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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Pieces Of Space Shuttle Stir Memories Of Tragedy

From Wire Reports

Two barnacle-covered chunks of the space shuttle Challenger washed ashore Tuesday near the Kennedy Space Center, a poignant reminder that half the ill-fated orbiter remains at the bottom of the sea.

“It’s like a ghost come back,” said Mike Stevens, head of security investigations at Kennedy Space Center.

The debris was discovered by a passer-by early Tuesday on the shores of Cocoa Beach, a few miles south of the Kennedy Space Center where Challenger took off on its final voyage 11 years ago next month.

One piece, measuring about 8-by-14 feet, was identified by NASA engineers as Challenger’s left inboard wing flap, or elevon, a segment from the base of the shuttle’s left wing that helped steer the orbiter during entry and landing.

The second piece, about 5 feet long and less than a foot wide, came ashore several blocks to the south. Engineers believe it broke away from the larger piece.

Both chunks of debris, were carted back to the Kennedy Space Center, where they will remain until early next year. The wreckage eventually will be lowered into an abandoned Minuteman missile silo at the nearby Cape Canaveral Air Station where the rest of Challenger’s wreckage is buried.

For NASA, the timing couldn’t have been worse. It greatly overshadowed the long-planned grand opening Tuesday of KSC’s Apollo/Saturn V Museum.

But it was even harder on the families of the Challenger Seven: Dick Scobee, Greg Jarvis, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judy Resnik, Mike Smith and teacher-in-space Christa McAuliffe.

“It’s like getting a scab on something and then somebody rips off a part of it,” said Jarvis’ father, Bruce Jarvis of Orlando, Fla.

June Scobee Rodgers, widow of Challenger commander Dick Scobee, said: “Every day I think of the crew, especially at holiday times. … But finding the wing or having it wash up ashore is a surprise.”

Oceanographers and meteorologists were somewhat at a loss to explain why a chunk of Challenger weighing several hundred pounds finally showed up.

Their No. 1 theory: The turtle-slow process the ocean goes through to replenish the beach with sand inched the chunk of metal ashore.

In between the large storms that erode beaches, slow but long waves return sand to the beach. If the wing part was somewhat buoyant, as some officials believe, then it would have moved along, too, said Robert Thieke, professor of coastal and oceanographic engineering at the University of Florida.

“Each crest is almost like a broom sweeping things to the shore,” Thieke said.

Challenger was destroyed by the failure of its right-side solid-fuel booster rocket on Jan. 28, 1986. One minute and 13 seconds after launch at 11:38 a.m., the spacecraft was engulfed in a cloud of burning fuel when its external tank suffered structural failure at an altitude of 46,000 feet.

Challenger’s right wing was recovered. But when salvagers attempted to pull up the left wing using cables attached to its landing gear, the gear structure broke away and the wing settled back to the ocean floor.

Because it was not central to the accident investigation, no other attempts were made to recover the left wing.