Surely windows could never be a structural weak point, and say the aerospace industry would never invest decades of engineering into understanding the load distribution around windows in order to prevent accidents at a mere 0.5 bar of difference. An untested off-the-shelf solution should be totally fine for 400 bar.
I don't know much about calculating loads or what the exact pressure at certain depths is.... But to me and my dumb brain, deep sea is about equal to deep space and you better be prepared. What they did sounds a lot like winging it.
400 bar is 5800 psi. So for every square in is about 3 tons of pressure. So if your window was 12" by 12" is almost 835,000 pounds of pressure that is a fuck ton trying to seal it
Deep space is only 1 bar (one atmosphere, 14psi) difference from what we walk around at, and it's a vacuum. Deep sea is 400 bar... 400 times that pressure difference... and it's trying to crush you. The silly comments that CEO was making around some of the silly technical standards and stuff around this kind of submersible was absolutely criminal.
I hope, for the sake of the families, that it was a quick implosion. The idea that they are still alive somewhere is really hard to fathom. It honestly makes me anxious just thinking about it, and my brain is not normally capable of much sympathy and empathy and related emotions after the surgery. Realistically, the only rescue that will happen at this point is a body retrieval, unless they just happen to be found floating on the ocean within the next like 24 hours and whomever finds them happens to have the tools necessary to open the damn thing.
Only 2 final outcomes I see. One is something happens and they get squished by almost 1 million pounds of force, or something happens and they suffocate. I pick the quick death.
“Sorry for your loss, ma’am. Here’s a Ziplock baggie of shark shit that used to be your husband. Our condolences.”
I wonder in an adrift situation how long I would last before I beat the CEO to death with a pipe wrench to conserve oxygen.
If those idiots didn’t bang out the s-o-s distress call instead of random banging every 30 minutes they deserved to die.
They did a "validation dive" in 2018 down to 4000 meters with this Titan sub, and then were supposed to have done another Titanic dive in 2019 or 2020? Did they swap out or change the viewport? It seems weird that they'd do a validation dive to prove it works and then after it works, change something. Based on some of the reporting, I thought this was like their first trip, first time in this sub. But, the company has been doing other submersible dives and expeditions since 2011. (Including one in Seattle / Elliot Bay with Ben Haggerty (aka rapper Macklemore), featured on Discovery Channel in 2014.) In hindsight, it certainly seems like there were some rescue planning errors, but otherwise, this was just a tragic accident.
I like the implication here that the recovery teams searching for a tin can full of people deep in the ocean are going to disregard metallic banging since they didn't spell out "SOS." "Hey Joe, did you hear that? Sounds like a wrench hitting a metal wall." "Yeah, I heard it. Didn't use morse code, though. Must be some other metallic object being pounded by a living being down at 14,000 feet. Maybe it's a squid playing drums."