CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The torn wreckage of the shuttle Challenger will be buried in two 90-foot-deep missile silos to protect it from the elements and provide security for the spaceship, NASA officials said Friday.
The 215,000 pounds of shuttle debris recovered during history's most massive ocean search and salvage operation will be stored indefinitely in the deactivated Minuteman ICBM silos at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station early next year.
'The storage of the Challenger debris will conclude NASA's primary activities related to the analysis and disposition of recovered hardware,' a space agency statement said.
Air Force Col. Edward O'Connor, who orchestrated the massive shuttle search operation off the coast of Florida, said using the old silos provided a low cost solution to the problem of where to store the shuttle wreckage.
'I said I would look for a close by place to store this,' he said in a recent interview. 'Putting on my Air Force hat, I said, 'Gee whiz, I know of some old missile sites over on the cape side that may be potential candidates.
'They agreed they could offer up two Minuteman tubes over there and some old blockhouses.'
The debris currently is housed at various sites around the Kennedy Space Center and the nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The location of the crew cabin remnants is a closely guarded secret even now.
The silos are roughly 15 feet wide and 90 feet deep. They provide about 31,000 cubic feet of storage space.
Once the wreckage is placed in the silos, massive concrete caps will be lowered in place. The result will be a weatherproof, controlled environment enclosure for the wreckage.
The advantage of the plan is that if engineers ever decide they need to examine a piece of debris for ongoing engineering studies, the caps can be removed, giving them access to the material.
The search for Challenger's wreckage was finally called off Aug. 28. About 45 percent of the shuttle was recovered, 50 percent of its two solid-fuel rocket boosters and 50 percent of its external fuel tank.
'Some components we chose not to recover,' O'Connor said. 'For example, there's an entire right wing out there on the ocean floor. There was no need to bring it in.'
Of the two satellites carried aloft in Challenger's payload bay, O'Connor said salvage teams recovered 95 percent of the Spartan Halley science observatory along with significant pieces of a $100 million shuttle tracking satellite.
'There'll probably be some minimal recovery activities going on for a long time,' he said. 'We have hit what we think in the recovery team to be the percentages of vehicle components that we need to recover.'
