I have to say I’m not sure what they were hoping for, the discourse hasn’t felt overly mean by internet standards, but maybe that’s just my bubble. I’m sorry they died, but now that we know all the details it’s a bit like the guy that decided to hike up a lava field last year.
Also,
People’s fascination with the wealthy is fuelled by both curiosity and envy. And when rich people find themselves in trouble, it makes the rest of us feel better, Pamela Rutledge, director of the California-based Media Psychology Research Center, wrote in a piece about social media and the submersible for Psychology Today.
I feel like “outrage” should be in there somewhere. It makes me mad that people can be that dumb with a quarter of a million dollars while I’m just glad to have a safe roof over my head, and other people (like the mentioned boat migrants) aren’t even that lucky.
Alright, back off my soap box.
The thing is Rush was by all accounts a smart guy and not a swindler. Obviously, he really believed his thing was safe, what with being on it and all. I suspect this will be a case of an elite expert that thinks knowing his field in and out means he knows everything. I usually call it “Ben Carson syndrome”, haha.
But the thing is, he wasn’t a smart guy and was a swindler.
His background is in aeronautics, not marine engineering, so he was trying to apply knowledge meant for 0-1 atm of pressure to engineering a vessel to withstand 400 atm of pressure.
Just like everyone in the submersible world is coming out of the woodwork saying they all knew about his designs and told him not to do it, he was also known in the oceanography world (my field of research) - he (or others from oceangate) would show up at the conferences and be on the tech expo floors, especially in his early years, and try to convince us all that we should be using his subs to do our research. He wasn’t pitching for us to do anything new or innovative with our research, just that he could attach our tech to his sub and go out there with it instead of towing it behind a boat, taking measurements remotely, using an ROV/AUV, etc. A) we already have tried and true methods of collecting or data, and in order to publish our data it needs to be reproducible in order to be peer reviewed, so why would we collect data with a method that would be best impossible for anyone else to do, B) why would we go through that risk of an untested method when the method isn’t our research, C) there wasn’t a chance that our research grants would cover the cost, D) there wasn’t a chance that our research institutions would insure us or our research for it. He really wanted to be part of the research world to show this was an important part of research and prove the legitimacy of his creation, but he was barking up the wrong tree. He was coming to those of us that were doing acoustic data collection of the seafloor and saying we could be in the sub while the data is being recorded - but there’s no benefit to that, or teams that take measurements that are taken regularly over a period of time which would require multiple deployments instead of planning a sensor that is checked remotely regularly. He really tried selling it hard though. Maybe if he went to the animal behaviorists that always say “I wish I could just see when they do ______” whatever behavior it is that has never been seen by humans because it’s underwater and too far to dive - but chances are the appearance of a strange bubbling metal vessel with a light will scare it off… This is what ROVs are for.
Anyway, since he couldn’t get anywhere with the research angle, he started hawking it to his rich acquaintances and friends of friends. He still claimed to them that the overall goal was to have it be used as a research tool, so I don’t know if the Titanic dives were a means to an end or a detour that would continue, but either way, he knew he had these acquaintances that had the will and the means to pay massive amounts of money for limited access adventure experiences and exploited the Titanic.