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Titanic traveler makes a tearful plea for citizen science

Renata Rojas on ship
Renata Rojas went on several OceanGate expeditions. (OceanGate Video via OceanGate Archive / YouTube).

Amateur adventurer Renata Rojas took a trip to the Titanic in OceanGate’s Titan submersible in 2022, and she was aboard Titan’s support ship last year when the sub and its crew were lost. Now she’s worried that the regulatory response to the tragedy will close off opportunities she and other citizen explorers have enjoyed.

Rojas fought back tears as she shared her concern today at a Coast Guard hearing that was aimed at determining the cause of Titan’s loss and formulating recommendations to avoid future tragedies.

“What we’ve all gone through is still very raw. Nothing is going to bring our friends back,” she told the investigators on the panel.

“I hope that this investigation creates an understanding that with exploration, there’s risk. And without taking that risk and the exploration, the world would still be flat,” she said. “I hope that innovation continues so we can make the oceans accessible to people like me who got to fulfill a dream, and that you still allow citizen scientists to participate in expeditions.”

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Video views show the shattered remains of Titan sub

Remains of Titan sub on seafloor
Remains of the Titan sub were spotted in a video captured by a remotely operated vehicle. (Credit: Coast Guard / Pelagic Research Services)

Video views from the search for OceanGate’s Titan submersible show mangled components from the craft — and tell the tale of last year’s dramatic implosion, which led to the loss of the sub and its five-person crew.

The U.S. Coast Guard released two videos this week in support of technical testimony that’s expected to be given during this month’s hearings into the cause of the incident, taking place in North Charleston, S.C.

The hearings began Sept. 16 and will continue on Sept. 19 with testimony from Renata Rojas, who was a mission specialist on an earlier Titan dive to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic; and from Steven Ross, a marine biologist who served as OceanGate’s scientific adviser. Technical testimony is likely to come later.

Both videos were captured on June 22, 2023, by a camera mounted on a remotely operated vehicle that took part in the search for the sub. The ROV came upon the scene four days after Titan went missing, and provided the conclusive evidence confirming that the sub had come apart amid the deep ocean’s crushing pressure.

One video shows Titan’s aft titanium dome and ring, plus remnants of the hull and carbon-fiber debris. The forward titanium dome and its viewport can also be seen, not far away. The other video shows Titan’s tail cone, emblazoned with the OceanGate logo.

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OceanGate whistleblower traces roots of tragedy

David Lochridge at Everett dock with Cyclops 1 submersible
In a 2017 image, David Lochridge shows off OceanGate's Cyclops 1 submersible. (GeekWire Video / Kevin Lisota)

Whistleblower David Lochridge said today that his concerns about OceanGate and its approach to undersea exploration began long before the company built the submersible that imploded last year during a dive to the Titanic shipwreck.

Lochridge referred back to 2016, when OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush crashed a different submersible called Cyclops 1 into the wreck of the Andrea Doria while Lochridge watched.

“He basically drove it full speed into the port side of the bow, and we could hear the cracking of the fairing as he got us jammed in underneath,” Lochridge recalled. “I’m not going to say how foul my language was, but it wasn’t good.”

At the time, the Andrea Doria expedition was hailed as a momentous achievement for OceanGate. But for Lochridge, a veteran submersible pilot who had joined the company months earlier, it was the start of a sour relationship with Rush.

During the second day of Coast Guard hearings into last year’s loss of OceanGate’s Titan submersible and its five-person crew, Lochridge traced how he tried to sound the alarm about what he saw as lapses in Titan’s design and construction — and how he ran into resistance at the Everett, Wash.-based company.

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Hearing reveals last words from OceanGate sub’s crew

Tail cone of Titan submersible on ocean floor
An image from a remotely operated vehicle shows the tail cone of OceanGate’s Titan sub on June 22, 2023. (Photo: Pelagic Research Services)

The last words transmitted by the crew on OceanGate’s Titan submersible before they perished in last year’s catastrophic implosion in the North Atlantic came to light today during the opening day of public hearings held by the U.S. Coast Guard.

“This is PH,” veteran explorer P.H. Nargeolet tapped out in a message that sent out during the fatal dive to the Titanic shipwreck on June 18, 2023, and shown at the hearing. “All good here.”

The very last message reported that the crew had dropped two weights from the sub. The sub’s mothership, the Polar Prince, received the final ping from Titan just seconds later. And then, nothing. Investigators say that Nargeolet and Titan’s four other crew members perished when the sub’s hull yielded to the crushing pressure in the ocean’s depths.

