April 10, 1963

[kham]

50 years ago
USS Thresher Still on Patrol

[bbjohn]

The Titanic. USS Thresher. Apollo 204. Soyuz 1. Challenger. Columbia. No matter how advanced our technology becomes, we are and will always be all too human.

Big Bad John

[Duncan Edwards]

Dad was on the USS Bushnell for his first cruise since my birth that February. He was trying to get his Dolphins and when his math skills were found to be deficient he was kind of glad.

[Mynock]

Finding out the crush depth of a submarine is near the bottom of my list of ways I would prefer to die.....RIP
Interesting trivia....according to the Wikipedia page the Navy used Robert Ballard's search and subsequent discovery of R.M.S. Titanic as a cover for later investigating the wreck.

[kham]

Correct
And, if you read the original book about the expedition, you scratching your head about the timeline.... until you realize who was actually funding the WHOI end of the expedition Thresher AND Scorpion were both surveyed before going to look for Titanic.

[PM2K]

Correct
And, if you read the original book about the expedition, you scratching your head about the timeline.... until you realize who was actually funding the WHOI end of the expedition Thresher AND Scorpion were both surveyed before going to look for Titanic.

Too bad it was classified... I'd find the search for the Thresher and Scorpion a fascinating follow up documentary to the Titanic...

Question... wasn't Scorpion the sub which had a hanger on deck to launch a winged missile from?

[rickyj]

The entire movie Das Boot revolves around just how far a WW II sub can go down without caving in, you remember those Nazis getting all scared and crap, trying to plug every hole that blew open, I cant remember how they surfaced...didnt they like inflate some tanks or some crap?
Submarine duty now for the Navy is voluntary. I was told that by a Leutenant when I was considering the Navy a long time ago, and he said he did the nuclear sub duty, and I was like the hell with that. I wanted to pursue meteorology and they told me they only offered oceanography programs, so that pretty much ended that. Pissed the guy off because he thought he had a serious recruit on his hands, then had to tell him, nope, sorry dude.

[kham]

Question... wasn't Scorpion the sub which had a hanger on deck to launch a winged missile from?

No, Scorpion was Skipjack-class, pure hunter-killer SSN. The boat you thinking of is USS Halibut which went on to do, er , other things during her service history, most of which remain classified to this day

[Duncan Edwards]

Question... wasn't Scorpion the sub which had a hanger on deck to launch a winged missile from?

No, Scorpion was Skipjack-class, pure hunter-killer SSN. The boat you thinking of is USS Halibut which went on to do, er , other things during her service history, most of which remain classified to this day

Indeed. The hangar on Halibut stored a lot of things other than missiles later on.

[PM2K]

Question... wasn't Scorpion the sub which had a hanger on deck to launch a winged missile from?

No, Scorpion was Skipjack-class, pure hunter-killer SSN. The boat you thinking of is USS Halibut which went on to do, er , other things during her service history, most of which remain classified to this day

Ah! Gotcha!

It is interesting how often people tried to work out a way of carrying aircraft/rockets on submarines before they perfected the missile technology used today. I saw a great documentary on a Japanese sub class from WW2 which featured a sealed hanger on deck where an airplane was stored. The idea being the sub would surface, the aircraft deployed, including attaching its wings (or were they folded? Can't recall) and from there they could launch airstrikes, possibly at North America. After the war, the US Navy apparently examined a couple of captured ones to check out the technology, which was quite advanced for the time, then sunk them quick to keep the Soviets from knowing about it.

On a side note, apparently the Japanese also developed nuclear weapons technology at the very end of the war, using German uranium smuggled to them via U-boat. They even detonated a fission bomb, but that was the day before they officially surrendered in September 1945. The site of this test is within what is now North Korea, which is why not much was known about it today. There was a news article written at the time, but it was overshadowed by the signing of the surrender papers and mostly forgotten. The US forces apparently seized all of the Japanese equipment and research and essentially purged the program from existence and memory, while it was also convenient for the Japanese government to let the program fade into the shadows.