News is preoccupied with the missing submersible that was taking a few people down to see the wreck of the Titanic.
It’s fine with me if the vessel uses a commonly available game controller in its control system. NASA prefers to use existing well-proven equipment where it can and reserve its best cleverness to apply where something new really does have to be invented, so why not do the same with a submersible?
But NASA is fervent, obsessive, relentless about preparation and redundancy. To the extent that it can, NASA wants a backup for every critical system, and ideally a backup for the backup. NASA ponders what could go wrong, builds safety measures in and practices constantly.
Even after all of that, whatever actually goes wrong may be something no one anticipated across the entire spectrum from life threatening to trivial. Nobody anticipated the explosion on Apollo 13. Nobody anticipated the loose shim in a flight recorder on the first Space Shuttle orbital mission. But the preparations made beforehand and the insistence on practicing response to every problem we can imagine improve the odds of getting through it okay.
An emergency beacon in the submersible would help a lot. It would cost a fraction of one passenger’s fare for one trip. Alternative communication systems would help a lot too. We don’t know whether it is stranded on the bottom or shed its descent weights and bobbed to the surface. If it’s the latter, as I understand it there is no mechanism to allow the occupants to open their hatch from inside. They need to be found and someone has to open the hatch from the outside before their air supply is used up.
The vessel is too small and operates in environments too extreme for escape pods to be practical. A remote-controlled companion vehicle on the mother ship at the surface, ready to deploy in an emergency, would be expensive backup but could multiply the options for coping with a crisis. What if the companion vehicle could deliver and dock tanks of supplemental oxygen to Titan? What if, what if, what if?
This morning BBC reported that Canadian searchers detected banging sounds in the search area. If people in the submersible are banging on the side of the vessel, that means they are still alive. It provides a signal searchers can triangulate to pinpoint where they should look. It doesn’t provide a way to go as deep as the ocean bottom there, find out what went wrong and somehow bring the vessel up. The best possible outcome is to find the vessel on the surface and open it in time.
I see some disparaging comments online about rich people going to see the wreck of the Titanic in this submersible as a lark. This particular submersible is designed to appeal to wealthy tourists but it can also be used for research. It’s far more common for deep submersibles to be research vessels. This type of crisis will happen again. Most of the time, a deep sea emergency will involve researchers simply because that’s the most common reason for people to go so deep.
No matter how this episode turns out, it is not a reason to stop deep submersible missions. But it is a reason to check the preparations for such mission. Even if we try to stay home and stay safe, things go wrong. The more we strive to go somewhere new and interesting to learn more about the world we live in, the more we rub elbows with danger. Preparation doesn’t guarantee safety. It does improve our chances.
Look at the marine heat wave engulfing the UK and Ireland right now, or the breathtaking strength of the El Niño that is starting. We still don’t know enough about the ocean. It covers most of the planet, yet we still don’t understand it well enough to make more than broad guesses about how global warming affects it and will affect it, and what that will mean for life in the water and on land.
We need ocean research, especially in the deep where we know the least. What’s happening now with Titan may cause a clampdown on tourists making deep dives, and that’s all right with me. But I hope it will not slow the pace of marine research. For that, I hope it will only cause better preparation.