THE SPACE SHUTTLES CHALLENGER & COLUMBIA - Recovery of the Astronauts

*Following are two internet articles related to the recovery of the Space Shuttles Challenger & Columbia astronaut remains. 

If you are sensitive to such material, you may wish to avoid reading the following articles.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. 

Recovery of the heroes was a long, difficult ordeal for all involved.

The bulkhead that secured the internal air pressure of the crew decks, separate from the airlock to the cargo bay, faced the divers as a dangerous skew of wreckage that had to be removed before they could reach what remained of the bodies inside.

First to be retrieved from the watery tomb were the remains of Judy Resnik. The divers worked slowly but steadily. More and more parts of bodies went to the surface. Then, from the middeck, the remains of First-Teacher-in-Space Christa McAuliffe were carried slowly to the surface vessel. For the moment, that was all the divers could do.

The cabin wreckage was so twisted and tangled, sharp edges jutting everywhere like knife points, that the divers demanded the wreckage itself be hauled to the surface and the operation continued on deck.

The crew, the NASA teams and the astronauts overseeing the operation stood silently on the USS Preserver recovery ship as a crane lifted the wreckage from the sea. Every step possible to render respect and honor to the human remains was taken.

The salvage operations proceeded normally until the steel cables on the ocean bottom tugged at another section of Challenger’s middeck. At first the weight and mass seemed too great for the hoisting system. Slowly, painfully, the cables pulled the unseen wreckage from the bottom. Then the cables drew the load to the surface. Divers in the water, and everyone on deck, froze where they were.

A blue astronaut jumpsuit bobbed to the surface, turned slowly and then disappeared again within the sea.

What seemed liked minutes passed, in reality only seconds of time. Divers and sailors stood stunned as they realized what had happened. They had found — and just as quickly lost — astronaut Gregory Jarvis. Immediately the divers went deep again, beginning a frantic search for the last astronaut of Challenger, a frustrating search that would not end for another five weeks.

Reuniting the heroes
In the days following, armed forces pathologists made positive identifications of six astronauts from Challenger. The underwater search continued for the body of Gregory Jarvis.

The frustrations of failure day after day began to tell on everyone involved. No one wanted to declare “missing” someone so close to his own group, when they knew the body had every chance of being nearby.

Veteran shuttle pilots Robert Crippen and Bob Overmyer had been put in charge of the recovery of their fellow astronauts, and they would brook no interference from anyone, no matter how high they might be in the NASA hierarchy. Or from any other source. Crippen and Overmyer had decided that when the remains were turned over to the families, there would be seven coffins beneath the American flags. There would not be six. So desperate was Crippen to bring Jarvis home with the rest of his crew that he used his own credit card to hire a local scallop boat to drag its nets across the ocean bottom. Crippen’s move was a last-ditch effort in a search all but abandoned by the exhausted recovery forces.

On April 15, when the recovery teams were planning to cease the search they had carried out for months, divers were making what was scheduled to be their last attempts to gather wreckage from the ocean floor. Two hundred yards from where they had lost the blue suit, they swam within view of the lost astronaut.

The seventh crew member of Challenger was brought carefully to the surface. Ashore, finally, the Challenger Seven were reunited.

Next: Finding fault

NBC News correspondent Jay Barbree has covered America’s space effort from Cape Canaveral for more than 40 years. This is an updated version of a series that was first published on MSNBC.com in January 1997.

Searchers Stumble on Human Remains

By Toby Harnden in Norwood, Texas

12:01AM GMT 03 Feb 2003

It began with a deep rumble and a white streak across the wide open Texas sky. Eli Connor, nine, ran from the porch of his house to see a fiery ball slowly breaking up and the pieces falling towards him.

"I heard the first boom and I thought it was a plane going through," he said. "Then white turned to yellowish orange and it was like a cannon going off. Every time it boomed again there were pieces coming down towards me."

Eli guessed that it was a military jet exploding. His father's friend, Tex Birdwell, feared that the oil pipeline that he had helped lay through San Augustine County had exploded.

James Couch assumed that it was his neighbors blowing pecan and pine stumps out of the fields. Manuel Steptoe, in his chicken coop next to Mr Couch's farm when he heard the noise, had yet another theory.

"I thought it was my butane tank blowing up," he said. "I saw a jet stream and a ball coming down making a whooping sound like a helicopter blade."

As the 12ft by 1ft piece of metal sailed past his chicken houses, he wondered again what was going on. "To be honest, I thought it was Iraq overhead," he said. Minutes later, Mr Couch's grandson Eric, 11, came bounding into his farmhouse.

"He come running just as fast as he could run," said Mr Couch, a Second World War veteran with "Texas" tattooed on his wrist and a "Power of Pride" bumper sticker on his pick-up.

"He shouted, 'Grandpa, I've found a helmet, there's a helmet over there. Is it your helmet?' I said, No, I haven't got the helmet, it must be from the space shuttle. I had already turned on CNN to see what was happening."

