Initially, I thought Stockton Rush couldn’t be a total moron because he had a degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton, but having followed the college admissions scandal, we know what those degrees are actually worth. Crap.
Very sad. Here’s a source for this if anyone’s curious:
A similar thing happened to me and my husband. We were out of state on vacation, and got a call and visit from the police at 3 am saying that my husband had been kidnapped for ransom. Of course he was laying right next to me, but for half a second I was terrified. It was a complete scam. They think they found my husband’s information in a data hack at his school.
Even worse, in the only third party testing that was performed, by the University of Washington, they rated the original iteration of the Titan only up to 9800 ft. As far as I can tell, Oceangate never redesigned the sub after that, and still decided to take people to 13,000 ft.
Also, given that Rush would brag about how cheap the original hull was, I doubt they fully replaced it when they noticed cyclic fatigue in the sub later. To me it looks like they did some kind of shoddy repair. And that’s the Titan everyone ended up with.