Mission Aims to Find Sunken Space Capsule

Undersea salvage experts are expected to set out this weekend to find and recover the long-lost Mercury space capsule that carried U.S. astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom into suborbital flight 38 years ago but then nearly killed him, officials said Wednesday.

A successful mission would recover a piece of American space history lost at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. But organizers were not certain if they could solve a lingering mystery: why the capsule’s escape hatch unexpectedly blew off and caused the spaceship to sink.

“It’s hard to say. There may be some clues in the recovered capsule that would shed some light on it,” said Jack Schmid, exhibits manager at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

“I think it’s important from a historical perspective to know.”

On July 21, 1961, Grissom became the second American in space on a 15-minute suborbital flight. When the Liberty Bell 7 splashed down in the Atlantic, the capsule’s hatch door blew off and water poured in.

Grissom escaped the capsule but nearly drowned. A hovering recovery helicopter was unable to pull the spacecraft from the water. It went down in about 15,000 feet--nearly 3 miles.

“Gus was going over his checklist when the hatch blew out,” said Howard Benedict, executive director of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation in Titusville, Fla. He was a news reporter at the time and covered the mission.

“Poor Gus was swimming for his life out there. He came pretty close to drowning,” Benedict said.

Grissom, who later flew on a Gemini mission and died in a launch pad fire in 1967, said at the time of the Mercury mishap he did not know why the hatch blew off.

The two-week expedition, led by undersea salvage expert Curt Newport and funded by the Discovery Channel cable TV channel, was expected to leave Port Canaveral Saturday or Sunday, Discovery Channel spokeswoman Karen Baratz said.

“If this mission is successful, we’re hoping to locate it and recover it,” she said.

“We think it’s in the waters right off the Bahamas.”

The exploration team will use side-scan sonar to search for the capsule and a sophisticated unmanned vehicle to recover it, Baratz said.

Discovery Channel will document the mission for a TV special in the fall.

Two previous expeditions to find and recover Liberty Bell 7 failed. If it is recovered this time, the capsule would likely be refurbished and displayed at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson, Kan.

NASA is working out an agreement to confer ownership on the expedition partners, Schmid said.

Baratz said the expedition aimed to recover the capsule but not to solve the mystery.

“That’s not really connected to the expedition,” he said.

“This is a historical space artifact that’s been on the ocean floor for 38 years.”

But NASA would like to fill in the blanks.

“It’s one of those things that is in the back of our minds,” NASA spokesman Bruce Buckingham said. “We’d like to know what happened.”