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Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX "A tiny, child-sized submarine" to rescue the 12 Thai boys and their football coach sadly trapped in the submerged subterranean complex of Tham Luang. According to the Bangkok Post an engineering team consisting of nine people and assembled by Musk has already started arriving in the area.
Officials were first relieved to find the group after being lost in the system cave during heavy rains on June 23rd. But the football team's situation has worsened lately with the threat of new seasonal monsoon rains and the death of a former Royal Thai Navy special forces diver sent to reinforce the reserves of oxygen.
dare, but very risky, plan to save the team by pumping as much water as possible into the system of caves, equipping the boys and the diving equipment trainer and then helping them navigate the 4 km passage to the entrance. Musk tweeted Saturday that while he had several alternative plans, his team of experts had agreed that the best idea was to build a small submarine – really more than a sheaf filled with water. air – using the liquid oxygen transfer tube from the Falcon rocket. like hull. "He added that it would be designed to be manageable with the efforts of two divers."
Musk also claimed that the submarine was already under construction and provided some details on its construction, indicating that it had 4 handles on the front and back and a total of four attachment points for the oxygen tank
Other ideas Musk floated included "build an inflatable tube with airlocks" as well as provide Pumps and Batteries to help evacuate water into the cave system.Although the Musk & Brier Company is known for its drilling, CNN reported that the timing of rescue of the team before a new flood is probably too short for the authorities to discover passages closer to the cave where they are trapped. (An effort to save Chilean miners by digging in 2010 took 69 days.)
All this sounds pretty good in theory – transferring children into an air-filled basket could be less risky than a impromptu diving training – but whether or not the Thai government is willing to bet on Musk's solution as opposed to the expertise of his divers is not clear. As Slate noted, an official page of the Thai government on Facebook acknowledged that she was receiving the Musk team, but was referring only to "tracking, pumping water or to battery energy ". Anmar Mirza of the National Cave Rescue Commission of the National Speleological Society was skeptical that more technology was necessarily the solution, especially on the pumping front:
"With all due respect for Mr. Musk, I am not sure that he or his engineers have a good idea of what they're dealing with in this particular situation, "said Mirza, commenting on the brainstorming of the Musk rescue operation was conducted over the last two days on Twitter. "The teams that work are already doing as much pumping as possible. They have enough pumping power.
The Speleological Society's director, Rick Speaect, told Slate that any object that prevents water from flowing into the cave could simply "build a dam behind him for the time that he will have to go through this, because this flowing water is not going to stop. "
According to Bloomberg, professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Douglas Hart also warned that any device or tube sent into the cave should be built securely enough to withstand the water pressure that could potentially reach two. tons of force, and surviving being swept or struck against the rough surface of the cave system. The Post reported that while Musk's nine-man team was Governor of Chiang Rai, Narongsak Osottanakorn, said the attempt to arrive at the end of the weekend could take place in the coming days without indicating the plan had been installed.Osottanakorn warned that another flood could leave the football team with "less than 10 square meters" on the rock platform on which they reside.
"Now and in the next three or four days, the conditions s have perfect in terms of water, time and health of boys, "said Osottanakorn. "We must make a clear decision on what we can do."
[Ars Technica]
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