_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [104]
It was a time your best simply wasn’t good enough.
TWENTY-THREE
An Eternity of Descent
The water was murky, swirling from surface winds, keeping divers Terry Bailey and Mike McAllister from seeing more than an arm’s reach in front of them. They had been diving for days, recovering Challenger’s debris, and, now, on this dive, they had only six minutes left in their tanks.
They were about one hundred feet down, moving across the sea floor, when they almost bumped into what at first appeared to be a tangle of wire and metal. It was nothing that unusual, nothing they hadn’t seen on many dives before. Then, they saw what was different: a spacesuit, full of air, legs floating toward the surface. There’s someone in it, Bailey thought.
No, that’s not right, he admonished himself. Shuttle astronauts do not wear pressurized spacesuits during powered flight. They wear jumpsuits. They carry along two pressure suits if they should be needed for an emergency spacewalk.
He turned to his partner. They just looked at each other and thought, “Jackpot!”
They had found the crew cabin but they were low on air, so the two divers made a quick inspection, marked the location with a buoy, and returned to their boat to report the find.
Early the next morning, the USS Preserver recovery ship put to sea. The divers began their grim task of recovering the slashed and twisted remains of Challenger’s crew cabin and its seven occupants.
On first inspection, it was obvious the crew vessel had survived Challenger’s fiery demise and its descent to its watery grave. A two-year-long investigation into how the crew cabin, and possibly its occupants, had survived was begun.
Veteran astronauts Robert Crippen and Bob Overmyer, along with other top experts, sifted through every bit of tracking data. They studied all the crew cabin’s systems down to the smallest, most insignificant piece of wreckage. They learned that at the instant the external fuel tank was breached by the rotating right booster, igniting 500,000 gallons of fuel, when a sheet of flame swept up past the window of pilot Mike Smith, there could be no question Smith knew—even in that single moment—that disaster had engulfed them. Something awful, something that had never before happened to a shuttle, was upon them.
Mike Smith uttered his final words for history, preserved on a crew cabin recorder: “Uh-oh!”
Immediately after, all communications between the shuttle and the ground were lost. At first, many people watching the blast, and some in Mission Control, believed the astronauts had died instantly—a blessing in its own right.
But they were wrong.
NASA’s intensive, meticulous studies of every facet of that explosion, comparing what happened to other blowups of aircraft and spacecraft, and their knowledge of the forces of the blast and the excellent shape and construction of the crew cabin finally led some investigators to a mind-numbing conclusion. The seven astronauts survived Challenger’s breakup.
Rob Navias, UPI’s outstanding radio voice who would later take a job with NASA, tracked the fate of Challenger’s crew intently. Navias, also a semifinalist in the Journalist in Space Project, told me NASA’s own forensic medical report, released July 6, 1986, concluded the crew most likely survived Challenger’s blast but was unconscious at impact.
Investigators found the explosive release of fuel that dismembered the wings and other parts of the shuttle were not great enough to cause immediate death, or even serious injury, to the astronauts. Challenger was designed to withstand a wing-loading force of 3 g’s (three times gravity), with another 1.5 g safety factor built in. When the external tank was ruptured and separated the two solid boosters, rapid-fire events, so swift they all seemed of the same instant, took place. In the shortest of moments, all fuel was gone from the big tank.
Navias said, “The computers still functioned and, right on design plan, dutifully noted the lack of fuel and shut down the engines.”
It was a supreme exercise in futility, because by then Challenger