All around Mr Couch's 14-acre property, fragments of the $2.1 billion Space Shuttle Columbia were raining down after plummeting more than 39 miles.

The charred helmet had landed in a field just a few yards from his house, and was embedded in the ground near two gnarled oak trees. His dog, Star, had run for cover behind a woodpile, just as she does when there is thunder.

A piece of broken tile landed on his asphalt roof, a wire in front of his doorstep. Then the 74-year-old cattle farmer did what any Norwood resident would do. "I called the local sheriff, I pulled out a chair and I sat there and guarded it until the police came," he said.

"I didn't need no gun. Of course, I have a good gun, an old thumb-buster six-shooter .357. Pretty soon there were three or four hundred people coming looking at it, but no one gave me any trouble." The sole of a space boot had landed close to Charles Evans's farm next door.

Elsewhere around Norwood, even grimmer discoveries were being made. Deputy Faron Howell was in charge of search teams that soon began stumbling across human remains.

"There was a hand, and a foot, then a leg from the knee down. One of my men found a human heart. The biggest piece was a torso, the upper bit with the chest ripped in half." A thigh bone and a skull, the flesh torn away, were also located.

"We think it was all from one astronaut, probably the one wearing the helmet on Mr Couch's property. It was mangled real bad. You couldn't even tell if it was a man or a woman."

A few hours later, the helmet was collected. "A man from NASA came up from Houston and took it away," said Mr Couch, sitting at the pine table in his kitchen. "I guess it could be useful evidence."

Employees of the Starr Funeral Home, in Hemphill, were called out to collect the remains, a motorcade of 15 cars and refrigerated vehicles driving the 15 miles west to Norwood. Dr James Bruce, the only GP in the area, examined several of the remains in his office.

Some people near Norwood - where there are "Trespassers Keep Out" signs in almost every field and the odd ragged Confederate flag hangs in a dilapidated trailer home - were reluctant to let the federal authorities on their land to see the pieces of debris.

"You just be careful of my Great Aunt Gladys," warned Joe Hilliard, a Gulf war veteran and former US Navy explosives expert who said the sound of the space shuttle was like the cluster bombs he had heard in Kuwait in 1991.

"If she don't want you around her property, she'll run you off at gunpoint. She's an itty bitty little woman but no sir, you don't mess with Gladys Henry. She can be kind of contrary."

The 200 people of Norwood, named after Mr Couch's wife's great-grandfather Hamm Norwood, were still combing the area yesterday, the most significant finds being a circuit board and part of a control panel.

At Nacogdoches, a town 45 miles to the west, the main command centre had been set up and hundreds of reserve troops, police and volunteer firemen dispatched into the countryside.

"They're going to have to drain Toledo Bend Lake," said Euell Connor, 42, Eli's father. "They say a bit of engine the size of a truck landed there." Sonar equipment had been ordered in to locate it.

In the meantime, Eli, at the wheel of a 4x4 all-terrain vehicle, sped across the fields in search of a dead cow that one person suggested had been hit by a piece of the Columbia.

"This is a Christian community and most everybody rallies round when something happens," said Mr Birdwell, 66. "I was born and raised in that house over there. It's mainly timber and small ranches around here. It's pretty conservative, good people."

The pieces of the shuttle were spread diagonally across Texas in a line moving south-west from Dallas. In Palestine, named when settlers from Palestine, Illinois, arrived at the beginning of the century, a hunk of twisted metal landed in the middle of a main road.

A state trooper redirecting traffic said: "This is just a dreadful tragedy, not just for our country but for the people of Israel. They had an astronaut on board too." Grady McAdams, 48, a volunteer fireman, was guarding the piece, which had an American flag planted beside it.

"They said there was some bad radiation stuff on it and that was all I needed to know," he said. "I ain't going to touch it."

Firemen used a Geiger counter to check people who had picked up shards of the spaceship. They were ordered to put their clothes into medical waste bags and to scrub themselves with anti-microbial soap.

Carol Farrar had a fortunate escape when a 12in strip of metal hit her windscreen and glanced off, leaving a deep scratch. She said: "I had the CD cranked up and then it hit, and I thought, 'I don't need to stop at Starbucks - I'm awake'."

The main fear of the authorities was that souvenir-hunters would pick up vital fragments and take them home. "Found objects should not be touched," said Glenn Martin, of the FBI.

"Both long- and short-term health considerations are involved. Don't touch any debris or breathe in any fumes. One of the chemicals involved, we don't even know much about."

In Nacogdoches, Greg Johnson, a Nasa astronaut who had been flown in, confirmed that the helmet would have been on the head of an astronaut as the shuttle re-entered the atmosphere.

"There are no additional helmets on board," he said. "They would be wearing their helmets." Surrounded by all the hubbub, Mr Couch held a mug of steaming coffee and sighed.

"Oh Lord, I'm depressed. We know that there was a person in that. They could have been a woman or a man, but whoever it was they had family and they can't never be replaced

"They were trying their best to accomplish something to better mankind. They were like the old pioneers of the Wild West, blazing a trail and making their way - this time in outer space. And now they're gone."