The Preserver was the oldest and least-capable ship in the fleet of more than 20 active rescue and salvage ships, but she was loaded for a three-month deployment and only minutes from getting under way from Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base, Virginia, on a familiar track that caught a little of the Gulf Stream’s countercurrent. In a few days, the Preserver was moored at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and NASA was teaching three of us ingress/egress procedures in one of the remaining shuttles, ostensibly so we could remove the seven astronauts when we found the sunken Challenger’s crew cabin, which—according to the NASA engineers—was probably still intact.
We didn’t attempt to argue, but we were under no such illusions. Only three times have I seen an aircraft emerge from the depths essentially intact. One was a TA-4 off the Dry Tortugas that had sheared a fitting during catapult and teetered on the flight-deck edge before falling upside down in 190 feet of water. It was still in one piece and upside down when I walked up to it in lead-filled diver’s boots. Another was an AV-8 Harrier that a Marine had set down south of Cape Hatteras in 200 feet of water; its entire silhouette was crisply visible from an SQQ-13 mine-hunting sonar we used to find it. And one other was an H-60 helicopter the pilot had set down in the Persian Gulf in 1991 because of heavy vibration; we hoisted it up by the Jesus-nut, and it still might be flying today.
‘Shattered into Pieces’
But aircraft that hit the water at accelerated speeds like the Challenger did had shattered into pieces. Three years earlier, the Preserver had recovered two F-16s far out in the Gulf of Mexico; we had to literally scrape the bottom with special rake baskets that looked remarkably like the ones my dad and I manufactured in Panama City, Florida, to rake sand fleas out of the surf to catch pompano.
Two years before, the Preserver had recovered an F-4 that ditched at low speed off the coast of North Carolina; the only things intact were the pilot’s leather boots. And the previous winter we had recovered a C-130 off the coast of Honduras; the four engines and the huge tail section were the only things recovered that were plainly recognizable from that low-speed impact.
This larger search-and-recovery operation at hand was led by an immensely able team under the Navy’s Supervisor of Salvage (SUPSALV), including Captain Charles A. “Black Bart” Bartholomew, whom I once watched spear a five-foot cobia in the exact spot where he would later die in a diving recertification mishap in late 1990.
Captain Jim Wilkins, who served on SUPSALV’s team then, pointed out to me not long ago that the operation had more than a dozen ships systematically searching an area encompassing 500 square miles and directing more than 3,000 manned inspection and recovery dives. The nuclear-powered Navy research submarine NR-1—a now-deactivated manned deep-diving and exploration program—was assigned to search and inspect in depths of 1,200 feet in the Gulf Stream.
Greatly complicating the search, most of what we discovered in our check-out dives were parts of space vehicles from decades of launches; of the more than 700 contacts we visually inspected, fewer than 200 were pieces from the Challenger. I distinctly remember one of those non-Challenger contacts; it was a scuba inspection dive very near the Hetzel Shoal buoy, which marked the navigable limit of the Cape. My dive buddy was a newly minted second-class diver, and—in the only instance of this that I have ever heard of—we descended amidst what seemed like thousands of red snapper in the hefty 10- to 15-pound range. On reaching the bottom, our compass swim-search pattern quickly put us onto an encrusted anchor chain, which I guessed was from an old navigation buoy, perhaps sunk by a merchant on autopilot.
As we finally started to make out a large dark object on the bottom where the chain was leading, about half of it started to swim to our left and then fade away, remaining just at the limit of our visibility. As we reached the sunken buoy, we startled a 200-pound baby jewfish that had been nestled against the buoy’s far side.
At this point, the forms of a massive daddy and mama jewfish emerged, as they cautiously returned to inspect the intruders of the nursery. Both curiously nosed up to us as close as six feet. I was transfixed by the size of the male’s mouth, knowing it was large enough to suck in an entire Navy diver wearing a set of double tanks. Thus threatened, we could not finish our inspection dive until their inspection had ended.
