What People Get Wrong This Week: the Titanic Submarine

This week, the world was riveted to coverage of the disaster of Titan, the missing tourist submersible designed to explore the sunken Titanic. After a frantic multinational search operation, an underwater drone today discovered a ” debris field” on the ocean floor in the search area . Unfortunately, it soon became clear that the debris came from Titan. According to the Coast Guard, the wreckage is consistent with a sudden “catastrophic explosion” of the ship, which immediately killed all five people on board.

Such a dramatic and fast-paced story is inevitably accompanied by disinformation and hasty conclusions. Below are some of the misconceptions regarding the Titan submarine tragedy.

Titan was not a submarine

A submarine is a submersible that has enough power to leave port and return to port unaided. A submersible is a submersible that requires a larger mother ship to launch and recover.

People who do not immediately understand the difference between a submersible and a submarine can be understood, but this difference is key in explaining what could have gone wrong. Submersibles are used for short underwater trips; submarines can often stay submerged for months. A submarine that lost contact with its mother ship, as happened to the Titan on Sunday, is a big problem, especially since the ship could only be controlled using text messages from the mother ship (more on this in a bit).

The Titan was intended for short trips underwater, somewhere around 10 hours at a time, so it didn’t have enough power to travel very far underwater. Some submarines can stay submerged for months, travel thousands of miles, and even produce oxygen on their own. The Titan was designed to descend quickly to depths of up to 4,000 meters, but not to travel very far horizontally away from the launch platform and launch vehicle.

The Titan may have been controlled with a game controller, but that’s not as bad as it sounds.

In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning in 2022, OceanGate CEO and Founder Stockton Rush showed off a device that looks exactly like the Logitech F710 Wireless Gamepad (currently on Amazon for $29.99) and said, “We Let’s run it all with this game controller. ”

This revelation understandably drew disbelief on the internet, but there are a couple of issues with the widespread perception of the controller as evidence that the ship was a fabricated nightmare.

Leaving aside the general decrepitude of the ship, we don’t actually know if this controller was used to pilot the ship in 2023. It may have changed since the original interview in 2022. We also don’t know if the controller has been changed. , or what changes have been made to it. So far, OceanGate has not responded to media requests for comment.

Stephen Wright, an aerospace professor, notes in an interview with CBS News that joysticks, which have been used in aviation and submarines/submarines for decades, are basically the same as video game controllers. This is a joystick that acts as an input device for the computer. Wright suggests that the Titan’s navigation system probably did not rely on a single game controller, and points out that there was probably a back-up control method.

The Titan was basically designed to sink and float, and from the CBS report’s review of the ship, the “up and down” movement (essentially dropping weight to return to the surface) was controlled by the button you see above, not game controller.

Even if the ship were to be controlled with an off-the-shelf game controller, it’s hard to see how much of a difference that would make. The Titan suffered a catastrophic explosion that was not caused by a controller malfunction.

Is it Elon Musk’s fault?

After news broke that the Titan had lost contact with its mother ship, various media sources reported that OceanGate was using Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system for communications. This has led to speculation that the communication problems may have been caused by Musk’s system.

This is (mostly) a lie. While OceanGate Expeditions used Starlink to access the Internet on the open ocean, communication between the submersible and the mother ship was neither Internet nor satellite based. The Titan was linked to its mother ship via a sonar system, which allowed acoustic location and short text messages to be sent, experts said. Space Internet Mask played no role in this tragedy.

When did the crew most likely die?

The US Coast Guard announced on Wednesday that sonar deployed by the Canadian Air Force picked up underwater noises both Tuesday and Wednesday, raising hopes that they are coming from Titan . The sounds appear to have come from something else: remote-controlled submersibles searched the area where the sounds were coming from and found nothing, and the Coast Guard later confirmed that there was no connection between the sounds and Titan.

According to the Coast Guard, the intense pressure from the deep sea most likely crushed the ship in an instant as it descended. The passengers most likely died before they even realized there was a problem, a fate that was certainly preferable to the slow suffocation they might experience if the ship’s mechanics failed while the ship remained intact. The dead are:

• Hamish Harding is a British businessman and explorer who has been described as a “living aviation legend”.
• Shahzada Daoud, Pakistani businessman.
• Suleman Daoud , son of Shahzada Daoud.
• Paul-Henri Nargeole , 77-year-old French explorer and director of underwater research for the company that owns the rights to the wreck of the Titanic .
• Stockton Rush , CEO and founder of OceanGate, Inc.