You didn't include the rest of my post. I finished that sentence with the fact that people are assuming the vessel was safe. In other words, if people knew that the CEO was taking short cuts, and in violation of safety laws, they likely wouldn't have agreed to the ''adventure.'' Even in the safest of vessels, there are risks inherent to something of this magnitude, but the vessel itself should be safe.
There is no "safe" vessel at that depth. That is the inherent risk. It was experimental and it was basically outside of the usual laws, rules and regulations. I don't agree with that but that is the situation.
The risks were known, the CEO made that clear to his passengers and he was putting his own life at risk so there was no "scam" going on here. Those weren't regular passengers in the sense of someone signing up for a Carnival cruise. What happened here is likely to happen on one of the "space tourist" Space X (and others) launches as well.
This whole news story, IMO, was messed up from the start but that's generally what happens where you take a story that requires some critical thinking and/or specialized knowledge and instead you have news anchors with a lot of time to fill and no specialized knowledge telling the story. It's also misleading when you bring on read Admirals and ex-submariners but then you realize that most of them acknowledged that they didn't know the specific design specs of the Titan. Some didn't know it had scrubbers and pingers. It would have been great if at least one new source had gotten the exact specs of the Titan and then had a qualified person go over it.
I am surprised that no one seems to spend a little time researching the specific facts and then laying those out. They would have come to the conclusion that it imploded and in the alternative if it didn't but something else happened it still would have been all over in about 24 hours.
Yet, the news became a countdown timer to 96 hours based on the oxygen supply.
The facts (as far as I can tell) is that the Titan did have c02 scrubbers but they relied on power and it did have location pingers attached (which have their own independent power source).
Therefore, when communications were suddenly lost, that's no big deal for a short period of time but when they aren't reestablished after a few hours, it's a very big deal. When you combine that with Titan not coming back to the surface, that makes it likely that it was an implosion. When you consider that the pings stopped at the same time that communications were lost, that's makes it almost certain that it was an implosion. People should have realized that by Monday.
If power was lost and it didn't show up on the surface some said, well maybe it got stuck on the wreck. It's highly unlikely that they would get stuck and lose communications at the same time and that the pingers would also stop.
Yet the story continued to be of people stuck in a dark, powerless submersible trying to conserve oxygen and banging on the hull (carbon fibre). Without power the scrubbers don't work so it makes no sense to keep talking about having oxygen for 96 hours when you would die from too much co2 within about 24 hours. I think there are designs that don't rely on power but Titan didn't have those. I think there was even an article pointing out that fact, that the CEO rejected that design.
The reality is that from the start it was 95% probably that it was an implosion and if that wasn't the case and it was just a case of no power then they only had another 24 hours.
Just knowing that communications and the pingers stopped at the same time indicated implosion, which was known from the start but no one ran with that story.
Unique design is a function of the money source and this company wasn't funded like NASA. He tried something new and failed. He paid for it with his life and the lives of others.
Even the first submersible to the Marianas Trench in the early 60's, which had a double pane glass (?) design developed a sudden crack as they neared the bottom. They (2 people) decided to continue and the inner held. They got to the bottom, stirred up so much silt that they could see little and had to come back up.
There isn't a "safe" way to do this so you have to access the risk/reward proposition individually.