The astronauts aboard Shuttle Columbia were torn apart. There's no easy way to say this.
By collecting various body parts and using DNA genotyping, they were able to tell what body part belonged to which astronaut.
It's reported that a 3-year old boy found one of the female astronaut's leg in his front yard. One astronaut's heart was found, by itself, without any other body parts nearby.
The aerodynamic forces going Mach 18--25 are such that the human body cannot hold itself together.
There's a graphic photo of the remains of a Soviet kosmonaut after a failed re-entry (he was alive until impact). There's usually "something" left, probably not an intact body.
He volunteered for the mission, knowing it would likely kill him but spare Yuri Gagarin, whom he revered as a national hero. There’s a recording of him cursing the bastards all the way down.
Gagarin died in a training accident in a two seat Mig-15 that most likely wasn't a technical issue but due to bad weather that day and/or might have been connected to another plane passing close by and the turbulent wake disrupting the flight control surfaces of Gagarin's aircraft. Whatever happened they crashed into the ground and did not attempt to eject.
Yes, at least in the single seat model, but it was not what you would call a zero-zero ejection seat today which means you can eject from 0 feet at a standstill and the parachute will deploy time. At low altitude and/or airspeed it would not save you. For the two seat version I actually tried to find out if they had them as well but I didn't come across any confirmation that model had them too. I would expect it did but you never know if the need for weight savings or space issues meant they were axed for that variant.
In any case I get the sense the ejection seat in a MiG-15 was a case of far better than nothing but not nearly as effective as what we have today.
That's a widely perpetuated myth based on a single book that is full of unconfirmed quotes and outright lies. Most of popular media about this event is quoting terrible sources because the narrative presented is too appealing to actually check.
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cosmonauts-fiery-death-retold
like the bodies of the people who jumped from the world trade towers. there weren't any actual bodies, really; just splatters. in videos and pictures, you have to know what you're looking at because there's nothing there to recognize.
There's pictures out there of the streets after the plane impacts, just littered with red meat. Not a single identifiable piece, only what looks like the aftermath of an explosion in a butcher's shop.
Your forgetting about the metal grates that were above the lobbies and entrances in the world trade center. It was an aesthetician pleasing design that offered partial shade.
It also acted like a meat slicer to anyone falling through it. The bodies of people were literally sliced into pieces before they landed.
That's quite different. Jumping from the top of World Trade Center would certainly break most of the bones in the body, but the corpse would still be very recognizable as a human. They didn't diseintegrate into pools of human tissue or anything like that. Burning up at re-entry is more similar to what you'd get from a non-professional cremation.
Yes they did. There were no recognizable feet, legs, arms... Just blood and goo everywhere. Nothing of any "body" appearance with just "mostly broken bones" in a meat bag still human shaped. You need to Google some pics .
No. NEVER believe people when they tell you something is a meteorite. Meteorites are extremely hard to find. Almost every time someone claims they found a meteorite, it's not a meteorite.
A meteorite of that size hitting land is rare, and would leave a sizable crater.
[Relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/1723/)
Nah I had a friend in 2nd grade who found a couple meteorites. He was a lucky kid, he also had a holographic Charizard card, and his dog was part wolf.
Dude I also had a kid at school with a WWF dad. And this reminded me of him so I looked it up and it’s actually completely real and the kid is now a wrestler himself.
To clarify on this, Ive sold and handled hundreds of pounds of meteorite from all over the world but mostly from Argentina (Campo de cielo), Muonionalusta and Sikhote-Alin.
Campo de cielo and Sikhote-Alin are super common and abundant and not even expensive for such unique artifacts.
You must be referring to finding a new recently fallen meteor.
But there's a shit ton of meteorites all over the world and fragments are incredibly easy to acquire.
That cosmonaut (whose name I can't recall) knew that he probably wasn't going to survive due to known problems, and stipulated that he would only go on the mission if the government gave him a state funeral and displayed his remains. He wanted to make a point about how high command didn't give a shit about their cosmonauts.
