Word: oceaneering
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Like a grim ghost ship, the broken space capsule sat on the ocean floor, 18 miles east of the launching pad at Cape Canaveral. Peering through the clear blue water of the Gulf Stream, U.S. Navy divers could make out the remains of several crew members of the space shuttle Challenger. The astronauts, some still strapped into their seats, had come to rest in 100 ft. of water after the long plunge from the sky on the icy morning last January that marked a crash landing for the U.S. space program...
NASA and the Navy have tried to keep a tight lid on the recovery of the astronauts' bodies, but some details inevitably came to light. Discovered resting on the ocean floor by the 15-ship search fleet that has been scouring the waters off Canaveral since the Jan. 28 disaster, the Challenger's crew compartment, 16.5 ft. by 17.5 ft. by 16.3 ft., was ruptured but not completely destroyed. The lower mid-deck, where Astronauts Ronald McNair and Gregory Jarvis and New Hampshire Schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe had been seated, apparently absorbed the full force of the blast from the shuttle...
...Hazel and Dreamland, and receive funds without the ordinary congressional review. Current projects, according to those who have peeked behind the veil, run the gamut from Grass Blade, designed to develop an air-defense system for intercepting low-flying helicopters, to Pilot Fish, aimed at placing transmitters on the ocean floor to pick up sonar data and transmit it to antisubmarine warfare craft. Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Donald Hicks says that black budgeting is necessary "because a government as open as ours needs some way to protect certain programs from public disclosure...
...have suffered relatively little damage, briefly riding the top of that fire ball." Nonetheless, a pathology expert sent to examine the astronauts' remains at Cape Canaveral said, "it is likely that the crew was knocked unconscious immediately and felt nothing during the [three-to-four-minute] fall to the ocean. I want to guess that they were unconscious all the way down, if any of them really survived the fireball and breakup in flight." Some experts believed that the tremendous force of hitting the ocean after a 55,000-ft. fall did as much damage to the crew compartment...
...rendered only more painful by the recovery of the astronauts' remains. "It just brings it all back again," says Dr. Marvin Resnik, father of Judith Resnik. The Resniks want no funeral service; they have asked NASA to cremate their daughter's remains and scatter them over the ocean, where Challenger met its end. --By Evan Thomas. Reported by Michael Duffy/Washington and Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral