Titanic tourist sub goes missing in Atlantic Ocean, June 2023 #4

[Charlot123]

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Feynman may have had an extremely high opinion of himself, but as you note it was deserved and based on his long, long list of achievements. Not because his ancestors came over on the Mayflower and he inherited a lot of money.

And Feynman would have never confused facts with what he wanted to be true. As a practicing scientist, Feynman understood the difference between theorizing something and running experiments and tests to actually prove the theory correct. Rush just assumed if he thought something was true ("carbon fiber would make a good pressure hull"), then reality would bend to his will.

This reminds me of the clip from a young Feynman's physics lecture at Cornell: "It doesn't make a difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn't make a difference how smart you are; who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong."

Free: Richard Feynman’s Physics Course from Cornell (1964)

We're beaming you back to 1964. Richard Feynman, our favorite Bongo-playing, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, reduces science to the barest essentials, to its most fundamental truth. If a theory doesn't square with experiment, it's wrong.

www.openculture.com

The most humane, the sincerest and the saddest part of Feynman’s life was his relationship with his first wife, Arline, who died young. His achieved the most after her death, but I wonder if a part of him died with Arline. IMHO, after that, he must have taken the personal losses of the astronauts’ families close to heart. In his dissenting opinion, Feynman describes the toxic connection: first, NASA management drastically underestimates the risks of catastrophic failure, then sells their unrealistic opinion of flights safety to laymen, of which one, Christa McAuliffe, falls the victim. If Feynman was so harsh on rocket scientists (who, btw, were far from inadequate), just imagine him commenting on Stockton Rush’s arrogance, cavalier attitude to his escapades and safety-blindness. (Unafraid to argue with Niels Bohr, Feynman couldn’t care less about the Mayflower, he’d just leave Rush in the dust).

But Feynman had no filter in other areas, that’s why he’d periodically get in trouble. This is where I see some parallels with Rush.

 

[somequestions]

Thank you very much for linking this movie. It is interesting to compare all three situations from the leadership angle. 1. The Challenger. At that time, the critical decision was left with the wrong team (the managers). However, NASA is still a team structure. A spacecraft consists of many parts; at any point, things can go wrong. When the spaceship disintegrated, it wasn’t “oh, darn, these O-rings”. It took Rogers commission over 5 months to arrive at their conclusion. Given how many times the launch had been postponed, I suspect that post-accident, different scenarios were entertained. Ultimately, Lawrence Mulloy, a manager, took the most flak. His attitude was, “we have been postponing it for too long, and we don’t have any data about O-rings performance at low temperatures. They have held so far. So let us make the decision to go ahead, and if we are wrong, it will be my head on the table.” A wrong decision, sadly, but in Mulloy’s stance, I can still see that old generation of leaders who are unafraid of responsibility. On the screen, he is humanely grieving. Also, you can see how everyone still feels about the Challenger and the crew. No engineer says, “me, me, me was right”. Everyone blames himself for not having done more. The only problem with that old leadership is perhaps excessive response to pressure from above in the context of financial constraints, but it is not the worst thing that can happen.

2. The Columbia leadership is a huge step down. Communication is bureaucratized, rigid and fractioned. Everything is politics (“improper lines of communication”), but the chief enforcer is a poor politician. I don’t know by what parameters Linda Ham was chosen to lead, but is a mismatch for the role. Being blunt and unapproachable, Linda, sadly, serves to dehumanize the outcome. Did she personally contribute to the disaster? I don’t think so. Perhaps the astronauts were doomed either way. But at least the management ought to have publicly acknowledged the risk and considered trying to save the crew instead of denialism. Why didn’t Linda participate in this movie? I think being interviewed about the disaster is hard for a person who feels the empathy but can’t project it onscreen. Another explanation - a new generation of leaders shies away from responsibility.