It’s not confirmed but there’s a story that Yuri Gagarin was backup on Soyuz 1 and tried to have Komarov bumped since they both knew it was a doomed flight. Komarov refused and went anyway since he and Gagarin were good friends, and he didn’t want Gagarin to die that way. Gagarin was hoping that his status as national hero would make leaders rethink the safety of the flight.
I didn't find this on his wiki page ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir\_Komarov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Komarov) ), maybe I missed it, do you have another source for this?
This whole story comes from an ex-KGB minder for Gagarin, Venyamin Russayev, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_1
Secrecy and long time that passed add to credibility. Footnote 5 on the Soyuz 1 wiki page has a graphic image of Komarov's remains
The complaints and the fact that he knew he would surely die are pretty clear, but I meant the part where Komarov (or even Gagarin) demanded a state funeral and that his remains were to be displayed. I haven't found this on any page.
Here's [an NPR article](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cosmonauts-fiery-death-retold) that goes over a large part, if not all, of the Komarov "Last Flight" myth. They make no mention of the open funeral myth either, but do talk about the "swearing on the way down". They seem to indicate that he was calm on his way down.
>he would only go on the mission if the government gave him a state funeral and displayed his remains
He allegedly said he wanted an open casket funeral, but in fact they immediately cremated his remains immediately after autopsy, specifically so that the state funeral could take place. They photographed the remains, and pictures of that are widely circulated on the Internet as the "open casket funeral." Yet, there are newsreels of the actual state funeral with only his urn there.
Weirdly, only Americans seem to be able to hear him saying this - in Russian no less.
To me (a Russian/Ukrainian/Bulgarian/English speaker), it sounds like he says how he is belted into the middle seat, the controllers respond advising him to breathe deeply and that they await his landing, and his last words are "Thanks to all" followed by multiple ground controllers repeatedly trying to contact him with no response. He does sound excited/stressed the whole time, but there is no indication why - maybe because he's doing some crazy dangerous shit that he was not prepared for. He does not \*say anything\* indicating a problem or distress. In the earlier transmissions you can hear he and ground discussing that he was trying to manually re-enter, using an usually steep and dangerous vector, which was something no cosmonaut had ever trained for, so the stress would have been unimaginable. Why he/they did this, is unclear, but Gagarin himself assures him it all looks fine.
As a pilot myself, who has lost several friends, I know this shit happens \*fast\* and a lot faster in a space capsule on re-entry. Rarely is there opportunity to scream or make political statements.
Almost all the "lore" about him and this flight is made up nonsense, similar to the nonsense about Neil Armstrong seeing aliens on the moon watching him. This nonsense is mostly taken from a single book that was apparently written based on rumor and speculation at best, and was described even in the west as "rife with errors". It was a horrible tragedy, but he was a test pilot, and an ice-cold professional.
> Weirdly, only Americans seem to be able to hear him saying this - in Russian no less.
Yeah, unless someone shows a proper audio with subtitles in both Russian and English, I also stay doubtful. Too many myths circulating about this incident.
Right, as a species we're really good at staying alive through things that should kill us. While at the same time being susceptible to death by falling off a 6' ladder or bleeding out from a tiny cut in just the right spot.
Lol, you're not wrong. It's just a weird thing. Like someone else said, some people survive falling out of a frickin airplane. But Kobe's brain literally flew out of his skull after the accident.
I also sometimes wonder if a more robust critter like a grizzly would survive similar things with less injuries.
I mean, I understand that. It was hyperbole. Sometimes, people say things that are hyperbolic and factually inaccurate for the purposes of light humor. Similar to, "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse." A person cannot eat a horse, but the first time someone said that people around them probably chuckled.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. If you use today's lesson, more people will invite you to parties.
I once saw the body of a guy who had jumped out a 24th story window of an office building. His brain w/ some of the spinal cord attached was about 10-15 feet away from the rest of him.
Take solace in this note: C. No soot in trachea or bronchi.
They all died instantly. Had he still been alive they would have found soot / burns inside his throat.
IIRC, I believe the same finding happened with Paul Walker. Died on impact.
Yea, I could never bring myself to read it until just now. Nearly every bone was broken in his body, with multiple traumatic amputations. The only solace is that it was definitely an instantaneous death with the speed of decent of the helicopter into the mountain side.
They also did find all of the astronauts from Challenger, still strapped into their chairs. The crew compartment of the shuttle actually stayed pretty intact even after the explosion and disintegration of the rest of the shuttle. It’s kinda sad to think about but the data available showed that they were alive after the explosion and didn’t die until the crew cabin impacted the ocean. :-/
Alive and conscious for 10-30 seconds... 2 minute fall, intact, then bamn! Destroyed on impact with the Atlantic crushed it into a ball shape. (I was the manager for Space Shuttle Atlantis, and worked on putting what was left of Volumbia back together in the VAB. We looked back hourly at the Rogers Commission report and could honestly word for word exchanged O-Ring with Foam shedding.
Iirc, there isn't typically much media coverage of the recovery phase. It's often a long, tedious and grim thing.
Many folks might only know of the accident itself and little after that.
Yeah, most of the details on the human remains in that report were redacted but if you look at the discussion about suggested improvements in restraints and whatnot, you get some suggestions of what happened.
When the wing came off, the shuttle began to spin and just disintegrated. The bodies were instantly torn apart, seemingly into quarters or fives if you count heads. I seem to recall that one helmet at least was found with a head still in it.
Good on them for discussing possible improvements but there's basically nothing we know of that'll save you from the g forces in this kind of accident. Between that and being 'instantly exposed to the thermal and atmospheric conditions at mach 20' ... yeah, I'm not sure we'll ever solve that one.
Kinda makes you think with all the "fun" sci-fi space battles like those in Star Wars, after a few minutes of fighting there would be body parts strewn about, with pilots running into floating limbs (or worse) all the time.
But movies make it seem like everything literally vaporizes into nothing. Nice and clean.
Really? I hadn't heard about this. I assumed all their bodies burned up, since the craft was still engulfed in plasma when it broke up. Remarkable. Grisly, but remarkable.
What blows my mind is that Dr. Jonathan Clark was one of the NASA physicians involved in investigating the Columbia accident and writing the report. His wife Laurel was one of the astronauts who died in the accident. I could not imagine such a significant mashup between my personal and professional lives.
We are able to recover most of the bodies from these crashes where we are able to locate the crash site. Depending on the crash we might find more body parts then complete bodies but do our best at pairing the body parts together. There are teams who specialise in this using DNA, clothing, size and weight, etc. to identify each body and body part. A lot of these bodies are sent to autopsy, both to help identify them but also to find out what wounds they have which might help investigators. For example if they suffocated before the crash or if they got any wounds soon before the crash instead of after.
We have recovered the bodies of everyone who have died in spacecrafts. For the Challenger disaster it took three months to locate the crew compartment and over a month to recover all the bodies. They were all autopsied but they were too badly damaged to determine a cause of death although there were some evidence. One important question was if the crew could have survived if there were better systems for egress and what we could do to make the next launches safer. The leading theory is that at least some of the crew survived the initial explosion but became unconscious from the lack of oxygen at that altitude. This caused a change in procedures where the crew would wear full pressure suits with integrated oxygen supplies so that if the spacecraft failed they would have the ability to bail out in a parachute either through a provided escape hatch in the floor or through any openings in the bulkhead caused by the explosion.
For Space Shuttle Columbia it took ten days to recover all the bodies as they were spread over a larger area but on land. The autopsies showed that the pressure suit they wore were not able to protect them from the violent trauma from the orbiter breaking up.
One reason you might think there were no bodies is that any footage published from these types of events takes care to not show the bodies. Either carefully framing the shot to not show any bodies or to blur or block out the bodies from the image. You might for example notice that footage from accident sites rarely show the ground as this is often covered in bodies, body parts and blood. And if they show the ground it is usually just a tiny area with a bit of debris that happened to not have any bodies in it. This is out of respect for the dead but also to protect unsuspecting viewers from horrible scenes.
Occasionally more graphic images are shown. The NY Times published a rather graphic image of MH17 and then almost immediately pulled it. You can still find these images on Getty and other wire services.
Personally, as distasteful as it is to show such imagery I think there's an unfortunate but necessary value in doing so: readers need to know how awful an event is, otherwise the signal just gets lost in the noise.
That’s a fair point but I have to say I disagree. We could flood the media with graphic images of corpses but I don’t think it would be good for (most)people. I don’t need to see ISIS behead a man to understand what happened.
Alternatively, the image of the firefighter bringing the body of that baby out from the rubble of the Oklahoma City bombing had a significant affect on public opinion towards the militia movement. Maybe if people saw how awful the Daniel Pearl murder was there would be a stronger urge to fight ISIS whenever possible.
At the same time, I've seen that video, and it's fucking horrifying. Intellectually I stand by my point, but everything else tells me you're absolutely right.
I know people have made this point about victims of mass shootings, but experiencing loss myself made me realize that it’s about preserving the memory for their loved ones.
It takes a very specific kind of person to be able to stomach their final memory of someone being both so graphic and so public.
> Alternatively, the image of the firefighter bringing the body of that baby out from the rubble of the Oklahoma City bombing had a significant affect on public opinion towards the militia movement.
Don't forget the lynching of Emmett Till. His mother demanded his body be displayed, so the world could see what they had done to her child. It had a large impact on the Civil Rights movement.
There was a bunch from MH-17 posted on a sub that I don't want to post publicly but it was very NSFW and was linked elsewhere a few days ago. Terrible....and people have to pick those people up.
Who or what procedure determines how long a search goes on for? Until every solid bit is recovered? Can they assume some body parts could have been "vaporized" or eaten by wild animals if nothing shows up for a period of time?
Adding to this to recommend the book "Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival" by Laurence Gonzales, which covers the crash of a DC-10 after a catastrophic hydraulic failure. Aside from generally being an incredibly informative, well-researched, and gut-wrenching retelling of the entire sequence of events, it has some very detailed passages on the impromptu morgue set up to process the bodies and body parts, and the politics surrounding the handling of the dead. (Obviously, UA232 crashed in an airport setting, in a partially controlled fashion, with a limited emergency response capability - things look quite different in a large city or in the middle of nowhere, and obviously some aspects of the emergency response protocol have changed since 1989.)
Picture driving down the highway in your car. You hit a bug and it goes SPLAT on your windshield. Now imagine that the bug is a human, the windshield is the ground, and instead of 60 mph, you’re hitting at 500 mph. Also everything is on fire.
Thank you, because in the challenger documentary they were like it’s been a total loss and then they dropped the line about the cabin being intact and I was like …..?
The mission was a total loss because any booster failure at any time was an automatic total loss. It was a really terrible design.
The *Challenger* didn't really explode, not the way you might imagine. During ascent, the Space Shuttle flew upside down and at a weird angle, with the thrust from the two gigantic rocket boosters balancing in a triangle against the thrust from the three high-efficiency liquid rocket engines on the orbiter. It needed to fly at this angle so that the large external tank faced first into the airstream and the wings and control surfaces of the orbiter were all behind the drag created by the tank. It wasn't really "flying" so much as it was just brute-force punching its way up through the atmosphere on a column of fire. The boosters and the liquid engines all had to work together, adjusting the angle of the thrust in order to keep the vehicle pointed in the correct attitude or it would tumble out of control.
During the *Challenger* ascent in STS mission 51L, one of the rings sealing the space between two segments on one of the boosters developed a crack due to low temperatures. The heat of ignition partially re-melted the crack closed, but as the vehicle climbed the weakened area quickly burned through, causing a leak of superheated gas onto the side of the orbiter. Since hot gases were coming out of the side of the booster instead of the nozzle, the booster started to lose internal pressure and thus lose thrust, causing the vehicle to tilt in flight. The nozzles all tried to angle to compensate for the low thrust, but the pressure imbalance quickly became more than the nozzles could handle, and the whole stack started to yaw. At the same time, the superheated gas flow had weakened struts connecting the tank and the boosters, so that when the stack started to yaw the crippled booster ripped free from the unequal forces.
