As details emerged about the implosion last week of the Titan submersible in its descent to the wreck of the Titanic nearly two and a half miles below the surface of the North Atlantic, there was widespread anger that its owner and pilot knowingly took civilians on an uncertified vessel to a depth of crushing pressure.
The billionaire investor Ray Dalio, who founded the ocean exploration company OceanX with his son, Mark, expressed what he described on Twitter as his “great anger.” He accused Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate, who was piloting the Titan, of “reckless disregard for tried-and-true safety protocols that have made manned submersible exploration extremely safe.” Within the oceanography community, that view was widely held.
Mr. Rush, trained as an aerospace engineer, had justified his decision not to have his vessel certified for safety by arguing that the regulatory process stifled growth and innovation.
“At some point, safety just is pure waste,” Mr. Rush said in an interview with David Pogue of CBS. He even suggested that safety was used as an excuse by “industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation.” OceanGate put it this way on its website: “By definition, innovation is outside of an already accepted system.”
In Mr. Rush’s telling, innovation was the province of maverick individuals, not stodgy legacy players and certainly not cumbersome government bureaucracies. Mr. Rush was perpetuating a myth — one that is particularly popular in Silicon Valley and among technology start-ups — that governments are just an obstacle and that innovation comes from bold trailblazers moving fast and breaking things.
That story is often wrong, and it was 100 percent wrong in this case.
The first two deep-diving submersibles built in America were developed by the United States government and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to assist in salvage operations at sea and to install and monitor Cold War underwater listening systems, including the original version of the system that detected the implosion of the Titan.
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