World's Deepest-Diving Unmanned Submarine Lost

XenonOfArcticus writes "Kaiko, the world's deepest-diving submarine was lost in in late May off Japan, after it snapped its tether as a typhoon approached. Kaiko entered the record books in 1995 by diving 36,008 feet to the bottom of the Challenger Deep - the ocean's deepest point."

Comments

Re:Recent events

[Mt._Honkey]

I am concerned about the recent setbacks in many scientific fields. With the loss of the Challenger, the crash of the Helios, and now this, it makes me wonder what next.

Hang on there cowboy. This probably just needs to be filed under the "Shit Happens" category. Spacecraft have always been blowing up because it is mighty difficult to build something that reliable goes through all that punishment. Experimental aircraft have always crashed, because they're experimental. You do experiments, and when something crashes you know what not to do. This sub was lost because it ended up in an extreme environment.

What's next? More spacecraft exploding, more experimental aircraft crashing, and engineers and scientists learning a lot from it. This isn't a fairy-tale world; pushing the boundaries of known science and engineering is bound to have some hic-ups and failures. Think of all the test pilots who have died, the scores rockets that blew up in the 50's and 60's, and the ships lost at sea hundreds of years ago. When the cabin of Apollo 1 burst into flames and killed three people, we didn't abandon the program, we just figured out what went wrong, fixed it, and moved on and landed on the moon what, seven times? That progress at the cost of a failure invigorated at least one nation and led to greater public interest in aerospace, without which Helios wouldn't even have a chance to fail.