> I can't even imagine where you would find an institution willing to let its employees take such risks today.

Uhm, OceansGate?

I very strongly doubt that they would have continued a dive with a cracked window. Their risk was abstract, and caused by ignorance.

The crew of the Trieste continued to descend knowing full well that their vessel was damaged.

That's not the same thing in my mind.

> Their risk was abstract, and caused by ignorance.

There was nothing abstract whatsoever about the lack of adequate preparation and responsibility taken: they did not certify, and they used components that were not rated for the depths of their dives, among many other things. This was not ignorance. This was boldly deciding not to care about safety. They ignored very vocal and direct outspoken concerns from all their peers in the industry for years, specific concerns about what they were doing that was not safe, and they ignored that too. Not abstract.

Stockton assured passengers that it was totally safe. Either he was lying, or he deluded himself enough that he found the risk to be abstract.

A reckless teenager driving at 120mph on the highway with no seatbelt is obviously in serious danger, but to their young, impulsive mind the danger may feel completely abstract.

Danger is relative, that's normal in Germany.

They dove the Titan to the Titanic for 10+ times with a viewport that was rated for 1300-metre depth when the Titanic is at 4000 metres.

I feel like OceanGate did not really pay that much attention to window safety.

Not just window safety. The CEO effectively said he didn't care for safety in general.

I believe this to be the elephant in the room, I wouldn't be surprised if the viewport gave way before the hull.

They listened to the carbon fibre cracking, sometimes very loudly.

That seems to be driven more by naivety than anything else

If they survive it's bravery, if they die is naïvity.

Maxim 43: "If it's stupid and it works, it's still stupid and you're lucky."[1]

[1]From Schlock Mercenary's "Seventy Maxims of Maximially Effective Mercenaries".

https://www.ovalkwiki.com/index.php/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Ma...

No, it wasn't naivety.

I was also amazed to read that the window was made of plexiglass:

> Observation of the sea outside the craft was conducted directly by eye, via a single, very tapered, cone-shaped block of Plexiglas, the only transparent substance identified which would withstand the external pressure.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trieste_(bathyscaphe)#Design

And it's because of those early pioneers that submarining is now a mature art. At least when practised by those prepared to learn.

I read that their logic was "If it was going to catastrophically fail, it would have. So no need to stop."

Reading that for the first time blew my mind. How did it not fail after cracking? I don’t understand how it wasn’t structurally compromised.

The guts it takes to not abort the dive seems just clinically insane to me

Another comment quotes something that it was only an outer pane, probably more functional than structural.

I found this interesting enough to look into it a little more:

> At 30,000 ft. a sharp crack rang through the ship, shaking it violently. The water pressure outside wasmore than 6 tons per sqare inch., and even a slight fracture in the hull would have meant certain death. It proved to be only an outer Plexiglas windowpane which had splintered under the pressure. The inner hull remained watertight. "A pretty hairy, experience," admitted Walsh.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070202144233/http://bjsonline....

Was this comment written by Stockton Rush's ghost?

> That's the stuff those explorers (and the people backing them) were made of.

They died all the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_expeditions

I don't know why that's laudable: if you die before you make it back, for most of these locations, that means whatever you've learned is lost as well, and someone has to take identical risk to learn it for humanity again.

Seems to be better to see the cracked pane, return to the surface with your lives, write a letter to your submarine enthusiast magazine group or whatever the equivalent of a web forum was back then noting that such and such glass installed in such and such way cracked at N depth, try a new method, and dive again.

> No wonder nobody has been to the Moon in 50 years.

Why bother when the ocean is infinitely more interesting?

In the "Deepsea Challenge" documentary (2014), Don Walsh (one of the two men that made the dive with Trieste) tells James Cameron that "if you can hear a crack it means you're still alive, might as well keep on with the dive" (paraphrasing). So when Cameron is doing a test dive he hears a loud noise and indeed just keeps going. Personally, I'd wet my pants right there and cry for my mother. These gentlemen are built different I guess.

It's possible that consciously or unconsciously they reasoned that a failure which compromised the vessels integrity would have been instantaneous and catastrophic, and thus the crack most likely was not compromising the vessels integrity.

At least that's what I'd tell myself.

Continuing after a window cracked seems bad. Why not figure out why it cracked and fix it, then try again?

It was a window in the non-watertight entrance tunnel, not the window in the hull.

This article describes it in more detail: https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/don-walsh-describes-the-trip-t...

This is the answer... nobody is going to go deeper if the window to the pressure vessel cracks

Not to dismiss the guts of these explorers, but we have not been to the Moon in 50 years because it costs a fortune to get to when it's not much more than a floating rock (I'm being hyperbolic but the point is that there is no economic incentive to offset the cost). If we could get to it cheaply, but with a high risk of death, I'm sure many would be doing it right now.