3. In comparison to NASA, the Titan is a tiny one-man show with a glitzy, conceited leader. Instead of teams, Rush leads students from a local community college, the only person with experience being fired and sued. The whole story revolts around Stockton Rush’s own inflated, vindictive ego. Responsibility? Nada, zero - the submersion “is safer than crossing a street”, he says. A private grandiose entrepreneur, Rush feels absolutely no empathy for the passengers because he’d die too.

I would describe the Challenger and the Columbia catastrophes as “we don’t know, but we haven’t had a problem with it before, so let us take the risk,” situations. With Rush, it was “I absolutely do know” one.

Interestingly, i can see some superficial parallels between Rush and Richard Feynman, both being extremely self-conceited, but first, Feynman was a Nobel prize winner, and second, he accused NASA of showmanship in bringing Christa McAuliffe to that flight.

The main point I thought was not really to compare NASA to Oceangate as they are two different operations. Oceangate is a private company.

The point was to show that many times it helps to understand how decisions are made and why. Like the author of the Challenger book in the Retro clip said, many people did not understand the position of Larry Malloy or Linda Hamm.

Yes, Stockton Rush seemed to be someone who did not care about safety. But I think that he really thought nothing would go wrong. Oceangate had postponed numerous dives before due to safety concerns. But I do agree that unlike NASA, Rush was warned for years about the design of his submersible and seemed to deny those safety concerns. Maybe he really was crazy like submersible operator Karl Stanley thought, or maybe he was so naive that he believed nothing could go wrong because he knew more than everyone else. I do not think it helped that the Titan submersible had successfully dived to the Titanic before.

It is probably best to wait until the investigation is complete and the accident board can figure out what actually caused the implosion(if they can figure it out).

 

[Charlot123]

The main point I thought was not really to compare NASA to Oceangate as they are two different operations. Oceangate is a private company.

The point was to show that many times it helps to understand how decisions are made and why. Like the author of the Challenger book in the Retro clip said, many people did not understand the position of Larry Malloy or Linda Hamm.

Yes, Stockton Rush seemed to be someone who did not care about safety. But I think that he really thought nothing would go wrong. Oceangate had postponed numerous dives before due to safety concerns. But I do agree that unlike NASA, Rush was warned for years about the design of his submersible and seemed to deny those safety concerns. Maybe he really was crazy like submersible operator Karl Stanley thought, or maybe he was so naive that he believed nothing could go wrong because he knew more than everyone else. I do not think it helped that the Titan submersible had successfully dived to the Titanic before.

It is probably best to wait until the investigation is complete and the accident board can figure out what actually caused the implosion(if they can figure it out).

I see Stockton Rush as a combination of a tunnel vision, obsessiveness, obstinacy and grandiosity. Perhaps coming from "Stockton" and "Rush" gave him insecurity. MOO - I don't think he flaunted the family names to sell the product. I think that the names set the bar too high for him. Sadly, it doesn't appear that Stockton Rush was too successful in his prior endeavors. I also have questions about his basic knowledge of physics, but i am not a physicist myself, it is just mere logic that makes me wonder. Perhaps the submersible was Stockton's last chance to prove to himself, his friends and family, that he was worthy of the legacy. I think he hoped, beyond all reality, that the sub would work, but it was also his ultima Thule and his last stand. If he abandoned the project, he'd walk straight into infamy, and perhaps debt-laden infamy, too, and this he could not accept.

ETA: the shuttles are not a one-man idea, enterprise or decision. Lots of technology, engineering and craftmanship goes into shuttles. I still have hard time blaming anyone for either the Challenger or the Columbia, because it is rocket science and the astronauts are aware of the risks. From the managerial standpoint, any flight is "a pyramid of signatures." (Remember Douglas refusing to sign and Kilminster, his boss, doing it?)

In Titan, one person is the physicist, the engineer, the owner and the signature. Could he manage? Yes, if he had Henry Ford's brain. But Stockton had the brain to make a cart, and thought he made an automobile. Technically, no one but him and his company are at fault, either. The industry seems to have ostracized him.