Distress Signals from Ocean Gate's Titan:

A business model failure?

The tragedy of Ocean Gate’s Titan submersible’s demise is all over the press. The world has lost irreplaceable talent. Families have lost loved ones. But, the event tells us a lot about what is happening in the world economy that we should consider. It tells us we have the wrong business models for making physical things out of new materials.

First, Ocean Gate’s Titan submersible was made of carbon fiber/composite materials. This is considered to be the future of manufacturing. We are building everything from spacecraft to cars out of these new materials. The carbon fiber market is projected to grow to $21.7 Billion by 2032. Why? Because we are building more and more things with it. But what can and can’t be made with it? We’re finding out the hard way. As we shall see, The Titanic went down on a materials misjudgement as well. We just haven’t learned the lessons yet.

The Titan and the Titanic both prove that the answer is that there are always limits to new materials. James Cameron, the director of Titanic, explains. He says that such devices have to be made on one element such as steel, titanium ceramic, or acrylic. The wound carbon fiber filament material the Titan was made of basically delaminated under massive pressure. In 2017, Composites World wrote about the Ocean Gate, saying it started with a Steve Fosset project. He was an adventurer who had set five records for non-stop circumnavigations of Earth in many ways – in a balloon, a fixed-wing aircraft, and a sailboat. He died when his plane crashed in 2007. Apparently, he was building a submarine at the time.  Jeff Sloane, the VP of Composite World, wrote: