May 1 1999
From The Space Library
After a search of nearly two weeks, a team of salvagers funded by the Discovery Channel located the Liberty Bell 7, the Mercury space capsule flown by astronaut Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, which had been lost at sea on 21 July 1961. Grissom had survived the splashdown and had been rescued from the Atlantic Ocean. He had maintained until his death in the 1967 Apollo I launchpad fire that he had done nothing that could have caused the hatch to blow out following the splashdown. The cause of the accident remained a mystery and "forever marred" Grissom's otherwise successful 15-minute suborbital flight, the nation's second piloted spaceflight. The salvagers' remotely operated submersible had located and recorded video of the capsule about 300 miles (480 kilometers) southeast of Cape Canaveral, Florida, 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) beneath the surface of the ocean. Expedition leader Curt Newport said the video showed that the capsule was in "amazingly good condition." It was "still shiny in spots," the window and parachute liner were intact, its periscope was extended, and the words "United States" and "Liberty Bell" were "plainly visible." Newport explained the difficulty of locating the capsule, comparing the attempt to find it to searching for the Titanic the Liberty Bell's capsule, smaller than one of the Titanic's boilers, was hidden in water 0.5 miles (0.8 kilometers) deeper than the doomed ocean liner. Although the submersible located two cameras and a tape recorder with the capsule, which might possibly help to explain why the hatch blew open prematurely, it was doubtful that the film from those items would be salvageable after 38 years underwater. Although the discovery of the hatch itself would more likely provide an answer, Newport estimated that the hatch could be a mile from the capsule. The capsule remained in the ocean, for recovery at a later unspecified date.
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