The Chaser Report - That Time We Bragged About Being 100% Correct About The OceanGate Submersible

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

Charles is sick... sick of being right all the time that is! After looking back at how cool it was to correctly predict the outcome of the OceanGate Titanic Submersible, we realised that our bragging rights allow us at least one more day of smugness. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello, it's The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Look, it's Dom here. Charles is sick today. I tried to organise someone else to chat too. I'm sorry, it's a little bit slack. We'll try and do better next week.

If you want to complain, send us a funny complaint at podcast at chaser.com. What we thought we'd share with you today, though, is the episode after the submarine one that we did yesterday, where Charles was really quite unreasonably pleased with himself. I think, thought it was some kind of profit or something. I don't know. Overconfidence comes easily to this man. Anyway, look, let's hope he's in good shape by next week, or at least as good a shape as Charles is ever in,

and we'll catch you then. Thanks for bearing with us. Oh, and we've got to sort out that $700 trillion thing. If you still want to enter, podcast at chaser.com. You send his email. Speak soon. So, Charles, this submersible.

The tragic and yet not entirely unforeseeable deaths that followed. when this extremely unstable, it seems, carbon fiber vessel. Yes. Well, this is what I want to talk to about, which is the nature of carbon fiber. Oh, yeah. I've used to carbon fiber, I think, for tennis rackets and other things like that. Yes. Yeah.

And so one of the interesting yarns that Daniel Feldman actually did a couple of days ago on Twitter was pointing out where carbon fiber in submarines comes from, that comes from, like the original idea for using carbon fiber in submarines. So as you know, as we talked about on the last thing, one of the difficult things about building a submarine is that for every, what was it, 10 metres you go down, you double the pressure that's on the hull. It may have been every one. Oh, it was a one minute.

It's certainly, it increases at a incredibly horrible rate. A logarithmic, a logarithmic rate. So you're talking about absolutely massive pressure on a hole. And part of the problem is that you have this sort of collapsible thing. Like when it does finally break, it sort of collapses in on itself. And you're done. And one of the things that has always been pointed out about carbon fibre is that it is a brittle material. So it's always been saying that metal is a much better material to make a submersible out of.

Because instead of just like cracking and therefore imploding, you know, catastrophically, Medell at least gives you a bit of a warning system, which is that it sort of crumbles. Yeah, that's why they don't make cars out of carbon fibre because they would shatter rather than crumpling. And in fact, modern cars are designed to actually impact and fold in a bit so that it doesn't get to your body. Interesting point.

Maybe they could have, I don't know, accessed the dozens and dozens of years of car development in designing this submersible. Well, the thing is there are lots of incredible advantages to carbon fiber though. And the key one is just sheer portability, right? So imagine if you have to do a submersible that has enough metal on it to, you know,

like, and we're talking like steel and stuff like that to go down 4,000 metres. You're talking about a fucking heavy vehicle, right? Like, it's a vehicle that you can't even conventionally put on another boat. Like, you can't just... Because it'll sink the boat. Yes.

You sing the boat. It gives you a start, though, and you're submersing. Yeah, that would be fair. Exactly. So you've then got to design hundreds of millions of dollars of other equipment just to cart it around the country, especially if it's a submersible, which by definition is not one that can just travel on its own. No, that's right. It's important to note that doesn't have much ability to sort of move around on its own.

Yes, that's right. So the guy who came up with the idea to make it out of carbon fiber was not, in fact, Stockton Rush. It was in fact Stephen Fossett. Do you remember Steve Fossett? Oh, yes. The sort of adventure. Another eccentric millionaire adventurer.

