Pretty insane story, not going to have a happy ending.
Sounds like the end of OceanGate as a business.
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tourists?
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This is pretty 
Kinda surprised they can’t have some sort of floating emergency beacon/communications unit on a long ass tether that could be released up or something
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saying that there was currently “no way” to communicate with the vessel as neither GPS nor radio “work under water”.
“When the support ship is directly over the sub, they can send short text messages back and forth. Clearly those are no longer getting a response,” Mr Pogue said.
He added that because the passengers were sealed inside the vessel by bolts applied from the outside, “There’s no way to escape, even if you rise to the surface by yourself. You cannot get out of the sub without a crew on the outside letting you out.”
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4000 meters is crazy deep though. It’s over 10x deeper than submarines usually go. It’s roughly as far below the surface as the tallest peaks in the alps are above the surface. That would be one hell of a tether!
Saw a tweet that said the deepest successful submarine rescue ever in history was from 480 meters deep.
LOL…It’s not like they’re going to survive by leaving the sub if there is no rescue boat or helicopter around.
Yeah I’m sure there are logistical reasons why it can’t happen. But my thinking was deep sea fishing reels have like 1000 yards of monofilament strong enough to withstand a marlin so doesn’t seem like would be that impossible to have a 4000 yard “reel” with line strong enough to hold a small floating beacon.
I feel like they thought this story was going to be received with more sympathy. Like it was going to be the thai kids stuck in a cave or something.
I simply cannot imagine having run so well in life that that sub looked like anything but a death trap. But I would love to hear more about how billionaires have more money than the rest of us because they’re that much smarter than the rest of us.
Ugh, just seems like one of the most horrible ways to die though.
It’s hard not to contrast this with the refugee boat tragedy in Greece, which was hundreds of times worse as Dude pointed out but probably got less coverage.
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This seems like a design flaw…
I’ve never understood some of the extreme “sports” that the wealthy and upper middle class engage in. Things like skydiving. Who the fuck thinks that’s a good idea? This is dumber obviously. It would be one thing if you were sealing yourself into a metal coffin to advance human knowledge, like by going to space. It’s quite another so that you can take a selfy next to the tomb of thousands of people who died horribly.
Submarines are probably a lot like diving, where the learning curve dramatically increases as you want to go deeper. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was no way to build a hatch that could withstand the pressures involved and they basically just bolted two halves of a pressure vessel around the occupants of the sub. This sounds like a classic dumb way to die that is particularly attractive to the rich.
Man, my house cost less than that deathtrap trip. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
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This was significantly riskier than skydiving. I don’t know how many trips this vessel did but obviously your chances of dying were 1/however many trips there were (and I don’t think it was >10) and skydiving is definitely a <1% chance of dying deal in 2023.
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She was doing it in the armed forces though. I draw a distinction.
skydiving is a lot of fun
I can’t imagine how terrible it is to be 4000 meters down in the sea in a small metal submarine, cutoff from communication and knowing you have a limited amount of life support left.
This is a terrible thought, but the people onboard apparently found the titanic wreck so fascinating to go to these extremes to see it up close. And now they’re getting the ultimate reality experience of what it was like to be on the titanic, slowly awaiting their own death. Pretty horrifying stuff really.
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