this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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While obviously he intellectually knew the requirements were different, and even managed to build something that survived a few trips, I almost wonder if there is a certain amount of mental inertia there, similar to the old saw, "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." In aircraft, and even spacecraft, you do so much more to save weight than would be necessary or appropriate for designing a submarine, and your pressure vessel will never need to handle more than 1 atmosphere. Again, I'm not suggesting that he was literally stupid and didn't understand that at some level, but I haven't heard from anyone who's been around subs who thinks he was on the right developmental track.
If you read the Wikipedia entry on the Titan submersible, it mentions somewhere that the original designer only intended it as a one time use vehicle. That doesn't inspire confidence.
That is freaking insane! So they knew this wasn’t meant for repeated dives and did it anyway…..
So I went back to the Wiki entry and I made a mistake - There was a footnote about a submersible built by Richard Fossett called the DeepSea Challenger that was first to use the carbon polymer design, which is what the Titan's design was based on. Anyways, Fossett died before he could use his personal sub, Virgin Oceanic bought it and got it tested (because Richard Branson wanted to use it), but that testing determined that it could only be used once, so they never bothered to use it after that. So I guess the main lesson that Rush learned from all this is to not get the carbon polymer sub tested because that'll just confirm it shouldn't be used more than once.