In 1961, Liberty Bell 7 sank after Gus Grissom's flight; 38 years later, crews recovered the capsule from more than 15,000 feet beneath the Atlantic Ocean

On the morning of July 21, 1961, Air Force pilot Virgil "Gus" Grissom rode a modified Army missile 118 miles above the Atlantic, spent five weightless minutes as only the second American ever to leave the planet, and splashed down 302 miles off Florida looking, by some accounts, like a man having a very good day. Here his hatch blew, and his capsule began to ingest seawater, and the very sea that helped him pull off a hero's feat only minutes earlier almost swallowed him up and his spacecraft as well. According to a NASA Kennedy Space Center archive, apparently a Marine rescue helicopter attempted to lift the capsule, which was underwater, but failed, and the capsule sank to the ocean floor without anyone being able to stop it. It went missing for roughly 38 years.

A capsule with a nine-word obituary: lost, presumed unrecoverable

For decades, Liberty Bell 7 was NASA's one that got away: It was perhaps the only American manned spacecraft to go missing at sea. Grissom went on to fly Gemini and was sadly lost in the Apollo 1 fire in 1967, never knowing what happened to his first spacecraft. The wreck occurred in an area of the North Atlantic known as the Blake Basin, more than 15,000 feet deep, even deeper than the Titanic. That was the interesting part: we had walked on the Moon twice, landed rovers, mapped craters ¼-million miles away, all while a piece of American space history lay in one of our familiar backyard oceans just because we didn't have the sonar resolution to find it in three miles of water.


Enter a man who did not let shipwreck be a shipwreck

However, that was changed by one obsessive underwater salvage expert, Curt Newport, who spent 14 years working on the idea, and only then did he realise that he had the technology to do it. A 2004 NASA Goddard Space Flight Center colloquium abstract states that in 1999, a Discovery Channel-sponsored expedition succeeded in finding Liberty Bell 7 in 16,043 feet of water with a side-scan sonar system called Ocean Explorer 6000.

This demonstrated how a wide-swath sonar could be used to find small, isolated objects on rough, unmapped seafloor. Two and a half months later, on July 20, 1999, a specially designed remotely operated vehicle (ROV) named Ocean Discovery was used to attach a Kevlar sling to the capsule and retrieve it to the surface, one of the deepest commercial salvage operations in history. It returned 38 years after its launch to Cape Canaveral, and on the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

The unexpected turn in the story: dimes

Here's the explanation that makes this a true tale. According to a blog article from the Cosmosphere, the Kansas museum that was leading the recovery effort, the capsule contained some 1961 Roosevelt dimes, which were placed inside the capsule by McDonnell Aircraft technicians before launch as souvenirs. They might've been expecting to find just corrosion and nothing else. It is a very human and a little mischievous detail that brings NASA back to the 1960s when it was more of a job than a monument.

An excellent 60-year-old space junk tale

It took us a long time to retrieve the spacecraft and it took a little pedantic effort after deciding to try. Fourteen years, a television network's checkbook and the best of a new kind of sonar to bring back a dented Cold War relic nobody really needed. But it's kind of what it's about that makes this story relevant.

According to the Cosmosphere blog, it took almost six months of SpaceWorks restoration to pump the salt water out of 25,000 parts and today Liberty Bell 7, the only privately owned flown spacecraft in the world, is on public display in Hutchinson, Kansas. It's a reminder to a generation that's currently grown up on Elon Musk livestreams and Mars-colony daydreams: at the time of its creation man mapped the Moon before he mapped the ocean floor of his planet. And at times the frontier we seek is not up. It's down.