The Titan Submersible: A Deep Dive into Ego and Failure
- Christopher Jackson
- Mar 27
- 11 min read
On the 18th of June 2023, the only deep-sea submersible made out of carbon fiber composite (called the ‘Titan’) imploded in milliseconds at about 3.5 km or 11,500 feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. All five people on board were killed. They perhaps died so quickly that their brains wouldn't have been able to register any feeling or response to it.
The world was gripped for several days when it believed there was a possibility the crew was still alive but stranded on the ocean floor. But when the unfortunate truth became apparent, so did many other troubling things in the much longer story of the Titan submersible. A submersible built primarily to explore the 3,800 meter or 12,500 feet deep wreck of the Titanic. The similarity in the names is no accident.
At the heart of this story is the human ego. Or, more specifically, one human's ego. One of the five killed on board the submersible was Stockton Rush, the CEO of the submersible's creator, OceanGate. While the submersible was technically the product of an entire organization, it was the embodiment of decisions that Stockton Rush made. The good, bad, and incredulous.
Tension and compression
It is much easier to make materials that need to be really strong 'in tension.' Tension is all about things being pulled apart. Ropes, cables, and chains are good examples of things designed to resist the forces that create tension.
‘Suspension bridges’ are one of our most amazing inventions because they utilize tension. Those that use steel cables between vertical suspenders now have the longest spans of any bridge in the world. Turkey’s 1915 Çanakkale Bridge (built in 2022) has a span of 2,023 meters of 6,371 feet. That means that for over 2 km or 1.2 miles, no part of the bridge touches the Dardanelles it spans.
But it is much harder to make things that need to be really strong in ‘compression.’ Compression is all about things being pushed or pressed. Compression is the opposite of tension. Ropes, cables, and chains can't do compression. The proverbial act of 'pushing on a rope' is often used as an example of futility.
Bridges that rely on compression cannot do what suspension bridges can. The Tian’e Longtan Bridge relies on a ‘compression’ arch that supports a 600 meter or 1,969 feet span using a combination of steel and concrete. This is the longest span of such a bridge.
But here’s the thing – even arch bridges cannot escape the need for tension. When people say ‘concrete,’ they usually mean ‘reinforced concrete’ with steel rebar inside the structure to make sure that nothing moves by providing the ability to resist tension. You could argue that the only bridges that rely exclusively on compression are the much older stone arch bridges that pass over small creeks and rivers.
And these old bridges can't span much more than 50 meters or 160 feet.
The thing about (carbon) fiber …
Carbon fiber is like a tiny, really strong rope. All fibers are fantastic in tension. Not so good in compression. Carbon fiber is often mixed with an epoxy resin to create a 'carbon fiber composite' material. This material is very strong … but mainly in tension. When you compress carbon fiber composite, you rely on the (now solid) epoxy resin to resist these forces. The carbon fibers can’t help at all.
Unfortunately, the Titan submersible was largely made up of carbon fiber composite. Deep sea submersibles are all about compression. The deeper you dive, the more pressure is applied from all directions. And so designers pull out all stops to resist it.
The first thing to do is to try and create a ball-shaped or spherical pressure vessel. A sphere is essentially the 'same shape' from all directions, meaning there are no corners or sharp bends to amplify stress. A sphere equally distributes stress in all directions.
The Titan submersible, however, used a carbon fiber cylindrical pressure vessel. While a cylinder has a circular cross-section (just like a sphere), it is long and straight along the axis of the vessel (unlike a sphere). And it is much easier to collapse a cylinder (like squeezing a toilet paper roll) than an egg (whose shell is similar in strength to a toilet paper roll cardboard but much closer to a sphere).
Let’s call this issue one.
So, we (ideally) want a spherical shape to spread the compression forces equally. And that leads to 'homogeneity,' a fancy word for describing something with a uniform construction or structure throughout. One of the preferred submersible materials is a titanium alloy that includes vanadium (a soft metal that strengthens other metals, including steel and titanium) and aluminum (great for preventing corrosion). Suppose you use a titanium alloy for a submersible. In that case, you have no corners, sharp bends, holes, or anything that will increase stresses at the atomic level. It is ‘homogeneous,' apart from the inevitable manufacturing defects that we do our best to eliminate.
