Epilogue: From the depths of the ocean

Curt Newport cannot recall when the idea first occurred to him to consider the possibility of raising Liberty Bell 7 from the ocean floor. “It might have been when I read The Right Stuff, or it could be just something I thought of,” the salvage operator ventured during an interview back in 1986, a full quarter of a century after the loss of Gus Grissom’s spacecraft. All he knew back then was that it had sunk in very deep water and that any recovery effort would be an incredibly difficult task.1

A CHILDHOOD FASCINATION WITH SPACE

He was born in Oakland, California, where his father flew as an Army aviator out of Chrissy Field. Growing up with a childhood passion for space flight and undersea exploration, Curt Newport was only 10 years old and living in St. Louis, Missouri, where his father was stationed temporarily, when Liberty Bell 7 was lost on 21 July 1961, settling into the mud of the Florida Trench off the Bahamas, some three miles below the surface of the Atlantic. “I think Grissom’s capsule was probably built less than ten miles from our home,” he reflected in 2013.2

As he related in his book, Lost Spacecraft: The Search for Liberty Bell 7, the Mercury astronauts were huge heroes back then. “While Shepard and Glenn were certainly the most famous to me, I remember being taken by Grissom for no special reason. Maybe it was the way he looked or that he didn’t appear to seek out the lime­light. However, he was a central figure to me.”3

In 1974, aged 24, Newport entered into the subsea business building ship fenders in Washington, D. C. He later graduated into building deep diving systems such as div­ing bells and deck decompression chambers. After leaving a Los Angeles-based com­mercial diving school in 1977 he began working with submersible robots known as Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV). Although his expertise grew over time, he found much of the freelance work in which he was engaged, such as inspecting rusty pipelines and routine maintenance on AT&T telephone cables, to be rather less than satisfying. He began to look at people involved in ocean exploration such as Jacques Cousteau for some way to creatively inspire and challenge him. “I was interested in doing something that I felt was worthwhile with the underwater vehicles that I had worked with for so many years. I wanted to have some fun with ROVs.”

Newport says he had very little money back then, but a lot of ideas. “I started think­ing about things that had been lost in the ocean. Targets. Sunken objects that would be interesting to find and explore and I came up with two possibilities – the Titanic and Gus Grissom’s Liberty Bell 7 Mercury spacecraft.”4 In an article which he wrote before Titanic was located, he actually predicted the likely location of the ocean liner to within a couple of miles.

In 1985 he was contracted to remotely pilot the SCARAB 2 ROV, equipped with television cameras, sonar, and mechanical arms to help salvage the wreckage of an Air India 747 airliner off the coast of Ireland. A total of 329 people, including 268 Canadians, died en route from Montreal to New Delhi when the aircraft was ripped apart 31,000 feet above the Irish Sea by a bomb which was planted on board by the Sikh militant group Babbar Khalsa. It remains the deadliest aviation disaster ever to occur over a body of water.

“AI 182 was actually found by a Navy search team using a towed pinger locator and side-scan sonar before I arrived in Ireland in July of 1985,” noted Newport. “By the time I got there onboard the CCGS John Cabot, Cable and Wireless had already recovered the FDR [flight data recorder] and CVR [cockpit voice recorder] using SCARAB I. What I did was survey the crash site, a three-by-five nautical mile area, and recover wreckage using SCARAB II in conjunction with a German ship which had all the heavy lift gear. The data recorders proved nothing. But evidence of an explosion was on the wreckage we raised. We broke lots of records on those dives, one lasting 143 hours.” Altogether, the exhausting salvage operation continued for six months, ending in November 1985.5