Millennium, millennial and gen, sort of Z and Gen Y might not remember him because he died about 13 years ago. But when we were growing up, he was a sort of Richard Branson-esque. Dick Smith sort of guy who would, you know, go, oh, guy, I'm going to fly in a plane entirely around. the globe and oh i'm going to get in a i didn't he get in a hot air balloon one i did a lot of that sort of stuff yeah all that sort of stuff anyway for a while there he was the sort of go-to go and he was actually he did everything quite sensibly right but he came up with the idea in about 2007 he came up with the idea why don't we make a submersible out of carbon fiber because it'll be really light and easy right so he he started development on this he spent

actually several years developing it up and then unfortunately completely unrelated he crashed his plane into the side of a mountain stumbled out and actually walked about half a mile from the wreckage and then died well he was in a lot of records for flying planes circumnavigating the globe and all that kind of stuff yeah and crashed his plane anyway so at that point i think that was about 2012 the guy who picked that up and who who then bought out that project was Richard Branson. Oh, really? And he said, okay, well, this is an interesting idea.

Carbon fibre is submersible. Let's see what we can do with it. And then they realized, and it was going to be called the Deep Flight Challenger. Oh. And it was a one-person sub with wings, made of light white carbon fiber. And his whole idea, because Fossett just liked breaking records. His whole idea was... Yeah, he said a lot of world records.

I'll do the quickest underwater run or something. But crucially... I'll do the flimsiest vessel under the water. No, but crucially, because Fawcett was not an idiot, right? Like, he actually valued safety. His whole design was based on that it would be a disposable sub that you would only ever go once out in a carbon fibre thing. Because the whole nature of carbon fibre,

and the whole point of this podcast is to let you know that the way carbon fibre works, it is strongest when it's new. Oh, so reusing the same. carbon fiber submersible, which they did. It gets weaker and weaker with every use. I've heard several people say it's like, you know how, say you had something like a paper clip or something like that. You know how, like when you bend it first of all, you can sort of bend it back, but if you

keep bending it quite a bit, it gets brittle, it snaps. It sort of just, yeah, eventually snaps, right? So, and it's a bit like that with carbon fiber. So in actual fact, the safest time, like, it's ironic, but the safest. time to go in, say, the Titanic, not the Titanic, in the Titan, but the Stockton Rush submersible, would have been on its first voyage because it's the one that's least likely to have any carbon fibre damage. Well, there was a term that was used in the analysis of the crash, which was quite chilling, which was delamination, which sounded like a very bad thing to happen

to carbon fibre, basically coming apart. Have you heard what James Cameron had to say about the carbon, the type of carbon material? He said it was a horrible. He said it was a horrible. horrible idea to use carbon fiber, that it's not at all sensible for vessels with external pressure. And he just just chucked in. He's done a lot of interviews about this. He just sort of threw in here and there that in his, you know, untested submersible that he went in.

A, he didn't take passengers. It was just him and his scientist. He didn't sell tickets. But also he went three times deeper or something down to the Challenger deep and survived because he didn't use carbon fiber. So he called it a horror. Yeah, the critical failure of the whole thing was the carbon fiber. And he was really worried about this because they used such a dumb material.

And this is someone who thought the Titanic was a good idea for a movie. So, you know, James Cameron's not right about everything. But even worse, Avatar. Oh, yeah. I imagine doing an Avatar and going, what I really need to do is four sequels. It's all at once. Imagine going, you know, I'm going to do a movie called Avatar, but there's an even dumber idea out there, carbon fibre on submersible.

I think the next Avatar is called The Way of Carbon Fiber. But can I just quote, he's just backing up what you're saying here. He said, this is with George Stephanopheles. He said, they fail over time because each dive adds more and more microscopic damage. Why didn't they ask him? No. James Cameron knows this shit. No, but the thing is, and this is the next point in the rave, Stockton Rush also knew that, right?

And I would just counter that I don't think necessarily it's the worst fibre, the worst material to use, if you're just going to do it once. because it is strong and the point is there are lots of good qualities to it. Like, for example, if you build it out of metal, then you have to also work out how it's going to float back up to the top. If you build out of carbon fibre, it is incredibly light. You can literally fly through the water if you're in a carbon fiber submersible. But yes, you're right. It has micro tears in the carbon fiber with every time you go down in it, right?

