The New Guys by Meredith Bagby

Author:Meredith Bagby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

All We Know of Heaven

Off the Coast of Cape Canaveral, USS Preserver. March 8, 1986.

At dawn, Bagian suited up in scuba gear with the Preserver’s Captain John Devlin. The Preserver, the larger boat, would take over the investigation from the Lucy. Bagian and Devlin would do a reconnaissance mission before deploying the hard-hat divers. As the sole NASA representative onboard (Sonny Carter was on leave), only Bagian could properly identify the orbiter.

Overnight, a strong current had pushed the Preserver away from the diving spot where Bailey and McAllister discovered the spacesuit. “We only had forty minutes from the time your head hit the water. So that clock was already ticking,” Bagian said. Bagian and Captain Devlin swam against the drift to find the location. “We dive down. And the first thing I see is a transitional hand controller. I was pretty sure it was from the robotic arm.” Bagian saw the joystick-shaped controller lodged in the silty ocean bed and motioned for Devlin to follow him. “This is pay dirt. Let’s keep heading this direction because we’re starting to see more stuff.”1

The next thing the Air Force physician saw made his blood run cold: a leather flight boot. “It was broken right off at the boot top,” said Bagian. The name of the crew member was on the side of the boot: Ron McNair. Unprepared and lacking the proper equipment to haul debris back to the surface, Bagian unzipped the top of his wetsuit and tucked the boot close to his naked chest.

“The visibility was horrible, maybe thirty feet at this point,” said Bagian. “So by the time you saw something you were pretty damn close. I started seeing this ghostly apparition. It’s maybe a forty-by-sixty-foot pile mound.”2

Unlike McCallister, he knew right away that he was seeing the crew module. “It looked like you blew it up with a bomb and then shoved it back together with a bulldozer into one pile,” Bagian explained. “Which means it hit intact. It didn’t blow up.”3 The metal pieces he saw were “granular as if they had smashed apart, not shiny, like when you rip a tin can. When metal hits the water that hard, it doesn’t rip, it shatters.” He surmised that the shuttle had hit the water at two hundred miles per hour. Bagian saw the full instrument panel, the windscreen structure, the command console, and the control levers. Though everything had imploded on impact, it was all still held together by the network of wires that ran throughout the shuttle. Everything was jumbled, but recognizable, like a Cubist reconstruction of the crew compartment.4

What Bagian saw next broke his heart—the bodies of the crew members, sitting strapped into their seats. “We saw three or four definitely, different individuals, still in their flight suits, some with nameplates still on them.” An arm extended from one, with a class ring on the finger. “You see his ring and you just knew who he was. And their flight suits are intact and there it was.

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