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John Fischbeck, 70, has retrieved the 150-foot-long, 12-foot-diameter solid rocket boosters on all but two shuttle missions. A master mariner, he’s tall and lean with the craggy good looks of a man who spends his life at sea. About 24 hours before a launch, Fischbeck and his crew of 10 divers and assorted seamen head to a point roughly 140 miles east of Cape Canaveral and hold a position that will have them about 10 to 15 miles from where the boosters splash down. “When the rockets hit the surface, we steam for about an hour, and if it’s a night launch we wait until dawn. The boosters are afloat, albeit about 100 feet of the rocket is underwater. The divers unfasten the three main parachutes and the drogue chute, and, if they’re not all tangled up, we winch them in on separate reels. Sometimes they’re so tangled that we have to just reel them in in one big mess.” He and his crews have done the job in 15- to 20-foot seas and never lost a rocket. Bren Wade, captain of the Liberty Star (one of the two sister ships that each brings back a booster) laughs a little when he describes taking the uninitiated on a booster-retrieval cruise: When the sonic boom of the ascending shuttle hits the ship, the passengers drop their cameras and binoculars. Both Wade and Fischbeck say the eeriest thing they recall is that when Challenger launched in January 1986, they did not hear the boom. The Liberty Star has already retrieved a booster from the first Ares launch, and Fischbeck hopes that the crews will be able to find work with Elon Musk’s SpaceX program. “There’s never been much turnover on this team,” Fischbeck says. Wade’s worry: “I don’t want to end up driving a supertanker.”
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David Burnett/Contact Press Images
Photos from: "Throttle Down" »
