![]() Veteran shuttle pilots Robert Crippen and Bob Overmyer had been put in charge of the recovery of their fellow astronauts, and they would brook no interference from anyone, no matter how high they might be in the NASA hierarchy. No one wanted to declare “missing” someone so close to his own group, when they knew the body had every chance of being nearby. The frustrations of failure day after day began to tell on everyone involved. ![]() Divers in the water, and everyone on deck, froze where they were. Then the cables drew the load to the surface. Slowly, painfully, the cables pulled the unseen wreckage from the bottom. At first the weight and mass seemed too great for the hoisting system. The salvage operations proceeded normally until the steel cables on the ocean bottom tugged at another section of Challenger’s middeck. Every step possible to render respect and honor to the human remains was taken. ![]() The crew, the NASA teams and the astronauts overseeing the operation stood silently on the USS Preserver recovery ship as a crane lifted the wreckage from the sea. The cabin wreckage was so twisted and tangled, sharp edges jutting everywhere like knife points, that the divers demanded the wreckage itself be hauled to the surface and the operation continued on deck. For the moment, that was all the divers could do. Then, from the middeck, the remains of First-Teacher-in-Space Christa McAuliffe were carried slowly to the surface vessel. More and more parts of bodies went to the surface. First to be retrieved from the watery tomb were the remains of Judy Resnik.
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