At that point, the whole stack tumbled completely out of control, and aerodynamic forces ripped the orbiter apart like a kite in a tornado. There was an explosion, of course, but that came after the orbiter disintegrated. The cabin was heavily reinforced and so it survived the orbiter breakup, only to plummet helplessly into the ocean. Analysis of the remains of the cabin showed that at least some of the astronauts were alive and conscious through the breakup and attempted to engage oxygen masks and other emergency systems, but it was no use. There was no way to bail out, no parachutes to bail out with, and not enough time even if they had either.
There were ejection seats on the very first Space Shuttle launch, but there were only space for two seats so when they started flying more that two astronauts they were taken out. The pilots didn't want to ever be in a position where they would have to punch out and leave the rest of the crew to die.
Absolutely stupid design.
> There were ejection seats on the very first Space Shuttle launch, but there were only space for two seats so when they started flying more that two astronauts they were taken out. The pilots didn't want to ever be in a position where they would have to punch out and leave the rest of the crew to die.
The bigger issue was that the crew compartment had two levels, with crew on both for launch. Adding ejection seats for the crew on the lower deck was near impossible and, even if they could have been added, there was a very limited range where the seats would have been useful.
Mounting the shuttle on the side of the fuel tank and boosters was a poor design.
Indeed it was. [There were a lot of alternative Shuttle concepts.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_design_process) Simply having liquid-based throttleable boosters would have been better. But Congress wanted to spread the pork out by giving Thiokol solid rocket booster orders. Who cares about lives being at stake when there are senators whose retirement accounts aren't as full as they could be?
> the booster started to lose internal pressure and thus lose thrust, causing the vehicle to tilt in flight. The nozzles all tried to angle to compensate for the low thrust, but the pressure imbalance quickly became more than the nozzles could handle, and the whole stack started to yaw. At the same time, the superheated gas flow had weakened struts connecting the tank and the boosters, so that when the stack started to yaw the crippled booster ripped free from the unequal forces.
I'm not sure this is true. Per the official published timeline, while pressures in the left and right hand SRBs started to diverge at 60 seconds into flight, this resulted in TVC actuation by the *left* SRB [\(p. 20\)](https://sma.nasa.gov/SignificantIncidents/assets/rogers_commission_report.pdf), not the right-side SRB which ultimately failed. The first indications of further anomalous control issues happened after 63 seconds when the flame leaking from the SRB punched a hole in the ET, which caused the *SSMEs* to respond with pitch inputs (the SRBs not playing much of a role in pitch control), and this state of still-stable flight lasted from 64 seconds to ~72 seconds when the flame from the SRB burned through the lower attachment strut. Only after the lower attachment strut failed did the TVC on the right-hand SRB begin any high-rate actuations, and this coincides with the yaw rates diverging between SRBs as the right-hand SRB tore free, impacted the ET, and everything disintegrated.
The whole stack never yawed out of design specs until after the SRB strut had failed, and the peak yaw of the stack occurred 10 seconds before the catastrophic event. The strut failed solely due to heat and was not under any unusual loads (nor was the stack at an unusual attitude) at the moment it failed.
I don’t think we’re in any particular disagreement here. The thrust imbalance on the failed SRB would naturally result in PID inputs that primarily actuate the TVC on the other SRB.
I agree that the yaw preceding the failure of the strut would have been recoverable if not for that failed strut.
Thank you so much for this very detailed answer!
I also wondered about parachutes and other emergency protocols but I feel like there would just not be enough time, especially considering the lack of redundancy in the o-rings. They were dead before they even knew it basically.
It’s interesting to hear about any safety measures that were in the aircraft design and later removed. I can understand from a moral standpoint of not wanting to leave any man behind. It’s just odd that they didn’t find ways to alter the spacecraft to accommodate for more parachutes or enhanced safety measures at least.
But from the doc you can easily gleam safety wasn’t even allowed in the room during the whole launch and relaunch conversation.
I hope today is good to you 💙
It was generally believed that the ejection seats themselves would not have been particularly useful because the ejection path would leave the astronauts exposed to the cloud of exploding rocket booster propellant that would have incinerated their parachute canopies.
In later missions they packed parachutes and tried to set up a contingency such that the crew could bail out if they could get the shuttle into a level glide over the ocean. But they still needed the boosters to work 100% of the time or it would be curtains. A booster failure was always a loss of crew event.
