The Sea is a Beast. So is Space.
The Titan submersible tragedy reminds us that exploration will always be fraught with unknown — and known — risks.
Trigger warning: this article discusses several engineering tragedies.
On Monday, news broke that the Titan submersible — billed as a Cyclops-class human submersible capable of exploring sea depths to approximately 4,000 meters, or just over 13,000 feet — had lost contact with its surface vessel. Despite efforts to locate the missing submersible, today the U.S. Coast Guard released a statement that a remote-operated vehicle located a “debris field” near the wreckage of the Titanic, the legendary ship of movie fame the Titan was meant to survey. Just moments ago, the U.S. Coast Guard confirmed that the Titan suffered an implosion, killing all five people aboard.
OceanGate, the company that operated Titan, had performed 200 dives among its three submersibles, with Titan being touted as its vehicle able to go to one of the world’s hallowed shipwrecks. It was meant to go the distance, but Titan tragically reached its watery gravesite among Titanic, the exact vehicle it was meant to explore — carrying five people.
According to a Jalopnik article, OceanGate’s CEO, Stockton Rush, bragged about cutting corners on safety, stating, “You know, there’s a limit. At some point safety just is pure waste. I mean if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything. At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk/reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.” Former OceanGate employee David Lochridge was unceremoniously tossed overboard and mired in legal paperwork deeper than the silt on the sea floor when he dared to question the company’s devotion to Titan’s safety; again, according to the Jalopnik article:
According to the report, OceanGate fired David Lochridge when he questioned how safe the Titan was and later sued him after he filed a whistleblower complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, claiming he violated the terms of his contract. Lochridge then countersued, claiming he was wrongfully terminated. In the suit, he said he pushed back against launching the Titan without doing “non-destructive testing to prove its integrity.”
“The paying passengers would not be aware, and would not be informed, of this experimental design, the lack of non-destructive testing of the hull, or that hazardous flammable materials were being used within the submersible,” Lochridge said in his suit.
This vindictiveness against a former employee turned whistleblower did OceanGate no favors. Ironically, one of the victims aboard Titan was the company’s CEO, who asserted he could “do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”
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Whether by foot, rocket, or deep-sea submersible, exploration carries enormous risks. Mountain climbers have fallen victim to unexpected avalanches or altitude sickness. Explorers have died trying to cross Antarctica, felled by subfreezing temperatures. Astronauts have died aboard spaceships; three astronauts even died on the ground, awaiting a ride in a spaceship, by a horrific fire. Now, the deep sea has claimed five more lives.* While these explorers can always be prepared and memorize contingency plans, no one can be prepared for the enormity — and weird unpredictability — of extreme environments.
The sea is a beast, especially at its murky depths; Titan was subjected to thousands of pounds per square inch that only increased as it sank further and further into the abyss. Any tiny crack in its hull would become more immense and crippling as the vehicle was increasingly stressed.
As commercial spaceflight firms, including Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, get ready to send their first paying customers into space, we can only remind ourselves of the tremendous risks inherent in all exploration and the price beyond thousands some pay to explore — whether at sea, on Earth, or in space. The sea has often been considered an appropriate space analog; astronauts have often ventured to the sea floor to prepare for space missions. Both environments are unforgiving of the smallest of mistakes. Sometimes all that shields a person from death in both environments is a matter of milliseconds or millimeters. Time and distance are friends or foes in both worlds.
Astronaut Mike Mullane — three-time space shuttle veteran and no stranger to danger, having survived a 1976 in-flight ejection during his time in the Air Force — probably put it best in an essay he wrote entitled “Space is Hard,” written in 2021 just as Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos and Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson announced their own suborbital space jaunts:
And that brings me back to the present, and the recent announcements concerning CEOs Branson’s and Bezos’s flights. It is 1985 all over again. In the news coverage following those announcements, I saw the same incandescent smile on their faces, as had been on Christa’s [McAuliffe, STS-51L’s “Teacher in Space”]. And just as it was with Christa’s mission, the talking heads covering the news focused on the novelty of the mission. There was zero discussion on the dangers involved.
…Space is hard. A sharp engineer once coined that expression after a space mission failure where the odds of such a failure were as extremely low as they are for these upcoming CEO/tourist missions. That engineer was right. Space is hard…and dangerous for everybody who ventures into space. Even with fail-safe designs and launch escape systems, it does not change the validity of that statement. Maybe someday the risk in spaceflight will be what we currently enjoy with commercial aviation, but that day is not here yet and probably will not be for many years.
Has anybody reminded Bezos, Branson, and [SpaceX’s CEO Elon] Musk of that fact? That would certainly be an interesting conversation, “Hey, boss. Just thought you should know the rocket we built with all that money you gave us can still kill you.” But it needs to be said. And it needs to be said to every space tourist who follows.
Space is hard.
*U.S. Navy nuclear fast attack submarines SSN 593 Thresher and SSN 589 Scorpion were lost at sea in 1963 and 1968, respectively. Oceanographer Robert Ballard was contracted by the Navy in 1982 to find the wrecks of both submarines; as an added benefit, he was able to locate the wreckage of the Titanic in 1985. The SUBSAFE program was implemented to prevent further naval submarine accidents.
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