For those who are unaware: A couple billionaires, a pilot, and one of the billionaires’ son are currently stuck inside an extremely tiny sub a couple thousand meters under the sea (inside of the sub with the guys above).
They were supposed to dive down to the titanic, but lost connection about halfway down. They’ve been missing for the past 48 hours, and have 2 days until the oxygen in the sub runs out. Do you think they’ll make it?
To add a little: when a thing fails in compression (submarine), it’s usually unpredictable and catastrophic. When it fails in tension (spaceship), it starts slow and fails in a predictable way.
Tension is also much easier to calculate when you’re designing structures. Engineers will often go out of their way to make sure that tensile failure is the controlling failure mode, just to make sure that we don’t have to fuck with compression.