Here’s some unsettling news about the technology and safety features on the missing submarine.
Technica reports Submarine Missing Near Titanic Used a $30 Logitech Gamepad for Steering emphasis mine.
Reuters reports that the five-person crew of the missing vessel, known as Titan, includes Hamish Harding, a British billionaire and adventure enthusiast, and OceanGate’s founder and CEO, Stockton Rush. It disappeared on Sunday while on an expedition to explore the Titanic shipwreck site after losing contact with the Polar Prince research ship, roughly 1 hour and 45 minutes after their dive began.
The submarine was last reported in the North Atlantic, approximately 900 miles east of Cape Cod, in a water body known to have a depth of about 13,000 feet. Search and rescue operations began shortly thereafter and are still underway. According to the BBC, the entire sub is bolted shut from the outside, so even if the vessel surfaces, the occupants cannot escape without outside assistance and could suffocate within the capsule.
As the potential disaster gripped social media, details about OceanGate’s history of avoiding or complaining about safety regulations emerged. In particular, people began sharing a CBS Sunday Morning segment broadcast in November 2022 that shows reporter David Pogue visiting the Titan, which he later boarded for an expedition to the Titanic.
During the CBS clip, Rush gives Pogue a tour of the sub, noting the presence of “only one button” in the entire vessel and saying that a sub “should be like an elevator.” Pogue also mentions how many pieces of the sub seem improvised, including off-the-shelf computer displays, a lighted overhead grab bar “from Camper World,” and using construction pipes as ballast. During that segment, Rush holds up a Logitech F710 Wireless controller that appears to have 3D-printed thumb-stick extensions and says, “We run the whole thing with this game controller.”
Safety Complaints
No Locator Beacon
Power Failure?
Safety is a Waste
Little Oxygen Remains
Five Unanswered Questions
The Independent has Five Unanswered Questions Surrounding the Missing Deep-Sea Explorer.
Why did the submersible go offline?
The Titan uses two systems to communicate with its surface ship. Text messages can be sent back and forth, and safety pings are emitted every 15 minutes to indicate the sub’s location and that it is still functioning.
Both systems stopped working about an hour and 45 minutes after the Titan submerged on Sunday morning.
The sudden loss of contact by the Titan’s twin communications systems was an ominous sign, according to longtime tech journalist David Pogue, who travelled to the famous wreck site onboard the Titan in 2022.
“There are only two things that could mean. Either they lost all power or the ship developed a hull breach and it imploded instantly. Both of those are devastatingly hopeless,” Mr Pogue told CBC on Tuesday.
What emergency options would the vessel have to float up?
The Titan had seven onboard backup systems to return it to the surface. These included “drop weights” of sandbags and lead pipes that would fall off in the event of an emergency and bring the vessel up to the surface using buoyancy.
Underwater currents
Another possibility is the Titan came into contact with the wreckage of the Titanic, and became stuck or had its onboard systems disabled.
The period between entering the water and when it lost contact would roughly correspond to the length of time it would take to reach the wreckage site.
Former ABC News science editor Michael Guillen, who was the first journalist to visit the Titanic wreck site in 2000, shared his own near-death experience after the submersible he was in became caught in an underwater current.
Assessing Hull Strength
The OceanGate Website describes real-time hull monitoring.
A combination of ground-breaking engineering and off-the-shelf technology gives Titan a unique advantage over other deep diving subs; the proprietary Real Time Hull Health Monitoring (RTM) systems provides an unparalleled safety feature that assesses the integrity of the hull throughout every dive. The use off-the-shelf components helped to streamline the construction, and makes it simple to operate and replace parts in the field.
Real-Time Health Monitoring
The most significant innovation is the proprietary real-time hull health monitoring (RTM) system. Titan is the only manned submersible to employ an integrated real-time health monitoring system. Utilizing co-located acoustic sensors and strain gauges throughout the pressure boundary, the RTM system makes it possible to analyze the effects of changing pressure on the vessel as the submersible dives deeper, and accurately assess the integrity of the structure.
We discussed the off the shelf components above. I am quite underwhelmed.
As for “Real Time Hull Health Monitoring”, if there is a problem, I suspect monitoring will be more than a bit late.
There is a chance this thing is bobbing on the surface somewhere but experts believe that is highly unlikely.
