A MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH

In 1987, following further ROV recovery operations, Newport took on a position with Oceaneering Space Systems, which involved working on the Space Station Freedom program. By this time he had established a fairly good grasp on where Liberty Bell 7 might be located, after poring over countless documents and charts. Then he had a major breakthrough.

“While working at Oceaneering Space Systems, I learned that they were planning to do some deep water sea trials using the Gemini ROV we’d used on the Challenger salvage. It had been updated and now had a 15,000 foot depth capability, so I made the suggestion: Why not add a side-scan sonar to the trial and use the opportunity to look for Liberty Bell 7? After considerable back and forth with several Oceaneering vice presidents, they decided to give it a try using Steadfast Oceaneering’s Deep Ocean Search System (DOSS).”9

The trial eventually went ahead, and the search was conducted in the area where Newport reasoned that the capsule might reside. There was excitement when two objects – one large and one small – were located, but in a curious twist of fate they later turned out to be pieces of wreckage from a downed aircraft. After several years spent scouring NASA charts and photographs and interviewing those present when Liberty Bell 7 went down, Newport remained undiscouraged. A thorough check of weather and sea conditions on the splashdown day in 1961, as well as currents in that section of the Atlantic, led him to the conclusion that Liberty Bell 7 did not drift far before sinking. He also believed that despite the massive pressure at that depth, the capsule would have remained basically intact. The only real uncertainty he harbored was whether it had moved horizontally during its nearly hour-long fall to the ocean floor. Nevertheless he was convinced he could locate the spacecraft, and mounted two further ROV expeditions in 1992 and 1993. But these were ancillary ventures attached to other seaborne operations, and were conducted in haste.

As he commented to the author, “Actually I was discouraged much of the time and gave up on the project during certain periods. You should see all the rejection letters I have. I was very concerned about the SOFAR [Sound Fixing and Radar] bomb carried in the spacecraft, even though there was no evidence it detonated – but it should have.”10 The SOFAR device was designed to go off at a depth of 3,000 feet if the spacecraft sank, allowing recovery vessels to pinpoint its location.

Newport continued to work with ROVs on various salvage projects, including the recovery of wreckage from yet another downed airliner. On 17 July 1996 the 747 on flight TWA 800 had mysteriously exploded and crashed into the Atlantic near East Moriches, New York. This time the probable cause was an explosion in a fuel tank sparked by a short circuit. In the first two weeks on the TWA operation, Newport’s team recovered the bodies of over 50 passengers using the Navy’s MR-1 ROV.

Over the years, Newport had participated in the development and use of ROVs and knew they were now far more reliable and easier to mobilize. “Overall, by 1998, things were looking up for me,” he recalled. Then he heard that Oceaneering might be conducting some dives on the RMS Titanic for the Discovery Channel, and he became part of the team, this time in charge of remote-piloting an ROV known as Magellan. “I actually got MSNBC and Discovery the ‘promo’ which they used to advertise the [Titanic] program by flying the Magellan straight up the edge of the bow, very close and very fast – so close that I knocked off rusticles [formations of rust similar in appearance to stalactites] from the towing shackle with the priceless WHOI [Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution] high-resolution camera. A little too close I guess, but that’s what they wanted.”11

Prior to this expedition, he had written to the Discovery Channel in regard to his own near-quixotic quest to locate Liberty Bell 7. To his surprise, he was aboard the ship Ocean Discovery one day when he got a life-changing call from the Discovery Channel’s Tom Caliandro. After discussing the project it was agreed that a meeting would take place once he returned from his work on the Titanic.

“Discovery had actually already turned me down in the early 1990s regarding Liberty Bell 7. The only reason I wrote them again was at the urging of a friend of a man doing renovation work on our house; he wanted to break into documentary film making. I never expected anything to come of it. Then the next thing I knew, I was getting phone calls in Boston while mobilizing the Magellan 725.

“What happened, is that after the Titanic operation I came back home from Newfoundland because I was scheduled to do classified work for the Navy in England within a week or so. During my three days home before flying out, I met with Discovery in Bethesda, Maryland, and wrote a business plan which was delivered to Discovery while I was on my way to England. I think they gave final approval to the project early in 1999.”12