So they knew this. So what Stockton Rush did is he invented a thing called the acoustic real-time monitoring system. So during descent, the computer sends an acoustic ping to 20 sensors throughout the carbon fiber hull to detect weakness. You know, every second or so, right? It's a real-time monitoring system, right? And Stockton Rush actually painted this for the thing. I'm not sure that patent's going to be worth much to his ears, unfortunately. But the idea was the submarine would stop every hour or two.

Sorry, they did it every hour. The idea was the submarine would stop every hour or two on its descent. The computer would measure the integrity of the hull. If it seemed like it was failing, the pilot would take it up to safer waters. Every hour. Now, note that none of Russia's engineers wanted to put their name on this invention. So it was Stockton Russia's own invention alone, right? So the point is that what happened?

was if you have a catastrophic failure in carbon fibre, so say, I don't know, what's another brittle? Say glass, right? Does glass, Dom, because glass is brittle, right? When you break glass, does it just slightly break? Or does it completely break? No, it completely. I think the term is catastrophic failure, isn't it?

It was used for what happens. So the point is that actually, maybe the point is that they knew that it was going to fail. And some people have suggested that, maybe even the straw that broke the camel's back could even have been them stopping down going, okay, well, let's send some pings through this stuff. Well, it might have exactly right. It's sort of just like stress testing it.

Let's do an underwater stress test. Crack! Oh, God. But apparently James Cameron made his sub so that it could actually shrink. So they used shrinkable glass and all the things. So it knew, like, because the pressure is so great. Yes. I love that we're just talking about physics and ignoring the comedy simply because this is so fascinating.

Yeah, it's really how you design for that challenge And his went again three times deeper It's bizarre Apparently all the bolts had to be able to move around In the Cameron one To avoid the bitterness Again, there was a product out there That did this job before

That Ocean Gate could have looked at If they weren't so ahead I said Stockton Rush have a carbon fibre tennis racket or something And just go, oh, great material The Chaser Report Less News Less News, Less on The other small detail, which I haven't verified, because I didn't want to, the story was too good to verify either way,

is that if you actually look at some of the photos from early emissions on that thing, you can see that the computer monitors are actually screwed in to the hole. And there was a suggestion of was it actually screwed into the carbon fiber, in which case... Forget about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Forget about it. The other thing that I'll just as a sort of coder to this story, is guess what happened to the Richard Branson version of the project

that he'd bought from Steve Fawcett years earlier. Guess what happened to it? Well, either it completely crumbled and failed or we turned into the spacecraft. No, what happened was that in 2014, Richard Branson decided to just write off the whole project because he thought it was stupidly dangerous and he'd done his risk assessment on it

and when there was no way to commercialise this because it's a fucking stupid idea. But Charles, Charles, Stockton Rush, where it was very clear. I've seen him quoted. Safety considerations and testing slow down innovation. Yes. What you'd want to do is just speed it up. If they try and slow you don't going, oh, let's stress test this thing that's going to go under

unimaginable pressure at the bottom of the ocean. You'd say, fuck off, boffins, I'm doing it anyway. Don't slow me down with your rules. That was the kind of guy he was. He probably should have explained a little bit more clearly to the three people he sold sick tickets to, for you. By the way, you know the other detail we didn't mention when we talked about this last week that I learned is that the British guy, the British adventurer, survived Jeff Bezos's

Blue Horizon. So he went up. He went up before he went down. And so he's clearly used to eccentric, you know, billionaires doing outlandish vessels that were completely safe. Bezos's Blue Horizon was absolutely fine. It worked really well. Not so much this one.

Well, the thing is, the Stockton Rush was by no means a billionaire. He was worth $12 million. Tom. And some of the reports that have been coming out in the last week is that essentially his company couldn't quite sell enough tickets. And that's why he kept on offering, you know, seats to journalists and things like that to drum up business. I suspect he's not worth as much as he was before this happened. But in particular, there is a suggestion that actually he knew that the carbon fibre thing was getting weaker and weaker. But he didn't have enough money to build a second one.

