Was the body of the Challenger crew recovered after the cabin crew fell into the sea??

Question

I want to know the bodies of the astronaut's were recovered after the Challenger disaster. If so in what condition where they in??

Answer 1

Hi. There were several small parts recovered, but they were described as "remains, not bodies". http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/25/AR2006012501455_pf.html

Answer 2

Medical ethics calls for keeping these gruesome details out of the hands of the public. Nobody would be helped if they were available and there is no need to make life harder for the relatives and families than it already is.

If you want to see burning crushed bodies, go watch "Saw XXMLVI".

What happened after the explosion is not covered by any technical design feature anyone would have ever put on the spacecraft. You simply don't engineer for surviving a small nuclear explosion this close to the human body. Therefor you can't hold any engineer accountable for what happened AFTER that O-ring went. You can and have to ask why it burned through, though....

As far as I know, pretty much every bit of information about those seals have been made public. Everyone who wants to know can now evaluate for themselves why the dump-truck into space model of the shuttle is a BAD spacecraft design and why NASA is returning to the well understood and tested conical capsule design that made Apollo successful.

And I am pretty sure the same people who cry over the shuttle being such a deadly vehicle call the Orion designs "booooring" without appreciating the design problems of either.

The truth is... once you accelerate the human body to around 8.8km/s, no technology imaginable can keep you safe. Just look at how hard it is to survive a "simple" car crash at 80mph. Now you are talking 250 times as fast. That's over 60,000 times the energy!

And the inverse is just as true... no technology that can make you this fast can ever guarantee that you will not die under any circumstances and imaginable way.

Answer 3

Yes, the bodies were recovered. I have never seen specific autopsy reports and I doubt they are in the public domain.

That said, there was a public report regarding the explosion and the nine minutes it took for the crew cabin to fall back to the ocean. The cabin remained largely intact and three of the emergency oxygen tanks had nine minutes of air missing. How's that for morbid?

Note, that doesn't mean any crew members were conscious the whole way down, since they would have blacked out from loss of air pressure very quickly...though it appears that three of the crew had enough time to put on emergency breathing gear before they passed out.

Accelerometers aboard the Challenger indicated the explosion itself probably did not kill the crew members...rather it was the impact with the ocean nine minutes later.

Maybe somebody will give you a link to the report...I don't feel like doing a Google search for you.