Pieces of Shuttle Pulled from Sea : Fuselage, Cockpit Parts Salvaged; Big Object Spotted on Ocean Floor

A Coast Guard cutter recovered and brought to shore several sections of fuselage from the space shuttle Challenger, including parts of its wings and the underside of its cockpit, found Thursday night in ocean waters north of here.

Sonar equipment aboard the cutter also indicated a large object resting on the sea floor and a National Aeronautics and Space Administration retrieval vessel and divers were summoned.

NASA-supplied film of the parts being unloaded showed five large pieces of the spacecraft, a couple of them charred and twisted but the rest surprisingly intact. One piece was a section of the fuselage that runs beneath the cockpit. On that piece, in clear yellow letters, was the word Rescue, with an arrow pointing to the outside of the crew escape hatch.

Other pieces included the top of the shuttle’s payload bay door, a 20-foot rectangle of fuselage and two smaller sections of wing.

The debris represents the most significant discoveries yet in a widening effort to reclaim as much of the shattered spacecraft as possible.

In addition, a small fragment of bone and tissue wrapped in a blue sock washed ashore Thursday on a public beach in Indialantic, 25 miles south of here.

The fuselage is the main body portion of the shuttle. When the segment was hoisted aboard the cutter, a spokesman reported: “They said it took everything they had to get it up there on the cutter.”

The Challenger exploded Tuesday morning 73 seconds after liftoff here, killing all seven crew members. The dead included 37-year-old Sharon Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher who was to have been the first private citizen in space.

NASA officials, unable to explain why the $1.2-billion spacecraft blew apart, have set in motion a sweeping effort to collect any evidence that might help pinpoint a cause.

A former astronaut with close ties to the shuttle program said in Houston Thursday night there was for the first time a feeling of optimism among investigators searching for clues to the tragedy’s cause. “The people down here have a much better feeling than they did yesterday,” he said.

The former astronaut, who declined to be identified, said: “I have the distinct feeling they are now onto something.” He said conversations with members of the investigating team were consistent with the report that a leak was suspected in a “fill joint splice,” an area where segments of the solid rocket booster casings come together.

‘Served Like a Blowtorch’

NBC reported Thursday night that a frame-by-frame study of a film of the explosion seemed to indicate that a splice between two of the booster’s four segments sprang a leak and “served like a blowtorch and burned through the tank--a 6,000-degree blowtorch.”

Wreckage is viewed as a potential source of important forensic evidence, and 26 military ships and aircraft Thursday systematically worked across an 8,000-mile search zone.

Nose cones from the shuttle’s twin solid rocket boosters were believed by NASA officials to have been among the pieces pulled out of the water. One of the cones was still attached to its parachute.

The boosters were destroyed by remote control seconds after the explosion when it appeared that one of the erratically flying missiles might crash on a populated area.

Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. James G. Simpson said the search also has netted “several pieces of electrical gear, a piece of a control panel, gauges, piping, wires, aluminum pieces--that sort of thing.”

No personal effects of any of the crew have been identified, he said.

Grisly Discovery

A citizen made the grisly discovery of the bone and tissue and contacted police officers, who in turn informed NASA. The fragment, described as four inches long and six inches wide, was taken to a hospital for possible identification.

NASA officials did not know what kind of bone it was, and there was nothing to link it to an astronaut.

“An anonymous citizen found a navy blue sock with what appeared to be a burned bone fragment attached to it at 11:30 today at the high water mark on the beach,” said Steven Okes, an Indialantic police communications officer.

He said police called NASA, which instructed them to refrigerate the find, then “20 minutes later they told us to take it to the hospital at Patrick Air Force Base.”

What had been a strictly inhouse investigation of the explosion Thursday was expanded to include National Transportation Safety Board experts on an interim NASA review board. NASA spokesman Hugh Harris said the space agency’s investigative board “will be joined by several senior NTSB managers with broad experience in reconstructing accidents and their causes.”

NASA Associate Administrator Jesse Moore established an interim investigatory board on the afternoon of the explosion. Later, as required by law, a full board of NASA and outside experts will be commissioned to conduct a full investigation.

Both at the Florida launch site and in Houston, where the ascent to space is directed, engineers studied computer tapes that recorded performance of the shuttle’s systems every one one-thousandth of a second.

Officials said they might be the most crucial piece of evidence in the investigation. The tapes could show whether the fireball was caused by something that went wrong with the spaceship’s huge external fuel tank or whether the fault lay with one of the two solid fuel rocket boosters.

Moore, the NASA official directly in charge of the shuttle program, has ordered impounded the vast quantities of computer data from the short flight, as well as film footage from its final seconds and notes from ground personnel involved in the mission.

These materials will be reviewed first by his board and presumably will be available as evidence for outside investigations.

The search zone has been expanded greatly since the disaster as a result of strong currents. Ships equipped with sonar are probing the sea bottom in waters that range from 50 to 1,200 feet. Recovered material, which now totals several thousand pounds, will be stored at an Air Force base hangar here.

The 378-foot Dallas arrived with the wreckage at Port Canaveral at 10 p.m. PST and unloaded the pieces with a large crane onto a truck to be hauled off for storage.

NASA officials said large intact pieces of the shuttle could prove to be crucial in determining what happened to it in the fiery explosion.

NASA officials refused to speculate on what the large object detected on the sea floor might be. Several missiles have crashed into the search zone over a quarter-century of NASA testing here, creating a potential for confusion among the searchers.

Jim Mizell, a spokesman for the Kennedy Space Center, called the area offshore “the missile graveyard of the world” because it contains the wreckage of scores of failed rockets and the discarded first stages of hundreds more.

“It will take some real expert to take pieces and say it’s not Snark, Redstone, Pershing, Atlas and on and on,” he said. Snark and Redstone are two of the early missiles of the 1950s.

The commander of the Dallas, flagship of the search flotilla, did not elaborate on his report of finding “cockpit parts” in the northern section of the search grid, off Daytona Beach.

With the exception of a large contingent of news reporters, there was little evidence here Thursday of the catastrophe of just two days before.

Buses Resume Rounds

The reception tent that was to have been the site of a post-launch VIP party was disassembled Thursday, and double-decker NASA tour buses resumed their rounds through the facility.

“We’ve wanted to come here for 20 years,” said Bill Murray, 53, a retired telephone engineer from Dearborn, Mich., “but this accident has sort of made it anti-climactic. It’s taken a bit of the fun out of it.”

Murray and his wife, Ann, were among a busload of tourists that had stopped at a huge Saturn V rocket that lies on its side in the middle of the sprawling coastal complex.

The Murrays said that the NASA tour guide had read a brief statement about the Challenger tragedy but that nothing more was said about it during the tour.

When asked if he believed that Shuttle flights should resume, Murray thought for a moment and then said: “There always is a risk factor. And they all volunteer. If we took the philosophy of ‘Don’t get into the water until you learn how to swim,’ we wouldn’t get anywhere.”

13,000 Employees

The space center’s three shifts of 13,000 employees continued to arrive around the clock, though work on the remaining three shuttle orbiters has been suspended. Work on the launch pads, with the exception of 39B, where the Challenger flight commenced, was resumed Thursday.

There was one reminder, however, to be found Thursday. On the road leading to 39B, seven American flags were planted in a tight row.

In addition to McAuliffe, the 37-year-old Concord, N.H., teacher selected as NASA’s first private citizen to take a space trip, those killed were: Francis R. Scobee, 46, the commander; Michael J. Smith, 40, the pilot; Judith A. Resnik, 36; Ronald E. McNair, 35; Ellison S. Onizuka, 39, and Gregory B. Jarvis, 41.