The Titan submersible actually used titanium alloy semi-spherical ends to the pressure vessel (recovered largely intact and undamaged). But the carbon fiber composite in the cylinder is a different story. Carbon fiber is made by creating a 'weave' out of the carbon fibers (to make it look like a fabric,) which is then compressed within the initially liquid epoxy resin to create the composite. This is the opposite of homogeneity. If you were to fly through carbon fiber composite on a microscopic journey, you would pass through regions of just epoxy, carbon fiber going in one direction, carbon fiber going in another direction, and the voids and spaces between them. And all these little changes amplify stresses at the microscopic level. This is how most cracks start.
Let’s call this issue two.
Finally, carbon fiber composite fails without warning, as a tiny crack can quickly propagate through the boundaries between the epoxy resin and carbon fibers. Those fibers create great pathways to allow cracks to move at high speed as they grow. Titanium alloys are susceptible to cracking, but this much slower 'fatigue' type is much easier to detect and monitor. With all the atoms mixed homogeneously, no 'crack highways' exist to move down in titanium alloys.
Let’s call this issue three.
The red flags and warnings
There were plenty.
The Titan was initially developed in partnership with Boeing and the University of Washington (which has laboratories to test designs at simulated water depths).
A Boeing engineer emailed Stockton Rush with a graph of the pressure vessel strain that suggested a high risk of implosion ‘at or before you reach 4,000 meters.’ Some scale models of the submersible imploded in the University of Washington’s deep-water laboratories. OceanGate’s director of marine operations later wrote a report that borderline begged Rush to have the design certified by the American Bureau of Shipping (which he didn’t). This certification would have involved independent testing and assessment of the Titan’s hull.
The chair of the ‘Marine Technology Society’ wrote a letter with other industry experts to Rush raising concerns about the Titan submersible (to say the least). Another deep-sea exploration specialist coincidentally also sent another email of concern to Rush at around the same time.
Notwithstanding, the Titan submersible was built and made several successful deep dives. But after 50 dives, the carbon fiber hull cracked. So a new hull was made, with ‘lifting rings’ added to help put it into and pull it out of the ocean. This was against the advice of engineers, who knew that this would add more stress to a hull that was already struggling to do what it was designed to do.
And 30 dives later, the passengers and crew heard a large 'bang' in the hull. It turned out that the hull was permanently deformed as a result, meaning something 'substantial' happened. Like a big crack.
Trying to discern mavericks from lunatics
‘At some point, safety is just pure waste.
I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed.
Don't get in your car. Don't do anything.’
‘I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.’
‘I don’t think it’s very dangerous. If you look at submersible activity over the last three decades, there hasn’t even been a major injury, let alone a fatality.’
‘I have grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market.’
‘We have heard the baseless cries of "you are going to kill someone" way too often.
I take this as a serious personal insult.’
‘To me, the more stuff you've broken, the more innovative you've been.’
‘I’d like to be remembered as an innovator. I think it was General MacArthur who said: ‘You are remembered for the rules you break’. And I've broken some rules to make this. I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind me.
Carbon fiber and titanium? There's a rule you don't do that. Well, I did.'
‘There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe.’
… various quotes from Stockton Rush
We are naturally drawn to 'mavericks.' These are non-conformists who break existing norms and paradigms. But mavericks aren't just rule-breakers. They are focused on achieving something specific.
We look at people like Steve Jobs (the creative force for the style of all Apple products), Al Davis (former NFL owner known for the motto ‘just win baby’ but was also the first to employ African-American coaches), Hannibal (ancient military leader still revered to this day), Anita Roddick (founder of the body shop who focused on, amongst other things, animal cruelty-free products) and so on.
These people 'broke rules' to achieve the lofty status of 'maverickism. Just like Stockton Rush said he did.
But when you look more closely at the rules that the mavericks above broke, you see one key characteristic among them: the rules they broke were the rules of human conventions. These are the perceived ideas of the right and wrong ways to achieve something.
The two rules that Stockton Rush broke were very different: the rules (laws) of physics and the rule of honesty.
Rush made claims that were, at best, misrepresentations of the truth and, more realistically, outright lies. He stated on OceanGate’s website that the Titan was built in collaboration with NASA, Boeing, and the University of Washington. While there originally was a partnership with Boeing and the University of Washington, both parties walked away when Rush refused to listen to their input. As you read above, this was unambiguously clear. OceanGate had only signed a ‘Space Act Agreement,' which permitted NASA to support external entities (like OceanGate). However, the Covid-19 pandemic meant that this support was never provided.
Then there was Rush's seemingly non-stop claims that the Titan was based on robust engineering, notwithstanding that his engineers were frustrated at not being listened to, filing for whistle-blower protection, and being sued when they disagreed with him.
