I was working with NASA and was at a meeting at Johnson Space Center in the 1987. I met an engineer who took me on a tour of the Shuttle simulator. While we were there she had me sit in the pilot’s seat and asked me to turn on the emergency oxygen which at the time was located on the back of the commander’s seat out of reach of any normal human. The emergency procedures required the crew in the jump seats to turn on the Oxygen.
When they recovered the intact cabin, they discovered that all of the emergency oxygen bottles were partially empty. This led them to suspect that the astronauts had survived and they did an analysis that showed the crew experienced about 10 g’s during the explosion and then settled in to a 0 g free fall. So the crew was not only alive but were alert enough to follow emergency procedures.
When the autopsy results came some had died of blunt force trauma on impact and others drowned. You can look this up on the net as well.
The crew compartment was blown off the front of the shuttle, and fell, intact, for 2.5 minutes before hitting the ocean. When it hit, it smashed open from the non-survivable impact. Nobody survived that impact. Emergency oxygen supplies for 3 crew members were found to have been activated. One was not. The three other oxygen controls were never found, so we don’t know whether they were activated or not.
NASA has never released photos of the recovered cockpit or the remains that were in it. Not all the remains recovered were in the cockpit, and no mention is made of any attempt to pass last messages. The doomed sailors on the Russian Kursk nuclear submarine lived 4–6 hours after the explosion that sank their boat. More than one note was later found in an immediate survivor’s pocket.
According to Snopes.com, this account by a Miami Herald reporter summarizes what’s publicly known. Remember that it took 6 weeks to find the wreckage of the cockpit, and it was breached and flooded with sea water when it hit the ocean.
This Snopes article addresses an alleged transcript from an alleged personal tape recorder carried by an astronaut. They don’t believe any such tape recorder existed and don’t believe the tape would have survived 6 weeks in salt water.
“Such an environment breeds its own rumors, and Miami Herald reporter Dennis E. Powell wrote that the crew were likely all alive and conscious until the shuttle’s crew compartment plunged into the Atlantic Ocean:
When the shuttle broke apart, the crew compartment did not lose pressure, at least not at once. There was an uncomfortable jolt — “A pretty good kick in the pants” is the way one investigator describes it — but it was not so severe as to cause injury.
This probably accounted for the “uh oh” that was the last word heard on the flight deck tape recorder that would be recovered from the ocean floor two months later. As they were feeling the jolt, the four astronauts on the flight deck saw a bright flash and a cloud of steam. The lights went out. The intercom went dead. After a few breaths, the seven astronauts stopped getting oxygen into their helmets.
Someone, apparently astronaut Ronald McNair, leaned forward and turned on the personal emergency air pack of shuttle pilot Michael Smith. The PEAP of Commander Francis Scobee was in a place where it was difficult to reach. It was not activated.
Even so, if the crew compartment did not rapidly lose air pressure, Scobee would only have had to lift his mask to be able to breathe. Two other PEAPs were turned on. The three others were never found.
Though the shuttle had broken to pieces, the crew compartment was intact. It stabilized in a nose-down attitude within 10 to 20 seconds, say the investigators. Even if the compartment was gradually losing pressure, those on the flight deck would certainly have remained conscious long enough to catch a glimpse of the green-brown Atlantic rushing toward them.
If it lost its pressurization very slowly or remained intact until it hit the water, they were conscious and cognizant all the way down.
In fact, no clear evidence was ever found that the crew cabin depressurized at all. There was certainly no sudden, catastrophic loss of air of the type that would have knocked the astronauts out within seconds. Such an event would have caused the mid-deck floor to buckle upward; that simply didn’t happen.”
There were seven people in there when it hit the ocean at 210 mph, subjecting them to 200 g of force. That is far worse than a head-on collision between two vehicles at freeway speeds. At that velocity, water would have provided no cushion whatsoever, they may as well have struck concrete.
I don’t think there is any question of how gruesome that scene must have been for first responders. At least the end would have been near instantaneous.
Let’s just hope the cabin de-pressurized in the explosion. Otherwise, the astronauts would have likely been conscious for the entire 2-minute and 45-second fall.
Edit: After some comments, here is what we know about the astronaut’s final moments. The peak g load immediately after the “explosion” was about 12–20 g for less than 2 seconds before dropping to 4 g, and then stabilizing to free-fall within 10 seconds. That is highly survivable (for a well secured individual) and most won’t lose consciousness, certainly not trained pilots.
There was no real explosion at all, with the minimal air pressure at 45,000 feet it would be better described as disintegration with a bit of fire. The wings and tail of Challenger were shredded by aerodynamic forces, not by any explosion. The remaining portion of the hardened crew compartment stabilized into a nose down orientation within 10 seconds and maintained it through until impact.
Of the four emergency oxygen PEAPs recovered, three were manually turned on and the rest never found. They were almost certainly activated after maximum g loads had subsided which means they were conscious after the effects of the “explosion.”
That transcript which is floating around of the Challenger crew’s final moments is a complete fake. Long debunked tabloid rumor.
Yes, it is very likely in my personal opinion that at least some of the astronauts were both alive and conscious when the crew capsule struck the Atlantic ocean almost 3 minutes after their launch vehicle “exploded.” A lot of people do not want to face that fact but its probably true.
