by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:
This is an utterly-amazing little one-minute piece….
“There are other sub operators out there but they’re typically ex-military sub guys who are 50 year old white guys (and that’s not inspirational.)”
Oh really? You mean the dudes who have a history of, well, setting sail and coming back to set foot on dry land? Except when shot or blown up, of course, which does happen when you go to war.
Setting acceptable margins of safety is nothing new; indeed we all do it every day although very few of us admit to it. There’s a roughly 1 in 8,000 risk you will die in a car wreck (no, its not an “accident” 99% of the time; “accident” implies nobody did anything stupid and most of the time when there’s a car wreck someone did) in a given year. Some people of course are at greater risk than others; the little old lady in a nursing home is at zero risk as she never goes anywhere, but with ~40,000 deaths a year from this and 330 million people in America the odds are what they are.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
The Shuttle program was calculated to have a risk of one in 100 launches and every person who got on board knew that; there were a lot of parts and all of them had to work “as designed” or everyone on board died. That tends to happen when you’re moving at ~17,000 mph in space, where there’s no atmosphere thus you have literal seconds to fix whatever’s wrong if you lose yours and to get back to earth you must decelerate in and through said atmosphere without burning up.
You can of course make the odds worse than calculated by being stupid. We did that in multiple ways (launching outside of known safety windows and changing the formula for the insulating foam on the external tank, to name two) during the STS program and wound up with a realized risk of about 1 in 67 that ended in the loss of two hulls and everyone on board both. Neither of the two failures was due to the calculated risk of something breaking unexpectedly which was an unavoidable risk; both were in fact caused by direct human stupidity and willful refusal to stop doing known stupid things and both gave prior warning on previous missions before the failure occurred.
Exactly zero people paid for this because, well, “the government did it” and “space is dangerous.”
Well yes, space is dangerous. So are underwater operations — unless you’re a fish, and we’re not.
Indeed underwater operations are more dangerous than space, on balance.
I have a fair bit of experience diving in hard overheads — specifically, caves and a few wrecks. I’m by no means an expert in either, and today I live where there aren’t many or any, and have sold off most of my gear. Underwater recreation is inherently hazardous; the first mistake is frequently your last one, and if you lose your cool anything unexpected has a high probability of killing you. There’s a computer-controlled rebreather sitting on the shelf in my workroom that I designed, built from literal scratch (yes, including the computerized part) and dove personally on multiple occasions. It works perfectly well; I built it because I refused to put up with the outrageous BS emanating from the so-called “dive industry” and in fact contemplated, when living in Florida, standing up a business to refine and ultimately manufacture it. The crazy surrounding the industry disabused me of that, and then came Obamacare that disabused me of ever entertaining entrepreneurship again. Nonetheless with replacement of the oxygen sensors (they expire due to age even if not used) and a check of the regulators its perfectly functional and could be dove today. While the rest of the unit operated at very close to the ambient pressure in the water at the time the electronics had to be absolutely protected against that — and the attendant risk of water intrusion, of course. Here’s a picture of the handset which, before using it the first time in anger, I proof-tested to 500′ of depth — roughly double my expected maximum operating depth of the unit — off my boat because if it leaked when in use I was immediately screwed and almost-certainly dead, in that order.
The bottom line: There is no such thing as “safe” when it comes to either space or underwater travel by humans.
Further, these people were not exploring anything so save me the nonsense comparisons to people like Lewis and Clark — or Columbus — who were.
They were tourists, basically, as was I when cave-diving: Others had been here, it was not “exploration.” My purpose was recreational, which is perfectly fine, but I also fully understood that if I screwed up I was dead with near-certainty.
For that reason I took great care to not screw up.
At the depth these folks were operating, approximately 300 atmospheres, even the tiniest leak is a torrent and, within seconds or less will render the submersible impossibly negatively buoyant and unable to surface — ever. The airspace will contract to 1/300th of what it was and even if the abrupt pressure change didn’t kill you immediately (it will) at over 2.0 PPO2 oxygen is toxic and causes Grand Mal seizures. At this depth the inspired concentration of oxygen, assuming you could manage to breathe it and get enough airspace to breathe it, is more than thirty times that level. Your odds of surviving anything approaching that are zero.
I could go on for quite a bit about the various issues with humans attempting to operate under extreme pressures; in short all inspired gases become trouble as pressure goes up and there’s no known way to mitigate it — thus the maximum anyone has managed to survive is about 500′, even with proper gas management and use of Helium, and below about 30′ you begin to accumulate a decompression obligation that increases rapidly with depth and time — short, recreational exposures down to 120-130′ without mandatory stops are possible and done all the time, but beyond that if you surface too rapidly the dissolved gas in your blood boils off and you die from the cut-off in circulation the bubbles produce (“the bends.”) Thus submarines and submersibles all operate at “surface” pressure internally and are utterly reliant on being able to maintain that.
If reports are correct surface communication was lost about an hour and change into this dive without any signal from the crew that they were in trouble. The presumption has to be that there was a catastrophic failure of some sort, because if not as soon as that was detected the operator would have surfaced if they were able. Being a submersible and thus having limited propulsion and duration without the surface ship you’re ultimately screwed even on the surface so if you lose contact you surface immediately so the support ship can find and retrieve you. They didn’t, which is very strong evidence they were incapable of doing so.
There two reasonable hypothesis in play here:
- The hull suffered a failure of its water-tight nature. It doesn’t matter if that was an explosive event (e.g. the front window or hull imploded) or a leak; anything that violates hull integrity at that depth almost-instantly kills everyone inside and makes the vessel hopelessly negatively buoyant. This submersible masses 23,000lbs and is utterly reliant on the air inside for buoyancy control; as it compresses it is going to be negatively buoyant by several tons and be it will be impossible for it to surface. At operating depth the make-up oxygen for breathing is at lower pressure than the outside water pressure so if you get a leak you can’t use the air to force the water back out and you don’t have the power to run a mechanical pump. You’re done. Due to operating depth they can’t exhaust used air into the water so a chemical scrubber for human-generated CO2 has to be in use with the make-up being the consumed oxygen, much as is the case with a closed-circuit rebreather — and if that floods it stops working, its done and shortly so are you.
- The vessel became entangled. This is a serious risk around any wreck; I’ve done plenty of wreck diving and you need cutting devices and in some cases might have to take your gear off to get to what’s tangled. This risk is no joke and a submersible has very limited thrust so it cannot break free of even something like a mass of underwater fishing line and there is no way to cut it either since you can’t go outside. From the pictures I’ve seen of this thing its reasonably designed in that regard but had several entanglement points that would bother me in terms of that risk. If it happens and you can’t clear it you’re hosed.
Both space and the majority of our planet that are underwater are inherently dangerous to humans. Neither is survivable without the application of significant technology and, if that technology fails whether by chance or human stupidity you are almost-certain to die. This is an inherent part of any such venture, so if you go forth in either do so with full knowledge that unless you’re the one who designed and built all of such technology (as I did with my rebreather) you are literally believing in the technological prowess and lack of corner-cutting, whether through “diversity and inclusion” or just pure stupidity, on the part of those who built whatever it is you’re using as a conveyance and life support.
That’s just how it is folks.
