The BBC described the Governor as “rescue chief” when his role is actually “Governor”. It’s like describing Sandra Bullock as “acted alongside George Clooney in the space movie Gravity.”

The Governor was not the subject matter expert. He was a vital coordinating and decision makin role, but he’s not a cave diver and was not directly involved in the rescue activity. The subject Elon is talking about here is “designing a rescue device for incapacitated survivors in a wet/flooded cave rescue”

Elon wasn’t trying to use the communication as proof that the sub was ready to go, only that he was designing it with direct involvement of the dive team (the people actually in the cave). His message was that it was fit for purpose.

You are correct that it would take time for the design to be validated, but the rescue team was facing the possibility of not being able to rescue some of the boys without it. Thankfully their mask-and-stretcher method worked with only one fatality (and that fatality would not have been avoided with or without the sub).

In the meantime the Thai navy has suggested they will be evaluating the device for potential utility in future dive rescues. It has clear advantages over a stretcher, especially considering the problems this rescue had with wet suits and masks not fitting the survivors.

Do you have a source that says the governor/rescue chief was not the person who made the executive decisions? This was a large operation, it’s not as if the divers just went in on their own to fetch the boys.

There are undoubtedly engineers at SpaceX and Tesla who know much, much more about their respective fields than does Musk. Doesn’t mean that he isn’t the shot-caller for those companies.

I just wrote that the Governor was the one making the executive decisions.

The rescue divers discussed their plans and their options with the Governor so he was thoroughly briefed on what was about to happen and the perceived risks.

You wrote:

> The Governor was not the subject matter expert. He was a vital coordinating and decision makin role, but he’s not a cave diver and was not directly involved in the rescue activity.

Making executive decisions about what plan to use, and when to use it, is part of "rescue activity". Presumably part of that role involved considering Musk's mini-sub at its stage of development. Seems like the governor/rescue chief would be the expert on whether the mini-sub was "not practical" for rescuing the kids.

The Governor was not involved in the design of the rescue device. He is not a subject matter expert in cave diving, underwater rescue, or the operations inside the cave during this event. Elon states this in his tweets. The BBC chose to interpret the correction (“that’s GOVERNOR to you”) as a perjorative against the Governor (“he’s only a governor, not a rescue chief”), and the rest of the media circus ran with that interpretation.

The governor’s area of expertise was more likely how to go about convincing third parties to accept the fallout (rice farmers whose fields were damaged, parents whose kids might not be coming home) rather than a deep technical understanding of the activities.

Also the governor’s statement about the device not being a good fit seems more likely aimed at the device being a Plan C fallback, rather than the device not being useful at all. The extraction mission was already in progress, involving a hundred people or so. Anyone who has managed a large team knows that a team this size working under stress should not be changing horses mid stream.

Given that the kids were being sedated, it also stands to reason that putting them in a sealed tube was not a good fit since that would preclude monitoring vitals with the available tools eg 1 stethoscope. A future revision could be switching from bolt-on lid to clip-on lid so that rapid egress or access is possible.

I think that @manicdee is getting at is, making executive decisions doesn't make one directly involved in carrying out the actions.

Otherwise we'd have the CEOs of telcos out in the field splicing fibre.

> He’s trying to portray a “thanks Elon, keep working on it” message from the lead diver as some kind of proof that his mini-sub was on deck, ready to go, as opposed to being just a prototype.

Everything they were doing was a "prototype"

AFAIK rescuing non-diver victims hasn't been done before, and from the sounds of it they decided to make the attempt sooner than expected due to bad weather and falling oxygen. The plan they used is something they had to rapidly develop in nearby pools with local kids to practice with - not unlike what Musk's team was doing. edit: For that matter, I have to wonder how the rescue would have went in a country that didn't allow them to practice with local kids... I personally think the rescuers made the right decision there, but I could see that being disallowed.

Remember that just after the rescue was finished they had to quickly evacuate the remaining ~100 personnel in the cave when the pumping unexpected failed and water levels started rising quickly. Had that happened a little earlier it's quite possible all the kids would be dead today.

They had at least 5 days in which divers were traversing the hours-long route, to ferry supplies and such, back and forth. No doubt the divers also took time to evaluate and partly simulate what it would be like to drag a mostly-inert human through the difficult spaces.

Do you think the rescue chief would have given the go if the feedback from divers had been “It’s utterly impossible!”? It was a massive risk, to be sure, but at least the divers have experience on what it’s like to move human bodies through he specific area. AFAIK the mini-sub never made the trip. Considering the route took as much as 10 hours round trip, it might have been at least a full day before to test it in real conditions.

> No doubt the divers also took time to evaluate and partly simulate what it would be like to drag a mostly-inert human through the difficult spaces.

That's the thing: moving a body through those spaces wasn't the unknown - cave rescuers get a lot of practice doing that above the water with live people playing victims, and sadly below the water with actual body recoveries.

The unknown was likely whether or not the kids would survive that route. I know of no examples of that being done successfully before; in that respect I'd say the actual plan used and the sub were prototypes to roughly the same extent.

What bothers me is people treating this like this rescue wasn't a miracle of improvisation backed by experience and huge amounts of skill: it _was_ exactly that and the rescuers deserve every bit of credit for that.

> AFAIK the mini-sub never made the trip.

The sub didn't arrive until after the rescue had started, apparently forced to start earlier than expected by worsening conditions.

So, using known, trustworthy, lightweight, manueverable equipment is the same as using an unknown, untested, heavy, potentially and likely more dangerous submarine is the same thing? Just because nothing had been tested on kids?