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Titan sub noise heard on board support ship.

LittleInch

LittleInch

Petroleum
Mar 27, 2013
22,757
Just watched a new documentary by the BBC and others like Discovery so if you're interested look out for it. Implosion: The titanic sub disaster.

Key new part for me is that they released video of the moment a loud "crump" was actually heard on board the support vessel apparently through the hull with Rushs wife Wendy doing the monitoring of the sub and her saying "what was that?". They then got a message from the sub which must have been somehow delayed saying dropped two weights which confused them. It is pretty chilling to listen to alright. That and the fact that they were thought not to be at the ocean floor implies they were getting some warnings.

This is a clip but there are others.

Not much we didn't already know, but they have noted dive 81 (out of 88) where there was a very large bang heard which they reckon was the point at which the hull was on its last legs after a major internal failure.

The Discovery documentary maker back in 2022 was very unimpressed with the whole thing and persuaded the company to can their documentary as he was convinced it would end in failure and didn't want to be seen to promote the operation.

Looks like it's on Discovery pretty soon. If you're interested, it's pretty good and not that big into the human interest side, but does have input from the wife of the man and his son that died which is quite moving.

www.tomsguide.com

How to watch 'Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster' - Stream the thought-provoking documentary online

Scientists explore how the Titan submersible implosion was more than just a tragic accident
www.tomsguide.com www.tomsguide.com
 
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One thing I'm always reminded of was when someone was talking about the Space shuttle and saying that compared to an aircraft which would have had hundreds if not thousands of test flights or tests to destruction for the shell or wings before letting the public on board, the space shuttle was barely up to 10 before it was in main use. So basically every flight was a test flight.

Out of the dives titan did, they had to change the shell at about 50 and many of the dives were shallow water. So maybe up to about 10 to 15 deep dives on that new shell before destruction. So again, every dive was a test dive and should never have been anywhere near accepting paying passengers. Whether all concerned really understood the risks they were being exposed to is really not clear.
 
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Hydration between the titanium dome and epoxy is a time compounded problem. It may not have even mattered how many cycles the sub made.
 
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LittleInch said:
One thing I'm always reminded of was when someone was talking about the Space shuttle and saying that compared to an aircraft which would have had hundreds if not thousands of test flights or tests to destruction for the shell or wings before letting the public on board, the space shuttle was barely up to 10 before it was in main use. So basically every flight was a test flight.
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All that is true, but the Space Shuttle wasn't designed for, nor intended to be, some fantasy, cost-cut, dream of someone who refused to follow solid design and test protocols.
 
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NASA ignoring the Challenger O-ring issue and ignoring the Columbia foam strike damage was the same mindset Stockton Rush had toward issues with his own vehicle.

In all three cases, passengers weren’t properly informed of the real risks.
 
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LittleInch said:
They then got a message from the sub which must have been somehow delayed saying dropped two weights which confused them. It is pretty chilling to listen to alright
Click to expand...

It’s very grim. I wonder if dropping the weights was related to the failure? Or just coincidence? I understand that dropping weights was normal practice and a standard means of braking once approaching the bottom.
 
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They then got a message from the sub which must have been somehow delayed saying dropped two weights which confused them. It is pretty chilling to listen to alright
Click to expand...

Jeff Ostrow comments on that; it's likely that the message was queued into the acoustic modem, just before the implosion and sent it after.
 
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Could it have been sent before the implosion?, with the shockwave overtaking the acoustic message?
 
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Speed of sound (ie what the acoustic modem uses) is 1500 m/s. Speed of shockwaves can be higher initially but it soon slows down to the speed of sound, as there is an impedance mismatch problem.
 
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It's also possible that the electronics in the tail section survived for some moments and transmitted erroneous signals as senors were destroyed, wires cut.
 
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The end section was remarkably intact so I assume it held the batteries and the communication system so given the speed of transmission of the message is very low it most likely kept sending the last message sent to it from inside the sub. You can see how it confused the command team though.

I had never realised that the command team on the vessel was headed up by Stocktons wife. Don't think I've seen any evidence once attributed to her. Maybe she had input into the awaited report from the USCG?
 
