CEO Stockton Rush and billionaire Hamish Harding thought it was a good idea to build a carbon fiber submersible with an Xbox controller for navigation and a single button that functions as an elevator and then drop it into the ocean to go take a look at the Titanic. Now the submersible has lost contact with the mothership and 5 people are on board with oxygen running out.
Seriously if you think about this, it just seems stupid to get inside a big scrap of metal, and then drop it 22,000 feet down to the ocean floor? And then think that nothing could go wrong?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... parts.html
Titan sub is like a 'kit car built from Amazon parts': Observers say 'flimsy' vessel uses camping shop lights, 'off the shelf' cameras, salvaged metal pipes for ballast and a Playstation controller - with a comms team in a ship previously traded on eBay
The US Coast Guard is now leading the search for the vessel in the North Atlantic Ocean where it vanished on Sunday. The remote area is where the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank in 1912, killing more than 1,500.
https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-u ... a57686ddcb
Even more eyebrow-raising are the components used to control the vessel, which includes a Logitech video game controller to manoeuvre the sub, no GPS system and single button that supposedly helps the vessel descend like an “elevator”.
Despite its peculiar design compared to other authorised vessels, Mr Rush repeatedly told reporters, experts and his visitors the vessel is “safe” — even “obscenely safe”.
“Everything else can fail, your thrusters can go, your lights can go. You’re still going to be safe,” he told American technology and science writer David Pogue last November.
