Contact with the small sub was lost about an hour and 45 minutes into its dive, the US Coast Guard said.
they do know when they lost contact, but obviously seem to be unable to reestablish it. Now assuming Musk’s starlink satellites aren’t at fault (which they could tell if that was the case), something must have gone wrong with the submersible’s hardware and that’s not good.
Starlink doesn’t work for submarines. The radio frequency they use can’t penetrate water. The support ship does use it to communicate with the outside world, but the communications link between the ship and the sub has to use entirely different technology.
Thank you for the extra information! The way the original article I read sounded, they lost contact and had no idea when. So that at least gives some hope that they have enough of a window for rescue based on how much O2 they generally carry on board. But if it just went dark, a lost of ship power is the only thing I can think of that would cause that, which means sitting at the bottom of the ocean. Would life support even help at that point? Nothing to pump O2 or scrub CO2 out of the air.
According to
they do know when they lost contact, but obviously seem to be unable to reestablish it. Now assuming Musk’s starlink satellites aren’t at fault (which they could tell if that was the case), something must have gone wrong with the submersible’s hardware and that’s not good.
Starlink doesn’t work for submarines. The radio frequency they use can’t penetrate water. The support ship does use it to communicate with the outside world, but the communications link between the ship and the sub has to use entirely different technology.
Thank you for the extra information! The way the original article I read sounded, they lost contact and had no idea when. So that at least gives some hope that they have enough of a window for rescue based on how much O2 they generally carry on board. But if it just went dark, a lost of ship power is the only thing I can think of that would cause that, which means sitting at the bottom of the ocean. Would life support even help at that point? Nothing to pump O2 or scrub CO2 out of the air.