Diving the Main Engine and Crew Cabin
Twenty-five years later, I can remember only two other dives, probably typical of the other divers’ most memorable experiences. The first involved the rigging and lifting of the Challenger’s main engines—a massive assembly about two stories high. After working for a few hours to rig this large lift, I had to stay in hard-hat deep-diving dress on the surface as Air Force explosive-ordnance-disposal divers in hazmat suits washed both the engine assembly and me with a neutralizing solvent. Meanwhile, the Preserver’s 100 crew members had to assemble on the upwind forecastle because of the carcinogens in the main engine fuel.
The second involved the initial dive on the Challenger’s crew cabin. Descending alone in the Navy’s blue space-suit-like Mk 12 surface-supplied diving system, I noticed coming into view below me a blue-suited human form that I usually would have taken as another diver in deep-sea dress. I told the topside winch operator to stop, jumped off the stage, and read the name tag. It was one of the astronauts. Amazingly, the body had already been pushed more than 30 yards north of the crew cabin by the Gulf Stream, and it would never have been found in the murky water had it not been stopped by a single diver’s stage-descent line anchored by a 1,000-pound clump that had just been lowered an hour earlier.
After taking the body to the surface, I returned to the bottom to try to find the crew cabin and reposition the marker buoy in the center of it. After 15 minutes and a long hose-stretch from the place where the body had been pushed, I finally found the crew cabin and had just enough bottom time left to inspect and recover what looked like another astronaut. It was a space-walk suit, which was floating surrealistically above the crew cabin by its umbilical, as if on a space walk. I peered into the space suit’s empty faceplate, only to remember that no crew member would have donned this suit for liftoff.
Trying to Fend Off a Frenzy
Out of respect for the astronaut families, our plan was to avoid a media frenzy by returning to port with the remains under the cover of darkness. I had the conn as we approached the jetties, and the plan seemed to be working.
But as the Preserver was halfway through the jetties, generators revved, and what seemed to be dozens of searchlights rented by the media were illuminated on our port beam, blinding the entire pilothouse team. The lights found their way to the fantail and shone on what they were looking for—flag-draped caskets and a full Navy color guard standing at attention over the nation’s newest heroes.
The inspirational leaders in those caskets weren’t the only ones on board the Preserver that night. I remember on Easter morning I went out to the forecastle to lead the Easter worship service, expecting to watch the sun rise over the Gulf Stream alone. But the members of NASA’s astronaut detail to the Preserver—Captain Sonny “Billy Bob” Carter, Commander Bill Shepherd, and Dr. Jim Bagian—joined me.
From what I had seen of them over the previous three months, these were the kind of leaders who would join such an event by any member of their team out of their sense of leadership, and not necessarily because of a particular religious conviction. Had I known then that one of them, Shepherd, would later go on to be the first commander of the International Space Station and earn the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, I would not have been a bit surprised.
The End of Manned Exploration?
It is for such an intangible reason as inspirational leadership that we should be concerned about the pressure to end high-risk manned exploration. I never imagined when I was taking a life-support systems course from Navy SEAL Ace Sarich at the U.S. Naval Academy that manned exploration of space and the ocean would be on the chopping block by the end of my career. The robotic revolution is clearly here. And paradoxically, even Ace has joined the robotic revolution, designing unmanned surface vehicles.
But the inestimable cost of not having such national heroes to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers is not something that competes well in a budget debate. Yet at the present time, when America faces a formidable set of energy, food, water, environmental, health, and weapons-of-mass-destruction threat trends, a couple of high-profile manned space and hydrospace projects such as the SpaceX program could be part of the broader strategic project to reinvigorate our young people’s commitment to careers that produce bold scientific and engineering innovation.
At the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, we learned that it takes 12 years of hard, unrewarding work to build an all-up-round engineer or scientist who can do basic research-and-development, and not nearly enough of our youth are being inspired to go through that grueling process. The reason, said NASA Hall-of-Famer Dr. Sally Ride in a recent PBS special, is that America’s youth think science isn’t “cool.”
The end of one technological era always marks the beginning of a new one; think, for example, what the end of the era of sails meant for the Navy. But the end of manned high-risk exploration seems different. The robotic revolution might free up shrinking resources to go where no man has gone before, but will our youth even take notice when the robots get there?