Voyage was scheduled to conclude 4 30 p.m the situation started to look less like a simple comms failure and more like a budding catastrophe 40 minutes after the Titans scheduled time to resurface the polar print notified the US Coast Guard that the sub was missing now there's no point burying the lead here all indications are that by this point the Titan had already been lost and all of its passengers had been killed days following the Titans disappearance the U.S Navy disclosed that its undersea Acoustics monitoring systems had picked up a large acoustic signal basically a loud noise that its analysts had found when combing through data and trying to assist with the search and rescue mission the signal they found was large and distinctive enough that it could be only one of two things an underwater seismic event like an earthquake or a catastrophic implosion of a man-made vessel given the lack of seismic events in the vicinity at the time the answer was clear although the world wouldn't know it for another several days the passengers aboard the Titan had already perished but the outset of this video we mentioned the four other people had been aboard the vessel in addition to Stockton rush but we'll take a moment and discuss each of them at slightly more length here Rush age 61 at the time of the accident was an aerospace engineer who'd long cultivated his love for deep sea exploration as well as experimental aircraft the trips guide Paul Ori nargia a was 77 he had been a world-renowned expert on the Titanic wreck who had visited it at least 35 times prior and was the director of RMS Titanic Incorporated which is the sole organization responsible for salvaging artifacts from the sunken ship Hamish Harding age 58 was a British billionaire who'd visited the South Pole with Buzz Aldrin gone to the edge of space on Jeff bezos's blue origin spacecraft held a world record for a four-hour dive at Challenger Deep and was an inductee into the living legends of Aviation shazada de wood 48 was a Pakistani British businessman and philanthropist as well as a board member for The seti Institute which searches for extraterrestrial life Across the Universe his son Solomon was just 19 a student at the University of strathclyde who played volleyball sold Rubik's cubes and loved science fiction according to his aunt Solomon didn't even want to go on the journey he'd been dreading the trip but he went as a gift to his dad for Father's Day with those obituaries in mind we're gonna hold off on describing the specific physical characteristics of the implosion in which these five people lost their lives at this point the effects of catastrophic implosion on the human body at such extreme depths are well documented if you'd like to learn about that we could trust you'll find your own way suffice it to say that at a depth where the surrounding pressure was nearly 350 times as severe as the air pressure at sea level a catastrophic implosion would have been the quickest and most painless way for the Titan's passengers to die some small consolation in such a tragic incident in all likelihood they'd have never known there was even a problem in the days following The Disappearance the U.S Coast Guard led a massive search effort by sea and by air using Sonar boys to map and monitor depths as low as nearly 4000 meters and an unmanned deep-sea diving vessels were deployed to the area helping to comb a search area twice as large as the state of Connecticut the search operation briefly got a glimmer of hope on Thursday June the 2nd when a Lockheed P3 Orion aircraft operated by Canada was able to pick up banging noises coming from under the sea at intervals of 30 minutes but although the world held out hope for days that this might be the Titans passengers tried to send some signal that they'd survived the accident and needed help it wasn't B the 96 estimated hours that the crew might have left based on the air available on board the Titan ticked by with no good news and just shortly after that clock would have run out the US Navy publicly announced the implosion they detected days earlier movie director and deep sea Explorer James Cameron later confirmed that his own Associates had recorded a similar signal we got confirmation within an hour that there had been a loud bang at the same time that the subcoms were lost a loud bang on the hydro phone loss of transponder loss of comms I knew what happened the sub imploded that afternoon on Thursday June 22 the U.S Coast Guard confirmed that they'd discovered a debris field near the Titanic one that included five major pieces of the Titan submersible including its tail cone although there is no way to know whether the Titans passengers were able to reach the Titanic before the implosion the tail comb was discovered just 1600 feet from the mighty ship's bow it gives you some small Solace to imagine that the five people on board might have cited the Titanic before they died you aren't alone and frankly there's no harm in choosing to believe it the people aboard the Titan have now become the first fatalities in the history of the commercial deep sea diving industry a stark and devastating reminder of the dangers in pushing too hard too fast in the name of innovation at the time of writing we don't know for sure what the critical system failure was for the Titan and we might never know but in the face of such a tragic accident the specific engineering failure is almost irrelevant it could have been a thousand small things now five people have paid the price in what should be a warning to others who might be willing to play fast and loose with commercialized Extreme Exploration today we're gonna relinquish our claim to the last word in this video instead we'll seed it to James Cameron and the statement he made to Reuters in the hours after the Titans destruction was confirmed to quote here we are again and at the same place now there's one wreck lying next to the other wreck for the same damn reason [Music] foreign

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 1,334,302

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Id: _3NR9H2Zs5E

Length: 18min 9sec (1089 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 25 2023