James Cameron says the Titan passengers probably knew the submersible was in trouble

SpacemanSpiff@kbin.social to News@kbin.social – 52 points –
npr.org

The Titanic director has made 33 dives to the shipwreck and visited ocean depths in a submersible he built himself. He compares OceanGate to the Titanic in that both ignored safety warnings.

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Pressure hulls should be made out of contiguous material like steel, titanium, ceramic or acrylic, he explained, in order to do modeling and finite element analysis to "understand the number of cycles that it can take." That's not the case with a composite material, like carbon fiber, made of two different materials blended together.

"And so we all knew that the danger was delamination and progressive failure over time with microscopic water ingress and ... what they call cycling fatigue," he added. "And we knew if the sub passed its pressure test it wasn't gonna fail on its first dive ... but it's going to fail over time, which is insidious. You don't get that with steel or titanium."

Damn, I didn't realize Ja knew so much about materials science.

Apparently he built the sub he used to go to the titanic and into the Mariana trench. Dude must be intimately familiar with this sort of thing with that experience.

Like, I don't trust carbon fiber for my bicycle frame and stick to steel because that shit cracks easily. I can't believe this guy rolled the dice with carbon fiber on a fucking deep-sea submarine.