The other victims were Stockton Rush, who was the CEO and co-founder of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate and served as Titan’s pilot; Hamish Harding, a British aviation executive and adventurer; and Pakistani-born businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

Jason Neubauer, chair of the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation, began today’s hearing in North Charleston, S.C., with a moment of silence for the crew — and then he introduced a presentation that traced the development and operation of the Titan submersible.

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Hearings open a new act in OceanGate sub tragedy

Coast Guard engineers examine Titan sub debris
Coast Guard engineers examine the aft titanium endcap from OceanGate's Titan submersible in October 2023. (NTSB Photo)

The U.S. Coast Guard is beginning two weeks of public hearings into last year’s loss of OceanGate’s Titan submersible and its crew during a dive to the Titanic shipwreck — but even before the start of the hearings, the official in charge of the hearings made clear that there’s lots more investigation to be done.

“The hearing is the first step in publicly showing the proceedings,” Jason Neubauer, chair of the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation, told reporters today. “We may hold additional proceedings. There could be additional witnesses interviewed. So, I would say it’s hard to give a projection on the end date for the investigation.”

Public hearings are due to run Sept. 16 through 27 in North Charleston, S.C., with the proceedings livestreamed via YouTube. They’ll delve into the causes of Titan’s implosion, which killed the five people on board — including Stockton Rush, the CEO and co-founder of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate.

The other crew members were veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet and three mission specialists who paid OceanGate to participate in the dive: Hamish Harding, a British aviation executive and adventurer, plus Pakistani-born business executive Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleiman.

Soon after Titan’s disappearance on June 18, 2023, OceanGate suspended all exploration and commercial operations, and its website literally went dark. These hearings will mark one of the rare occasions when people who were associated with the company will be speaking publicly about OceanGate’s activities.

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Report focuses in on Amazon’s costly satellite project

ULA Atlas V rocket launches Amazon Project Kuiper satellites in October
United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket lifts off with two prototype Amazon satellites in October 2023. (ULA Photo)

A newly published market analysis of Amazon’s Project Kuiper effort to create a global satellite broadband network estimates the cost of getting the project off the ground at $16.5 billion to $20 billion — which is significantly higher than the $10 billion figure cited by the company four years ago.

In its analysis, Florida-based Quilty Space projects that launch costs alone will amount to $10 billion or more. Most of those launches are to be done by United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket, which has executed only one space launch to date; and by Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which is still in development. Other launches will be taken on by ULA’s Atlas V and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 (which are tried and true), plus Arianespace’s Ariane 6 (which had its debut liftoff in July).

Project Kuiper aims to put 3,232 satellites into low Earth orbit to support a high-speed internet network that could serve tens of millions of users around the world — and, not incidentally, provide infrastructure for Amazon Web Services and for other current or future offerings from Amazon. Under the terms of Amazon’s license from the Federal Communications Commission, half of those satellites must be launched by mid-2026.

Two prototype Kuiper satellites were successfully launched on an Atlas V last year, and Amazon says another Atlas V is to send the first operational satellites into orbit by the end of this year. The current schedule calls for broadband services to be offered to customers starting sometime next year.

Amazon is well behind SpaceX and its Starlink satellite broadband network, which has more than 6,000 satellites in orbit. Quilty’s financial analysis says Starlink “will exit 2024 with 3.9M subscribers, revenues of $6.6B, and positive free cash flows.” But Quilty suggests that there’s still room in the market for Project Kuiper.

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Starliner spacecraft wraps up its crewless journey home

Starliner in the dark desert
Boeing’s Starliner space capsule sits in the New Mexico desert after touchdown. (Boeing Photo)

It wasn’t perfect, but the propulsion system that NASA worried about did its job today as Boeing’s Starliner space capsule made an uncrewed descent from the International Space Station back down to Earth.

The gumdrop-shaped spacecraft, christened Calypso, floated down to a parachute-assisted, airbag-cushioned touchdown at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico. “Starliner is back on Earth,” Boeing commentator Lauren Brennecke said.

Starliner’s first crewed trip to the space station was supposed to last only about a week, but when the capsule made its approach for docking on June 6, five thrusters out of a set of 28 malfunctioned. Four of the thrusters were reactivated, and NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams executed a successful docking. But concerns about the thrusters — and about a string of helium leaks in the propulsion pressurization system — sparked weeks of troubleshooting by NASA and Boeing.

