The unused pack belonged to Scobee, NASA officials said. Salvage teams recovered four air packs at the bottom of the ocean and determined that three of them had been activated. Officials said an inspection of the crew cabin wreckage showed that the crew members were strapped into their seats when they hit the ocean. Unlike the other crew members, Scobee and Smith could not have reached their packs without getting up from their seats. The pack only could be activated manually by a crew member. He noted that the cause of death could not be determined and medical examiners from Armed Forces Institute of Pathology “could not determine whether in-flight lack of oxygen occurred.”Įach crew member had access to a pack that provided about five minutes of breathing air. Traveling at a speed of 207 m.p.h., none of the crew members inside the compartment could have survived the impact, Kerwin said. The compartment crashed into the water nearly intact 2 minutes and 45 seconds after the explosion. He noted at the press conference that he could not rule out the possibility that they may have been alive until the crew cabin hit the water. When asked after the news conference if he meant that the crew probably remained conscious for at least 10 seconds, Kerwin replied: “Yes.” “So the number of seconds that the crew may have retained consciousness would be a function of how rapidly the crew module lost pressure.” “The pressures there are so low that even with a supplemental breathing supply, the time of useful consciousness would vary between approximately 6 and 15 seconds,” Kerwin said at the news conference. The explosion occurred at an altitude of 48,000 feet, and the crew cabin continued to a peak of 65,000 feet, Kerwin said. He said the amount of time which the crew maintained consciousness “depends on the rate at which the crew module lost pressure, and that depends on the size of the hole in the crew module,” which could not be ascertained from the wreckage. In his report, Kerwin said the crew “possibly but not certainly” lost consciousness in the seconds after the orbiter began breaking apart because of loss of pressure in the crew cabin. “Medical analysis indicates that these accelerations are survivable and that the probability of major injury to crew members is low,” Kerwin wrote in a report to Truly. Kerwin, director of life sciences at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said the explosion that tore the crew compartment from the rest of the orbiter probably would not have killed or even seriously injured the crew members.
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