This is one heck of a thrill seeking story. One person who signed up for the trip backed out after reviewing the technology and safety features.
By the way, Logitech still makes those game controllers. They are now sold out as a direct result of this Titanic adventure.
Fortunately we now have so many billionaires that they should be easily replaced.
Well i hope everyone remembers this when they start talking about how government regulation stifles innovation.
I saw this vessel, or a sister ship owned by OceanGate, in the Bahamas in 2019. It was docked for maintenance when not diving into a trench offshore. Up close, it wasn’t ‘high-tech’ given what was required of it; yet the sense of adventure and discovery was impressive given that most people live on their couches and get their thrills from social media.
In this particular case, science advances five funerals at a time.
Joyrides for billionaires, part 2. Imagine all the tax money they DIDN’T pay to find this stupid thing.
They’ll eventually find the sub and we’ll all know what happened. Hopefully in time to save lives, but it seems doubtful at this point. The person who knows the sub the best is on board. His input is the only one I would listen to. Anyone can play themselves as experts when there are no real experts around to shoot them down.
Very interesting article and responses. I know nothing about carbon fiber but do know about innovation. Whether you use an off-the-shelf item or invent your own, you still have to test and verify its suitability for purpose so suggesting off-the-shelf could be the problem (as the headline does) is “misinformation” (to demonstrate my wokeness).
I’m following the story with interest. Thanks.
I can’t believe the lack of an emergency beacon, this alone would make it a no go for me. I’m betting a catastrophic implosion crushing everyone instantly since the comm failed.
Part of issue is only comms is text messaging(low bitrate and mobile telephone SMS tech). Ideally some pinger is firing off as a heartbeat, but if thats disabled due to electrical loss then the sub will:
-Freeze everyone in there anyway
-Freefall sink
-Possibly go way deeper than spec and implode anyways
-I assume C02 scrubbers are not functioning all that well either
My first thought when the signal suddenly vanished was the hull imploded. But that is just a reaction without even being aware of a bolt issue. I am really unqualified to do much more on this than express my first reaction.
Would that instantaneously kill someone at depth or would they have 10-20 seconds or so?
Carbon fiber just cracks and shatters. So if the bolt holes created a stress point then I would assume the whole hull would have cracked, imploded and crushed them instantly.
Or maybe the sub made it, got hung up and if a part of the Titanic impacted the sub , it would have cracked And shattered. Whereas steel or titanium would dent. A sub was caught in the props for an hour in the early discovery years. It was a bitch to wiggle out. This carbon fiber thing is not designed for any impact.
The sub is designed to go up when it loses power . So I would assume it broke underwater and imploded.
Even if this boat made it to the surface somebody has to find it and open the hatch in 24 hours at best
The death would be instantaneous. In that pressure it’s like an explosion inwards (implosion). Not much left of anything after that.
A quote:
“When a submarine hull collapses, it moves inward at about 1,500 miles per hour – that’s 2,200 feet per second. A modern nuclear submarine’s hull radius is about 20 feet. So the time required for complete collapse is 20 / 2,200 seconds = about 1 millisecond.
A human brain responds instinctually to stimulus at about 25 milliseconds. Human rational response (sense→reason→act) is at best 150 milliseconds.
The air inside a sub has a fairly high concentration of hydrocarbon vapors. When the hull collapses it behaves like a very large piston on a very large Diesel engine. The air auto-ignites and an explosion follows the initial rapid implosion. Large blobs of fat (that would be humans) incinerate and are turned to ash and dust quicker than you can blink your eye.
Sounds gruesome but as a submariner I always wished for a quick hull-collapse death over a lengthy one like some of the crew on Kursk endured.
There are several sources of hydrocarbons inside a sub. Hydraulic oil, diesel oil from the auxiliary Diesel engine, kitchen oils, grease, rubber, plastics, etc. This stuff sublimes to make its way into the sub’s atmosphere. It permeates the crew’s clothing.”
This is the reply of the century! What a nasty visual. Thanks for writing that!
Sam Of Finland: Thank you for a very good explanation of a submarine-submersible implosion, especially at great depth. Tex
Your looking at over 5000 psi, instant death if the hull was breached.
At 12-13,000 feet? Perhaps milliseconds.
Instant disintegration. There would be no identifiable pieces.
Instant death if the hull implodes.
