NASA Workers Honor Crew

The technicians and blue-collar workers who sent the space shuttle Challenger aloft on its fateful mission gathered Saturday for a simple but poignant tribute to the spacecraft’s lost crew.

Unlike the huge gathering in Houston on Friday, no politicians or celebrities were in the grandstands, the same bleachers where spectators five days before had watched the Challenger lift off and explode. Nor were there any relatives of the seven crew members. Rather, it was an opportunity for about 2,000 ground crew members to vent their sorrow.

“Here among the machines and edifices of space exploration,” said Richard G. Smith, director of the Kennedy Space Center, “we are reminded by the tragic events of the past few days that people are our most precious resources.

“For it is people who build the machinery, who construct the building and who assemble and test the equipment and hardware. And who fly it.”

Astronaut Robert Overmyer read a poem that he said Challenger commander Francis R. (Dick) Scobee had kept hung on the wall in his Houston office. Entitled “High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee Jr., it begins: “Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.”

At the conclusion of the 20-minute ceremony, the crowd rose to observe a minute of silence, and a NASA helicopter carrying a wreath of white chrysanthemums adorned with seven red carnations passed low overhead.

The copter flew over the ocean, and at 11:39 a.m.--the precise time of Tuesday’s explosion--a NASA official dropped the wreath 150 feet into the water.

A NASA film crew in a second helicopter flew along to record the gesture, and it happened to capture a remarkable and touching moment one minute later:

A school of dolphins swam to the surface, arced once in tight formation toward the bobbing flowers, and then disappeared with a splash back into the green waters below.

The dolphins did not resurface. It was not possible to count them. But there appeared to be at least five and no more than seven.