The making of Titan: Oceangate's submersible capable of taking people to the Titanic

In this story from 2018, KOMO News got a look at the making of the Everett-based company Oceangate's submersible that takes people to the Titanic.

'Titan' was designed to dive about 4,000 meters (Titanic sits about 3,800 meters below the ocean surface).
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[pierremichaud]

The engineer said it would experience incredible pressures but the team inside won’t feel a thing. How right he was, nobody felt a thing.

[CrucialParodies]

“But the team inside won’t feel a thing” Well… he wasn’t wrong.

[hasanjamil]

Ocean Gate takes pride in delivering to its customers the full titanic experience.

[ppilot]

"We did this really fast"


Famous last words

[hennysworld]

“We did this extremely fast” that’s a huge red flag

[beegxxc]

"But the team inside won't feel a thing" - well with how fast this thing imploded it might still be a true statement.

[kevm]

"We did this really fast" If you're going down to the bottom of the ocean these are the last words you'd want to hear from your submersible's engineer.

Makes wonder too about the mindset of passengers who took the risk, if someone's very rich it must to an extent cushion them from reality and impact ability to think critically.

[MurrayHerts]

Screens?! risk your life to travel to the sea floor to look at screens?! that cannot be right surely

[carolramsey]

More than 60 years ago Auguste Picard descended 37, 000 feet to the bottom of the Mariana trench in a properly designed steel bathyscaphe 3X deeper than the depth the Titan tried for.

[Oogesay]

“The crew inside won’t feel a thing” yeah I’m betting when you realised it couldn’t take that much pressure and crumbled like paper they weren’t gonna feel their deaths

[arlat]

That kind of submersible has to be made in a laboratory, not in a workshop, I was shocked when he said "cut this a little bit"

[jamesthereaper]

OceanGate's last dive included a surprise meet and greet with the original Titanic crew.

[jacquesmertens]

If you're going to look at images on a screen, you don't need to be there.
That's what we have diving robots for.

[awfab]

The thing about carbon fiber is its extremely strong in tensile strength and not so good in compression strength, in fact very weak.
Trying to bend a carbon fiber rod will have tensile strength on one side and compression on the other. The compression side usually gives first then cracks up to the tension side but very quickly so it looks like everything snapped at once.
Still very strong that way. But in a sub you have compression 360 degrees around you. You can test this with a carbon fiber air tank. It will hold 4200 psi of air just fine because it's pushing out on the carbon fibers, all tensile strength, but put that down in the ocean or in another tank and put 4200 psi pressure on the outside of the tank like in the ocean and it will implode much sooner than 4200 psi.
They obviously didn't test this with a 3x saftey factor.

[mikaelkarlsson]

We did this extremly fast. That is just what you want to hear if you want to reassured that the vessel is safe.

[w-is]

Now tourists will be going down to see the wreckage of Titan.

[jimmy]

It’s amazing how much information there seems to be out there about carbon fibre being a bad idea….. and yet they still did it.

[msh]

From an experienced underwater operations standpoint, I can say that thing was an absolute death trap from the jump. An egomaniac that discounted subject matter experts in lieu of ‘diversity’. He surrounded himself with ‘young talent’, and created an echo chamber of thought, design, and execution. From construction, to controls, there’s just so much wrong with what they produced. It’s stunning that even the untrained eye wouldn’t recognize it’s shortcomings pretty quick.

[ijustwannabeadrummer]

extremely fast!? On a submersible you are going to take down to the bottom of the ocean miles below sea level?

[Aperturexplorer]

This didn’t age well. How would anyone trust a company that couldn’t even invest into a legit submersible controller vs PlayStation.