Introduction
There was a lot of coverage around the titan submarine but most of it wasn't very useful. The only useful newspaper article I have found is: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/08/titan-submersible-implosion-warnings
I highly recommend reading it in full.
Some of the key highlights
Some key takeaways from the article
In December 2015, two years before the Titan was built, Rush had lowered a one third scale model of his 4,000-meter-sub-to-be into a pressure chamber and watched it implode at 4,000 psi, a pressure equivalent to only 2,740 meters. The test’s stated goal was to “validate that the pressure vessel design is capable of withstanding an external pressure of 6,000 psi—corresponding to…a depth of about 4,200 meters.” He might have changed course then, stood back for a moment and reconsidered. But he didn’t. Instead, OceanGate issued a press release stating that the test had been a resounding success because it “demonstrates that the benefits of carbon fiber are real.”
Anyone who does TDD or attended one of the 42.fr schools (in one form or another) should be able to understand the importance of testing. There is a lot of code that looks to be working, but will fail when subjected to a fuzzer and some dedicated automated testing.
Stockton Rush ignored the margin of safety
The article covers this decently but doesn't emphasize it:
In the abyss, that means passengers typically sit inside a titanium (or steel) pressure hull, forged into a perfect sphere — the only shape that distributes pressure symmetrically. That means adding crush-resistant syntactic foam around the sphere for buoyancy and protection, to offset the weight of the titanium. That means redundancy upon redundancy, with no single point of failure. It means a safety plan, a rescue plan, an acute situational awareness at all times.
One way to think about the margin of safety (a term Benjamin Grahan uses in his book The Intelligent Investor) might be to think about the worst case scenario. Teddy Roosevelt in his speech at the Sorbonne perhaps indicates the importance of taking risks, but at the same time, it is notable to point out that failure does not mean death. Solomon's book of Proverbs says that "A living dog is better than a dead lion". Murphy's law indicates that if something has any significant chance of happening, it will happen (given enough time). In other words, the worst case will happen. All submarines that operate over a longer time period have contingencies.
Maxim 43. perhaps expresses it best:
- If it's stupid and it works, it's still stupid and you're lucky.
What shouldn't be learned from the disaster
There are situations where you are forced by circumstances to operate in less than ideal conditions. One-off solutions can often take advantage of special circumstances which allow for less-than-ideal solutions to work.
When there is already a disaster or an outage happening, effort should be spent to reduce the damage. If the boat is flooding, sometimes duct-tape will do. Just don't use that boat after that (or fix it properly and certify it). And don't start building the boat with duct tape and then expect it to last.