... there are also psychologists on there analysing exactly what dysfunction Rush suffered from. Can't say I disagree with any of them.
I think it's one of those cases of thinking he was the "smartest guy in the room". He wasn't out to put peoples lives at risk and scam them. He believed his craft was safe, and went on most of it's deep dives. IIRC he was on it's first deep depth dive. He just thought he was smarter than all the people warning him.
Seems common in tech entrepreneurs. Just like Elon Musk thought (probably still does) that he was smarter than all the people warning him away from buying twitter.
Just occured to me, when this video referred to the claims from those engineers about carbon fibre being a poor choice of material for a submersible, it did suddenly bring to mind the image of a canvas bag or a string vest.
It seems pretty easy to imagine that a material based on 'fibers' is going to be much stronger under tension than compression. Having recently done a grocery shop, it strikes me that as hard as it might be to tear a canvas bag apart by pulling on it, it's not going to provide much protection for the eggs or soft fruit you just bought if you sit on it, is it? Seems kind of obvious to this non-expert.
Definitely not the ideal material, but given it survived as many dives as it did, it does seem an area of potential research, that could some day create some kind of CF pressure vehicle that would be viable for deep submersibles, though it would have to be back by ridiculous amount of research and testing.
In reading about other DSV contraction, I came accross on proposal to make the
entire pressure hull out of clear Acrylic like the viewports. How cool would that be?