The company I work for makes underwater vehicles similar to these (both manned and unmanned) for the oil and gas industry. I’ve watched pressure tests done before and when it fails, it fails spectacularly.
That said, I suspect a power failure more than a hull breach. The hull was made to different specs and was rated for far deeper water than this. The amateur hour components they are using to control it and for lighting are something this company added afterwards.
If Sam of Finland’s analysis is correct:
-First implosion is instant
-Contents including people, under massive pressure ignite under compression(like a oil in a piston)
-Implosion and then explosion of fuel(people and stuff)
WOW
A scuba tank goes to about 700-800 PSI. around 8 times that is pressure from outside?
Not even a second.
If the submersible imploded at deep depth, the temperature inside the structure would rise to over 1000 degrees in milliseconds. It would be quite similar to the way a diesel engine functions with air being compressed in the cylinder to such an extent that the high air temperature itself ignites the incoming diesel fuel supplied thru injectors. If the sub imploded, they probably died instantly.
From what I have read, the sub was originally rated to 4K meter depth. After multiple dives, the hull of the sub was said to be experiencing ‘cyclic fatigue’ and was de-rated to only 3K meter depths. 3K meter depth is well short of seeing the Titanic hull. It was also stated that dives to the Titanic continued after the de-rating. That’s a big red flag in itself. Carbon-fiber experts chimed in that the material is good for ‘expansion’, but not as robust in ‘compression.’
Somebody else did the math calculating the USN Scorpion implosion decades ago.
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The collapse of a submarine pressure hull happens quick, just 37 milliseconds in the case of the Scorpion. The incoming water had a velocity of about 2,000 mph. Over such small time scales, there is no time for the water or the steel hull to absorb any heat from the rapidly compressing air inside of the submarine. Because no heat is transferred from the air to the water or hull, the compression is adiabatic. By way of comparison, a four-stroke diesel engine running at 1,000 RPM has an adiabatic compression stroke lasting about 30 milliseconds. The collapse of a submarine pressure hull is much more akin to a giant diesel cylinder compressing than relatively slow flooding.
A few people have mentioned Boyle’s Law (or more generally the ideal gas law) as the reason the temperature will increase inside the collapsing hull. But because the collapse is adiabatic, the ideal gas law does not apply.
So let’s do the math. The equation relating pressure and temperature for an adiabatic process is
P^(1-γ)T^γ = constant
Where γ is the adiabatic index (γ=7/5 for air). P and T can change, but that constant will remain…well…constant no matter what happens to P and T. If we assume that the initial pressure pressure was 1 atm (101,325 Pa) and the initial temperature was room temperature (~295 K) then the constant is
(101,325 Pa)^(1-7/5) x (295 K)^(7/5) = 28.5 Pa K
The collapse halted when the air pressure was approximately equal to the water pressure at 1,530 feet, which is 4,630,000 Pa (in reality the collapse would have continued a bit further before rebounding due to the inertia of the seawater, raising the air pressure and temperature even higher)
T = (constant/P^(1-γ))^(1/γ) = 879 K = 1,122°F
Needless to say, this is extremely hot.
wow, awesome
Innovation has it’s casualties. The first commercial jet was a great success until the frame window design failed catastrophically after multiple flights. The stress of the expansion and the window design forced multiple planes to crash before they went to oval windows.
If the Titan hull is all carbon fiber with 2 titanium endcaps, the material connection could fail. The bolt holes probably had stress fractures and once carbon fiber cracks it shatters. Ask any cyclist when they crash their 10,000 dollar road bike made of carbon fibre. Its pretty strong but it has a defined fail point. Metal bends and warps.
Plus all the above mentioned cheapo parts, lack of failsafe procedures and external-only access point makes the surface time just as bad as the bottom time. YOU ARE TRAPPED. This device is a cheap drone and failed on second mission
Yup. Carbon fibre under stress behaves much like an overly exuberant stock market.
Main issue is not the game controller. Logitech makes good stuff and they had multiple controllers. The big issue is super structure is carbon fiber. No compressive strength and prone to shattering. They also drilled holes into the hull to mount screens etc. So a 5″ hull suddenly becomes 1″ hull with 10000s of pounds of pressure per square inch
About 5775 psi (393 atmospheres) at 13,000 feet.
Yes, thanks for better math