We now know that the Titan submersible's carbon fiber hull basically exploded
You probably know that carbon fiber is prone to randomly shattering
So WHY did they use it for the Titan?
Fortunately, they wrote an article about why!
It starts with this guy:
Steve Fossett was an ACTUAL adventurer
He made the first balloon flight around the world; first solo flight around the world; fastest sail trip around the world; and records in skiing, mountain climbing, Le Mans, and even the Iditarod!
He was funded by Richard Branson
Steve Fossett's last project was top secret
The Deep Flight Challenger was an airplane-like submarine
It was a one-person sub, with wings, made of lightweight carbon fiber like his record-setting planes
And designed to go to the deepest point in the ocean (Challenger Deep)
For an aviator, making an airplane-like submarine likely made sense
Because it's very lightweight, it achieves neutral buoyancy in the water on its own -- without layers and layers of bulky foam
It can literally FLY underwater
But Steve Fossett disappeared in 2007, while flying his small plane over Nevada. This spurred the largest hunt for a missing person in history, involving dozens of planes, satellites, crowdsourced volunteers pouring over images, and even psychics
The search was so thorough that they found eight OTHER plane crashes while looking for Fossett!
It a year and millions of dollars to find Fossett's wreck -- it appears he crashed into a steep ridge, his locator beacon failed, and he stumbled about half a mile away before dying
After Fossett died, the DeepFlight Challenger was acquired by Richard Branson's new company Virgin Oceanic
He wanted to commercialized it
But here's the important thing:
THE DEEPFLIGHT CHALLENGER WAS MADE FOR ONE TRIP ONLY
That's what Fossett thought was safe with carbon fiber
In 2014, Branson gave up on commercializing DeepFlight Challenger for this reason ...
But that's around the time fellow adventurer Stockton Rush starts working on his second submarine, the "Cyclops 2" telegraph.co.uk/news/science/s…
(He had already built the Cyclops 1 out of conventional materials)
Rush contracts with Spencer Composites, an aerospace carbon fiber manufacturer, to design the Cyclops 2 hull... *IN ONLY SIX WEEKS*
Not coincidentally, Spencer Composites ALSO made the hull for the DeepFlight Challenger
But the Cyclops 2 didn't fly around like a plane. So why use carbon fiber at all?
Well, it meant it could be cheaper, and portable, and hold 5 people rather than the usual 1-3
Ok, so Rush isn't a complete idiot, he knows that the carbon fiber is going to get weaker on every dive
So he invents the Acoustic Real-time Monitoring System
During descent, a computer sends acoustic pings to 20 sensors through the carbon-fiber hull, to detect weakness
The idea was the submarine would stop every hour or two on its descent. The computer would measure the integrity of the hull. If if seemed like it was failing, the pilot would take it up to safer waters.
(The patent is in Rush's name alone -- he didn't have a lot of engineers.)
So what happened? Either the monitoring system failed, or it worked and for some reason they didn't ascend in time.
We'll probably never know. And there will probably never be another carbon fiber sub after this disaster.
Some good threads from people who actually work on this stuff (not me)
Why is Elon so obsessed with USAID, a relatively small agency mostly known for saving starving kids and such?
It's because USAID played a significant role in the fall of apartheid South Africa. The country where he grew up is gone forever, and he wants vengeance.
Thiel, Sacks, and Soon-Shiong are from apartheid South Africa too. They're mad that they're hyper-racist playground is gone and they want to rebuild it here.
Resist.
Thanks for following me on here folks, but this platform is compromised. Please follow me elsewhere.
Elon is just going through government payments databases and tweeting random things he thinks look funny now. Maybe you don't care if it's Lutheran hospitals (which he called a "money laundering operation") , but you'll care if it's your Medicare or your local schools.
The nice thing is, by calling Lutheranism a fake "religion" he'll become wildly unpopular in the Midwest
Of course his popularity doesn't matter since HE GOT ZERO VOTES
As a reminder, the president has no power to withhold already-budgeted payments. That is 100% the purview of Congress.
So as I'm writing this, it's looking extremely likely that Trump will win the election tomorrow.
The news is going to be full of after-the-fact explanations. How Harris didn't campaign hard enough, how Trump made inroads with minorities, how people blame Biden for inflation...
I do not think any of that actually matters though. Any kind of hypothesis about what voters were thinking is counterfactual and impossible to prove. We'll never know "why" and it has no impact.
What matters is what happens now. And we already know, more or less.
Trump's entire strategy (both when campaigning and in office) is to "flood the zone." He generates multiple major news stories, both positive and negative, every single day. If nothing is happening today he literally makes a big deal about the death of a SQUIRREL.
Restaurants on the same intersection JD is standing (and talking about a "city in decline"):
Du Nord Cocktail Room
Lagniappe (creole)
Arbeiter Brewing
Hook & Ladder (music/shows)
Zen Arcade (marijuana)
Loncheria Los Amigos
Wendy's
Raising Cane's
Mr. Momo
Quruxley (Somali)