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IRstuff said:
All that is true, but the Space Shuttle wasn't designed for, nor intended to be, some fantasy, cost-cut, dream of someone who refused to follow solid design and test protocols.
Click to expand...
Absolutely. The transcript where they fired the whistleblower lays it all out pretty clearly- Rush was convinced he had figured out how to make an unsinkable design, and no experts or alternative data was going to convince him otherwise.

While NASA was guilty of institutional hubris (and it seems a little dismissive of astronauts' professionalism to imply they aren't fully informed of the risks compared to amateur adventure tourists), this case was one man convinced he knew better and determined to fulfill his vision of disruptive innovator. 👨‍⚖️
 
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drwebb said:
While NASA was guilty of institutional hubris (and it seems a little dismissive of astronauts' professionalism to imply they aren't fully informed of the risks compared to amateur adventure tourists), this case was one man convinced he knew better and determined to fulfill his vision of disruptive innovator.
Click to expand...

For the most part, NASA's professional astronauts knew all the inherent risks, but the non-NASA crew, like Christa McAuliffe weren't likely to have known all the deets. I'm not sure that would have made any difference her decision to fly.

The question of risk is not so much the informing, but the basis for the risk assessment; that, unfortunately, was not a purely objective calculation, but subject to the sheer lack of statistical/flight data, and optismistic "tailoring" of the known, and unknown, risks. As the crash investigation showed, NASA's management, specifically, had the notion that "we flew before in these conditions, and everything worked fine" which, only in their retrospect, was completely silly and falls in line with the gambler's fallacy. The astronauts, certainly, didn't have any insight nor input into the actual decision making process in allowing those flights to progress.
 
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IRstuff said:
For the most part, NASA's professional astronauts knew all the inherent risks,
Click to expand...

The Challenger crew had no idea the degree of engineering concerns about the O-rings in cold weather, and that a decision was made shortly before launch to simply override the engineering advice to never launch below 53 degrees F - just as the Titan passengers weren’t told about known issues with the hull. That sort of information was secret, and overridden by management.

Neither NASA nor OceanGate were advertising the risks. That’s why NASA engineers had to covertly tip off Feynman, allowing him to “discover” it himself and present his “independent findings” on national TV with his glass of iced water.
 
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Something worth remembering about the space program is that historically it hasnt viewed risk the same as other industries. During the Apollo program it was simply accepted that hundreds of critical components would fail during each mission, and redundancy wasnt built-in for safety but rather for functionality. Many failures happened during launch and early in the mission prompting the use of redundant systems/parts, yet the mission continued for a week afterward including moon-landings. Consequently, astronauts simply had to accept that major risk was part of the job bc without it, they couldn't fly.

Its been a few years since I read McDonald's book and dug into the various reports on Challenger, but I remember being skeptical of most of the testimonies, both formal/official and informal/unofficial afterward. IME when hubris causes failure, there's usually a few folks who claim they predicted the exact failure mode yet chose to remain silent bc <insert bad excuse> - bs at best. Personally, I'd wager that the O-rings were simply lost in the plethora of possible failures/considerations for the go/no-go decision in the hours before launch.

The sub fiasco OTOH is a different matter bc obviously passengers thought it was reasonably safe. I havent found the documentary yet, but hopefully will soon. The clips I've seen are rather haunting in hindsight.

Thanks for sharing.
 
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The O-rings weren’t just part of the routine, inherent risks of spaceflight they were a clearly identified, catastrophic failure point. Brushing them off as just another technical uncertainty that you have to live with isn’t honest. Multiple engineers had singled the issue out and documented the urgent danger in writing, specifically warning about the risk posed by cold temperatures on the day of launch. And just like Stockton Rush, NASA’s program managers ignored those warnings, shut the door, and pressed ahead anyway.
 
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NASA made claims that the risk of losing a vehicle was something like 1:100,000 which seemed like a made up number, pulled out of one's a$$. Subsequent reviews revealed a LOV failure rate of closer to 1:100 which was very much closer. Those numbers are listed in the CAIB report and I'm just listing the numbers best as I can remember. Engineers closely aligned with the booster O-rings and the Columbia debris strikes were much more concerned about those problems than the mission managers were.
 
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I have a memory that following the challenger explosion they went amd looked at the SS over months and found over 200 potential single point failure items which could bring down the shuttle....

Titan was the result of one man's extreme ideas taking precedence over actual engineering design and testing. Everyone involved wanted it to succeed so badly they just couldn't or didn't want to see the flaws.
 
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