Jesus, it sounds like it was a fucking miracle that this thing even made it down to Titanic's depth ONCE, let alone as many times as it did, without some sort of failure either resulting in total loss or the inhabitants being fucking stranded at sea or at the bottom of the fucking ocean. As a thought experiment I sort of 'workshopped' or brainstormed a potential rescue plan if the sub had somehow been stranded down there with no means to propel itself or surface, and really the only idea I came up with was a very long cable/winch being used to slowly bring it back to the surface. No idea how feasible that would be, but all of the other possibilities are pretty much nixed from the start. You can't provide further oxygen [or other supplies] to the crew if they're stranded down there - there's no port to introduce more oxygen or remove CO2, and the hatch had to be unbolted on the platform, so even if they had surfaced it would have been tricky. This thing was built so that if literally ANYTHING went wrong, everyone inside it was totally fucked. I'm just surprised it took that long for something bad to happen.
One shitty part of this is that honestly, if this hadn't happened, it could have proven that with proper monitoring and an actual safety culture [and regulation], maybe carbon fiber for a pressure hull actually is feasible under the right conditions. Sure, such a craft's useful lifespan would be severely limited by fatigue/stress, but it could have feasibly led to further developments. Not to mention, OceanGate didn't do any of this "right", either - they literally fucking dragged this thing across the Atlantic, on a platform, through rough seas. It was left sitting out [not in a hangar, or a structure] in all sorts of weather and constantly changing temperatures, which is not good for carbon fiber. They basically did everything fucking wrong and somehow it still worked for a while - far longer than I would have expected, given what I know now. Unfortunately, the guy who had that fucking idea was quite possibly the worst fucking guy to have that idea. And I get what Rush was going for - he wanted to be like the Howard Hughes of submersibles, the difference being that Howard Hughes seemed to understand risk, had teams of engineers [that he didn't always listen to, to be fair] and most typically, Hughes would fly his own experimental aircraft himself and [from what I recall] didn't take on passengers until he knew that his design wasn't going to fling him into the fucking ground at Mach Jesus. Rush, on the other hand, was in a big hurry to have a return on his investment [to fund further development, I suppose, because he seemed half fucking crazed about this idea], so he started taking on paying passengers [or "mission specialists" as he deemed them, to avoid regulatory action] before he even really knew if the fucking thing was safe - and by the time of the incident, there had been more than enough other incidents and plenty of evidence that the fucking thing WASN'T safe, yet he continued to take on passengers and pretend like everything was just fantastic. That's my problem with him. I don't give a fuck if he wants to experiment on his own time, with his own life at risk, and throw his money around, that's his prerogative and his business, but he took on passengers and went to great lengths to give them asspats and convince them this thing was safe when he knew it wasn't.
Now, I don't have the hate boner for him that the retards over on Reddit seem to have [mostly because they just hate rich people, because they're a bunch of fucking communists] but taking on passengers and doing all of this work to convince them, that is quite a shitty fucking thing to do, given what he knew. I would be very interested to know what the fucking waiver looked like that prospective passengers signed - whether it was acknowledged even slightly that this thing was a fucking experimental death-trap in those papers, or not. Though I'm sure it was probably 250 pages long and nobody probably read it in full. Redditoids seethe about him constantly, but in fairness, he also got himself fucking killed, so I'd say he experienced sufficient consequences. They act like they want to dig up his corpse [or whatever is left of it] and piss on it as a punishment, the guy fucking died as a result of his own hubris, I think he's been thoroughly punished already. Paul-Henri Nargeolet's involvement was curious as well - he was an expert on all things Titanic and submersibles, he had to know that this thing wasn't fucking safe, and at his age I doubt he really cared about how much money Rush could throw at him to say and act otherwise. Perhaps his involvement lent further credence or credibility to the sub's design, prospective passengers would question it, but then see he was involved and go "well shit, it must be safe then I guess?", and maybe that's why Rush kept him around - considering I don't think he even usually piloted the thing, that was Stockton's job. I think the only theory that makes any sense is that Nargeolet knew it was unsafe but wanted to die near Titanic, because he was obsessed with her. His wife died in 2017, maybe he started not giving a shit about risk-taking after that, figuring that going out doing what he enjoyed and right next to the ship wasn't the worst thing, or that it was a fitting end. But he absolutely knew enough about submersibles and safe sub-marine operations to know this thing was a death-trap.
But anyway, yeah, TL;DR is basically - I'm fucking amazed this thing made the trip down to Titanic one time without some catastrophic failure, it was always living on borrowed time.
LMAO he just made shit up.
