Shuttle Clue Search Goes Underwater : NASA Says Large Object Might Be Crew Compartment

Salvage crews worked Friday to identify a large sunken object detected 140 feet beneath the waters where large sections of the space shuttle Challenger already have been recovered.

Two submersible camera devices were lowered from National Aeronautics and Space Administration recovery vessels to explore the sea floor 60 miles northeast of here.

NASA has not ruled out the possibility that the large object, detected by sonar, might be the spacecraft’s crew compartment, a self-contained cylinder that is pressurized and heavily reinforced.

Would Withhold Comment

But the space agency said that, should remains of the crew members be found Friday--a day when President Reagan led a moving memorial to “our seven star voyagers”--it would not divulge the information.

“No comment will be made by NASA officials today on anything concerning personal effects or human remains, out of respect for the astronauts’ families,” a NASA statement declared.

One NASA official said privately that he hoped the sunken object did not contain the lost crew. “I hope it’s not what I think it is,” he said. “I’ve had enough gore.”

The grim underwater exploration began as much of the nation watched a televised service for the Challenger’s crew in Houston.

Also, in Houston, NASA’s in-house review board investigating Challenger’s catastrophic mission met at the Johnson Space Center to collect and evaluate more data.

A terse NASA description of the session said only that the board reviewed preliminary reports from the wreckage salvage operation and from NASA data analysis teams.

Offers No Theories

The space agency, despite an abundance of much-publicized conjectures by outside experts about what might have triggered the disaster, has steadfastly declined to advance any theories about what triggered the explosion.

Confident of Finding Cause

Most speculation has centered on the space vehicle’s twin solid rocket boosters. A space flight expert close to the investigation has told The Times that there is a growing confidence that the cause of the explosion will be found.

Determination of a cause--and corrective steps to prevent its recurrence--are vital steps in NASA’s determined effort to resume its multibillion-dollar shuttle program.

A space center memorial service for the Challenger crew was to be held today--in front of the same grandstands where, just four days earlier, spectators had gathered to watch the shuttle and its celebrated passenger, schoolteacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe, 37, lift off for what was to have been a seven-day mission. Instead, the spacecraft blew up 73 seconds into flight, and it appeared to most spectators here to have been utterly obliterated in a violent fireball.

However, the recovery of several large pieces of the spacecraft floating in a small section of ocean has raised the possibility that the spacecraft--or a large part of it--survived the blast intact.

Moreover, one NASA official said, the debris pattern also might suggest that the crew made a desperate bid to ditch the damaged shuttle in the ocean.

“I have always felt that the orbiter was going to have an opportunity to get away from the explosion, and it looks now like part of it may have,” said Jim Mizell, a NASA public affairs officer with a strong background in shuttle engineering.

After the explosion, he said, he at first anticipated that the Challenger would return for an emergency landing. When that did not occur, Mizell said, “I had hopes the crew could try ditching.”

Little Chance of Success

Such an emergency water landing is given little chance of success because of the speed of impact and the craft’s heavy payload.

It is also possible, experts said, that the crew compartment and other large pieces were blown apart in the explosion but were carried by the enormous blast on the same trajectory.

The five pieces recovered by the Coast Guard Cutter Dallas on Thursday were taken to a naval dock and unloaded. They were to be transported to a huge, automated warehouse here, along with several thousand pounds of smaller shuttle debris still being collected by a large fleet of search ships and along Florida beaches.

Each piece of the shuttle bears a serial number, which will allow experts to piece much of the craft back together and obtain a better sense of what happened to it.

“They will lay it all out there and either mentally or physically try to rebuild it,” Mizell said.

The larger sections gathered Thursday could greatly enhance the effort to pinpoint a cause, officials said.

NASA film footage of the unloading showed most of the five pieces had not been charred or twisted. The most striking piece was a 10-by-10-foot section from the Challenger’s nose. This section of flotsam contained a device for opening the crew’s emergency escape hatches from the outside--identified with a green arrow and the word “rescue.”

Located Near Astronaut

The device is located on the starboard side, just six feet below where payload specialist Gregory B. Jarvis, 41, was seated during liftoff.

Other pieces included a section of wing, a 25-foot-long piece of fuselage siding, a piece that appeared to be a part of the cargo bay door, and another that looked like part of the tail.

The shuttle’s lightweight construction apparently allowed them to float. It was not known if strong currents had pushed them north, or whether they were found near the point of impact.

The concentration of large pieces heightened expectations among NASA officials about the possibility the large object on the sea floor could be the shuttle crew compartment.

In addition to its strong, reinforced construction, the compartment sits on so-called isolation pads, which are designed to reduce vibration but also would function as a shock absorber.

“I do know (the crew compartment) could withstand much more (shock) than the average part of the orbiter could stand,” Mizell said.

Another possibility was that the large object was a 5,000-pound tracking satellite that was to have been deployed on the first day of the Challenger’s mission.

May Be Old Ship

Also, a Coast Guard official cautioned that the sonar might merely have detected “a shrimp boat from 20 years ago or a Spanish galleon from 300 years ago.”

A small submersible named Sprint was lowered into the water from the NASA booster recovery ship Liberty Star on Friday afternoon.

The Scorpio, a larger submersible, was to be placed into the depths later Friday.

The remote-control devices, tethered to ships, take moving and still photographs of the sea floor. They are then monitored on-board the vessels.

No conclusive reports had been heard from the search site by late Friday, and NASA officials said it was unlikely there would be any firm word before today on what the submersibles found.

Although shuttle flights on the remaining three orbiters have been suspended indefinitely, work crews on Friday were allowed to resume “processing activities” on the spacecraft.

About 75 space center workers took time off to view the ceremony from Houston on a large screen in the facility’s 489-seat theater.

The mood was bleak. “I feel like a refrigerator fell on top of me,” said Richard Miller, a computer software worker who is an 18-year veteran at the space center.

‘Did I Do Something?’

“I’ve got friends who worked on the (Challenger) software,” he said, “and they’re asking themselves: ‘Did I do something? Was it something I did?’ ”

“You have to understand, that’s our baby. That’s what we’re here for.”

Barry Olton, a NASA official who works with shuttle payload clients, said: “I don’t think anybody got away unaffected. I think I’ve gone through a full spectrum of feelings, from disbelief, to utter shock, to . . . I don’t know.”

A third NASA worker, Al Folensbee, expressed a common opinion among his colleagues when he said of the accident: “I just hope this doesn’t affect the drive. We’ve got to find out what happened, and we’ve got to go on.”

Kim Murphy contributed to this report.