The issues they were having with Rush were not down to human conventions. The mock-ups that were routinely imploding in laboratories were not opinions. The strain charts suggesting failure was highly likely were not random scribbles on paper. The issues with carbon fiber composite were not made up.
Ego trumps reason … sometimes
There is always a place for ego (whether we like it or not). Steve Jobs famously said that he wanted people who would ‘irrationally’ toil away at engineering problems even when it would make sense for most to stop. He wanted those who were fixated on resolving the design challenge at hand and not those who wanted to get paid for eight hours of work (you may or may not agree with this approach to leadership).
And Steve Jobs can never be accused of not having an ego. This ego helped his relentless personal drive to create devices with complex computer-like hardware to be used with child-like simplicity. But this ego came at a cost, which saw Jobs temporarily expelled from Apple.
But here is the key difference between Jobs and Rush. Jobs created a company called ‘NeXT’ which continued working towards his vision. For Jobs, it was all about the product.
Rush’s ego was all about keeping up appearances. While Rush was talking about how he wanted to be remembered, Jobs was talking about how he wanted his products to be remembered.
One approach involves years of toiling to solve real-world physical and engineering problems. The other risks rushing past science, physics, and years of combined experience to try and win the race of acknowledgment.
The so-called 'rational' actor
Stockton Rush was irrational. That is a fact.
But his willingness to go down on the Titan, which ultimately killed him, provides a façade of rationality. Why would someone go on a submersible that he designed if he didn’t think it was safe?
Enter ego.
Years of incremental behaviors lead to massive holes in decision-making. The desire to be 'the deep-sea king’ or however you wanted to characterize Rush’s vision for OceanGate probably started with a small, preliminary test being discounted as an outlier. It, unfortunately, grew to the point where the organizations Rush initially chose to partner with were unceremoniously discounted when they disagreed with anything he said. In his own words, he took this ‘personally.’
And so we have someone whose own drives and desires transcended the concerns for his well-being. And the façade of rationality this presented doomed four people who signed up to go down with him.
The term 'rational actor' is used by military planners when they try and wargame scenarios. Time and time again, planners don't predict the behaviors of people they assume to be 'rational actors.' Countries are routinely invaded in ways that shock the world. But even the slightest revisit shows that human emotions trump reason … mainly because extreme risk-taking by a fraction of society inevitably results in some of them ruling countries. And those behaviors don't change.
Much of the world order is based on the presumption of 'rational actors.' But even then, what seems rational to you might seem irrational to someone else.
Free markets are based on the concept of ‘rational actors.’ It is ‘rational’ for the CEO of every company in the world to make decisions that benefit that company. And in many instances, this works fine.
But the ‘irrational actors’ are the ones who can really upset the balance. Bernie Madoff was responsible for the world’s largest Ponzi scheme (worth an estimated $ 65 billion). This is inherently ‘irrational’ as the Ponzi scheme’s mastermind has only two ultimate options: they are discovered whenever enough investors try and withdraw their money (which is inevitable), or they disappear. Madoff was so visible and well-known across the globe that disappearing was never an option. It was certainly not one he was actively planning for. And so he (irrationally) died in jail.
Physics, physics, physics
The disclaimer that OceanGate required its customers to sign before they became passengers on the Titan submersible required them to acknowledge that the Titan had only reached the Titanic on 13 out of 90 attempts. Let that sink in.
On 77 of those attempts, the submersible experienced some technical issue and had to resurface (or, in some cases, got lost). This was not a company that respected the laws of physics for any part of its submersible.
The reality is that when you pretend the laws of physics don’t apply to you in one area, you are almost certainly acting as if they don’t apply to you in others.
We all have a dash of ego (or other emotion) that can get in the way of ‘rational’ decision-making. Engineers are often tempted to declare that ‘early test failures’ don’t count because of the developmental nature of a product (all test failures count). Others will designate test failures as ‘outliers' (not many people know what an 'outlier' is). We might pretend that it is possible to bake reliability and quality into products once they hit ‘mature designs’ (it’s either impossible or expensive to not do this during preliminary designs).
The true mavericks understand that the laws of physics aren’t rules … so they don’t try to break them. And they don’t even try to break any other rule. It's just that their singular pursuit of something that hasn't been done before, by definition, defies existing rules of human convention. Hence, rules get broken.
Lunatics call everything that stands in their way 'rules' that don't apply to them, perhaps citing true mavericks as rule breakers to justify their actions. We all do this sometimes. Even the laws (not rules) of physics.
So, the questions moving forward for you are:
… how much of you is a maverick?
… and how much of you is a lunatic?
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