And so he kept flogging this one that he knew was past its... So this is a big problem because normally the whole model for this, Charles, is that the eccentric billionaires fund the thing and blow massive amounts of money chasing a stupid idea, as Branson did. It's not meant to be that you've got some sort of striver who doesn't have much money. It sells tickets to the billionaires. They're meant to do the funding. The narrative is completely wrong.

If he can't afford to just do more iterations of it. Yes. And just to add to that theory, there is actually one piece of evidence that Eugenie Lassingame came up with and reported on is that Stockton Rush actually bought the carbon fibre hull, the sort of front bit. At Bunnings. From Boeing. It wasn't far off, was I? Yeah, I know. Especially the guy going to Bunnings going, have you got any submersible stuff? And it was from Boeing.

It was a Spencer-built composite cylindrical hull. Right. But it was actually, Boeing sold it off because it was de-rated in January 2020 because it had, they hadn't used it enough and it was past its shelf-lough. So essentially it was too old to use in a Boeing plane, which doesn't have to deal with any pressure at all. They sold it off. Oh, right. It was seconds.

Yes, yes, it was second. Oh, goodness. So I'm just reading this here. Seconds world. Seconds world, yeah. The Deep Sea Challenger was made out of high strength steel and titanium, but it also had a crew compartment inside it. So they had a shell, but then inside it a second.

So that if the hole was breached, there'd be another thing to protect you. Whereas the Titan had some titanium, no separate crew compartment. And just went, yeah, heart cup and fibre. That's fine. So again, the Deep Sea Challenger already existed. this had already been solved. Yes. I also wonder whether when you paid $250,000 for your ticket,

and you got into the submersible, and you saw the Logitech gaming controller, was that a little bit of a clue? This was a bit of a Dodgy Brothers operation. Well, there's a fine line between Dodgy Brothers and Innovator, as shown by a little mask. Yes. And, you know, who are we to say,

who are we to judge, Dom? Who are we to judge? Us armchair critics Sitting here Safely at one atmosphere Yeah I've never done with it What have we done with our lives Dom?

You know what it is Charles We've lived It's the desire to adventure To push out the realm of human experience And do things that no one's ever done before That's what I don't understand about this whole thing Fuck that Why wouldn't you do that?

I have no desire to go to the highest mountain I'm going to no I desire to do the fastest Second navigation. Sounds like a bore. It just sounds incredibly tedious. I mean, going to the bottom of the ocean. Would you want to see the wreckage of the Titanic? I just have no interest in that.

Maybe that's why they had to have the logite controller to get people on this. Oh, we can do some gaming. That's great. No, in all sincerity, if someone offered me a free ticket in a completely safe vessel to gok at the wreck of the Titanic on which a huge number of people died. And it's just sitting there with, you know, seaweed on it or something. Fuck that. Why would I bother?

It's just boring. I mean, even the movie's boring that only lasted three hours. I've never seen the movie. I'm so uninterested in the Titanic that I refuse to watch the James Cameron movie. And I certainly haven't watched any of the stuff about his trip, although I'm actually now interested to see how a less stupid person goes about going to the bottom of the ocean. Our gear is from Road. We are part of the iconic less network.

Dom, I think we're becoming proper journalists. I think you're becoming oceanographers. Look, I don't want to be too mean. I realize they pay the ultimate price for this. And I feel sorry for the 19-year-old kid, who apparently, you know, not, the young guy, he didn't want to go. He was reticent. He was just like, well, dad really wants me to go, okay, fine, he's paying all this money. Never, just.

Moral of the tale, never try and impress your dad. As a father, just don't, no. We don't want you to, yeah. I'm very, lucky, I don't have. That will most impress me if you don't. I'm very fortunate not to have $20,000 to blow on a ticket to an experimental submersible that will kill both of us. Yeah.