The owners of the two other packs were never identified. A second identifiable PEAP belonged to Commander Dick Scobee and had not, apparently, been activated. Smith’s PEAP was affixed to the back of his seat, placing it out of his reach, which implied that either Judy Resnik or Ellison Onizuka, seated behind him on the flight deck, had leaned forward and switched it on in a valiant effort to save his life. Then, on 9 June, investigators revealed that one of the packs belonged to Pilot Mike Smith. Analysis of the packs led to an announcement on 21 May that at least one had been activated in the seconds after structural breakup and, later, that this activation was not caused accidentally at water impact. These were to provide each astronaut with a limited amount (about six minutes’ worth) of breathing air for use in emergencies. More conclusive evidence that at least some of the crew had remained alive and conscious for most of the fall to Earth came in mid-March 1986, when four Personal Egress Air Packs (PEAPs) were recovered. We could not positively identify the origin of the debris or establish whether the event occurred in flight or at water impact … Impact damage was so severe that no positive evidence for or against in flight pressure loss could be found.”Īstronauts Jim Bagian and Manley “Sonny” Carter, both physicians, speculated that penetrations in the cabin’s aft bulkhead, created by the violently severed payload bay umbilical lines, could have led to a slower depressurization and quick unconsciousness for the seven astronauts, although this was conjectural. A broken window due to flying debris remains a possibility there was a piece of debris embedded in the frame between two of the forward windows. The estimated breakup forces would not in themselves have broken the windows. Additionally, wrote JSC’s head of life sciences, former astronaut Joe Kerwin, in a 28 July letter to NASA Associate Administrator for Space Flight Dick Truly, the “impact damage to the windows was so extreme that the presence or absence of in-flight breakage could not be determined. Such an eventuality would have led to an upward “buckling” of the flight deck floor as air from the middeck rapidly expanded no such buckling was detectable. Having said this, when tested to 140 percent of its design strength in Lockheed’s Plant 42 rig almost a decade earlier, that same cabin had proved to be extremely hardy, and certainly its wreckage showed little evidence of having experienced an explosive depressurization. In his 2006 memoir, Riding Rockets, astronaut Mike Mullane expressed fervent hope that the explosive burn of the External Tank’s propellants had been enough to completely destroy Challenger’s crew cabin, or at least breach her flight deck windows, thereby causing a rapid depressurization and a mercifully rapid death. In the case of the 51L remains, apparently, even dental records were insufficient for positive identification.… The Crew’s Final Moments Indeed, in the months after the disaster all astronauts were required to submit a clip of hair and a footprint to NASA for identification. Veteran astronaut Mike Coats-later to serve as Director of the Johnson Space Center from 2005-2012-was among the first to examine the wreckage, and he described it as resembling “aluminum foil that had been crushed into a ball.” It contained the remains of the crew, but their horrific condition could be guessed from pathologists’ difficulty in identifying them: a few strands of Judy Resnik’s hair and a necklace were all that was left of Mission Specialist Two. Navy spokesperson Deborah Burnette told a Washington Post journalist that “we’re talking debris, not a crew compartment, and we’re talking remains, not bodies.” The last vestiges of Challenger lay in 100 feet (30 meters) of water, about 16 miles (27 km) northeast of the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), and their discovery would help to unlock many of the mysteries of what happened on the tragic morning of 28 January, when America’s dreams of space exploration were cruelly shattered in the Florida sky and on millions of television screens around the world. “The fractures examined were typical of overload breaks and appeared to be the result of high forces generated by impact with the surface of the water.” U.S. It “was disintegrated, with the heaviest fragmentation and crash damage on the left side,” read the Rogers Commission’s final report into the cause of the disaster. Preserver found the remains of the ill-fated shuttle’s crew cabin. On 7 March 1986, six weeks after the loss of Challenger, divers from the U.S.S. Of all the fragments of Challenger which were recovered, this shard of the craft, bearing part of her name, was particularly poignant (Credits: NASA).
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