Engineers decided that they could cope with the helium leaks, but the thruster problem was a bigger concern. Tests determined that the propulsion system’s performance was degraded by overheating that exceeded design specifications.

Two weeks ago, NASA said the uncertainties surrounding the system’s performance were too great to risk having Williams and Wilmore ride back to Earth on Starliner. Instead, the astronauts were told to remain on the station for months longer than originally planned.

To accommodate the personnel shift, NASA reduced the size of the next scheduled crew, known as Crew-9, from four to two spacefliers. That crew is due to go into orbit in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on Sept. 24. Williams and Wilmore will join Crew-9 and return to Earth in the SpaceX capsule next February.

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Blue Origin and NASA shift New Glenn launch plans

Workers mate sections of New Glenn first stage
Elements of the New Glenn rocket’s first stage are mated at Blue Origin’s factory in Florida. (Blue Origin Photo)

NASA is delaying the launch of its ESCAPADE probes to Mars, which means plans for the debut of Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket will change as well.

New Glenn was previously due to send the twin ESCAPADE spacecraft to Mars as early as next month, but after a review of launch preparations, NASA rescheduled the launch for next spring at the earliest.

Planning for the mission is complicated because of the tight window for launch, necessitated by the alignment of Earth and Mars. Even a small schedule change can result in a months-long delay for liftoff.

After consulting with Blue Origin, the Federal Aviation Administration and range safety managers at the U.S. Space Force, NASA decided to hold off on fueling up the ESCAPADE probes. “The decision was made to avoid significant cost, schedule and technical challenges associated with potentially removing fuel from the spacecraft in the event of a launch delay, which could be caused by a number of factors,” the space agency said today in a mission update.

ESCAPADE — an acronym that stands for “Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers” — is a mission designed to study interactions between the solar wind and Mars’ magnetosphere.

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Microsoft works with students on Golden Record 2.0

Richard Black holding glass platter
Richard Black, research director for Microsoft’s Project Silica, holds a data storage platter. (Microsoft Photo)

Forty-seven years after NASA sent a “Golden Record” into deep space to document humanity’s view of the world, Microsoft’s Project Silica is teaming up with a citizen-science effort to lay the groundwork — or, more aptly, the glasswork — for doing something similar.

Golden Record 2.0, a project created by students, teachers and researchers affiliated with Avenues: The World School, is also getting an assist from artist Jon Lomberg, who was the design director for Golden Record 1.0.

The original Golden Record project involved preserving imagery and sounds from around the world on gold-plated phonograph records. Copies of the record were placed on NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 probes and launched into space in 1977. The idea was that if space travelers came across the records in the distant future, they could decipher the recorded archive and learn what our world was like in the 20th century.

Golden Record 2.0’s organizers are going after the same idea, even though they’re still looking into how their archive would be packaged and launched.

Project Silica could play a role in the packaging. Richard Black, a manager at Microsoft Research’s Cambridge lab in Britain, has been leading an effort to store data inside thin platters of fused silica glass.

“It does that using ultrashort laser pulses that make a permanent, detectable and yet transparent modification to the glass crystal, so the data ends up as durable as the piece of glass itself,” Black explained in a Microsoft podcast called Collaborators.

Each coaster-sized platter could store several terabytes of data for 10,000 years or more, according to Microsoft. The data can be read out using a microscope, and decoded using machine-learning algorithms.

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Fiction Science Club

AI goes full circle from fiction to science and back again

Illustration: Paz on Mars in a spacesuit with a spider-bot on helmet
A teenager is left in charge of a Mars base in one of "The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories." (Illustration by Maurizio Manzieri / Infinivox)

Artificial intelligence has had an effect on nearly every facet of modern life — ranging from diagnosing diseases, to applying for a job, to deciding which movie to watch. Now it’s reaching back into the realm where our notions about AI were born decades ago: science fiction.

“AI is just becoming more and more prominent in science fiction, which I think is a just a reflection of the times we’re in right now,” says Allan Kaster, who has been editing annual collections of sci-fi stories for 15 years. “It’s getting harder and harder to see a story that doesn’t include some sort of AI.”

Kaster, who heads up a sci-fi publishing house called Infinivox, discusses the connections between real-world science and fiction in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

Continue reading “AI goes full circle from fiction to science and back again”