Yes but...

I believe NASA’s only involvement was the titanium end cap(s). Despite Gizmodo trying to really throw them into this:

Don’t disagree with any of that. My only thinking is that it’s even more important when a group represents to third parties that what they’re doing is safe, proven and dependable to at least some standard. If some eccentric billionaire wants to explode, or compress, themselves to smithereens, that’s their own business…

One reason that was stated for using carbon fiber to reduce weight was to make the sub self-buoyant without use of expensive syntactic foam, which most other submersibles (Alvin, Deepsea Challenger, the Triton subs, etc.) use.

Watch the video, no way NASA made that thing. Maybe they had an ex-NASA employee build it. If you google images of NASA building stuff for critical applications, they do it all in a clean room and everyone is wearing clean room attire. Any contaminants that get into a critical pressure vessel like this such as dust,…

The best thing about the general lack of industry regulations and certification in the US (except for the size and shape of tail-lamps and headlights, which NHTSA took incredibly seriously for 60 odd years) is that when the inevitable catastrophe they would have prevented eventually happens, the news industry makes…

No, it begs the question. There’s two uses of that phrase - one can be translated as ‘assumes the conclusion’ and the other is ‘create a specific question in response’. Both are equally valid uses of the phrase ‘begs the question’. If you can replace it with “the question that begs to be answered” and it fits, then…

NAsa has disputed that 

I get a very distinct feeling that Stockton Rush sees himself as analogous to Elon Musk.

“and particularly exploration by private parties and what role government regulation has in that”

we have the test tube for living and now, a test tube for dying. this guy should be raked over coals post mortem not because he railed against ‘REGS”, that was his way of saying he knew better than the established science. outside of his “revolutionary technologically advanced” approach, pretty much any 1/2 ass…

I get a very distinct feeling that Stockton Rush sees himself as analogous to Elon Musk. I’d wager he thought that in a similar stroke of genius to inventing reuable rockets, he could drastically reduce the operational costs of luxury submersible businesses to make it “accessible” in the same way. The weight of the…

If you’re already a billionaire, taxes are not a thing.

It seemed like the core issue with this design overall is that they couldn’t model how many cycles it could safely take, unlike steel and titanium. All of them will fail. The difference is you have models of when to expect failure. So, with steel, you could say, the hull and design can take 30 cycles safely. To be…

Yeah, but do you know much much trucks and cranes you can buy for the cost of a 5" thick custom made Carbon Fiber cylinder?

Too heavy and it becomes impractical to maneuver out of the water. You need a bigger boat and crane to launch it, a bigger truck to move it around on land, and so on. It’s possible that an all-steel (or more likely, all-titanium) design of this size couldn’t be handled by the class of tender surface vessels that the…

And yet the bell end in charge of this project was the thick one.

Many times from what I’ve read. The issue isn’t that it couldn’t take the depth. It was that it couldn’t take the depth over and over and over again.

yes, multiple times. 

::As an engineer:: Yet everyone complains on why vehicles cost as much as they do - safety items are usually the most expensive to design and implement.