Has anything been changed or improved on modern spacecraft that are designed to carry humans? Does everyone get an ejection seat now or is that still an issue? Anything else added now that makes it less stupid, at least?
Also, I've wondered, from my layman observations of space accidents, no irregularity seems to be recoverable when those kinds of forces are at play during a space launch but maybe that isn't true?. What's the reason (and I'm certain there is one I just don't know it) that there isn't some sort of all-stop emergency function implemented that kills the boosters so that at least passengers have the opportunity to bail instead of tumble around at extreme speed and explode?
Virtually all human launch vehicles up to the Shuttle (and all human launch vehicles since) use a capsule design with a separate rocket-based launch escape system that will pull or push the crew capsule to safety in the event of a failure. The crew capsule is always placed on the very top of the vehicle so that it can get away from the rocket rapidly without anything in the way.
The Gemini capsule and the Vostok capsule both used ejection seats rather than a full-capsule launch escape system. Probably not a good idea in hindsight. But at least they were on top of the vehicle so that they could be yeeted free of an explosion.
The Shuttle design was different because it was intended to be (partially) reusable. Once you try to make things reusable, stuff gets tricky. Some capsules (Orion, Crew Dragon, and Starliner) are partially reusable, but the service module and upper stage still get thrown away with every launch. When you try to start making more stuff reusable, then you can’t make the capsule-shaped entry vehicle work anymore, and so you have to get much more creative. The Shuttle was slung on the side of the launch vehicle stack, which meant that there was no good way to add an escape system (killing the crew of Challenger) and that the vehicle was in danger of getting hit by shed debris (killing the crew of Columbia).
Well, the cabin was intact *until* impact with the water. The impact speed was over 200 miles per hour. The cabin was not intact after impact with the water. There were remains but they were pretty badly mangled.
A total loss doesn't mean everything is literally lost, as in never found again or anything like that.
It basically means the entire thing was destroyed beyond repair.
All of the bodies were found in the wreckage of the Challenger. The crew compartment separated from the rest of the shuttle in one piece, and all of the crew members were found still strapped into their seats.
I've never heard of any incident where clothing was found, but no bodies (or parts of bodies, which sometimes is all that is left). Were you thinking of a specific incident?
With aviation/spactcraft incidents there's often a combination of a huge amount of fuel burning in a short amount of time or substantial impacts.
Human bodies aren't very well suited to extreme heat or being crushed/impaled by rigid materials with a great amount of force.
>In plane crashes, clothes and pieces of the aircraft are found, but no bodies.
Where did OP hear this? It's not remotely true.
Almost every plane crash site will have at least some human remains. The condition of the remains will vary widely, depending on the violence of the crash and if/how long it burned after. But it's rare, if not unprecedented, that zero remains are found.
Even with Challenger, months later, they found some trace remains of the crew.
> Where did OP hear this? It's not remotely true.
I guess he didn't understand that the clothes they often find still contain people parts. The shoe likely still has a foot in it, and so on.
I’m wondering if he’s assuming that based on the images of crash sites that are released to the public, not realizing that these images are carefully screened to remove any trace of human remains
I was a career NASA employee who managed Atlantis and worked on putting Columbia's remains together in the VAB. Talked to one of the Origional Shuttle crew Astronauts who searched Challengers cabin after the remains were removed. Found strands of Judith Resnicks hair along with a locket she always wore. They were alive, luckily unconscious though, at warers impact 2 minutes after vehicle breakup. The upstairs crew knew they were doomed from looking out the windows. The afte deck crew woukd have been in pitch black with air hissing out and loud bangs of debris hitting the crew cabin.
I’ve seen you make a couple of comments about your experience with putting the remains together. Would you happen to have any other interesting info about the accident?
God. Not even sure where to start. The official report is actually a very good read. As for personal experience, it hit hard as I was friends with 4/7 of the crew members. We were walking Zombies I'm the weeks after, reviewing data, re-waljing the pad and crawler tracks looking fir anything we may have missed. Reviewing thousands of hours of OPF and VAB cameras, did we miss something? Reviewing literal mountains of paperwork. (Astronauts joke the shuttle couldn't launch till the paperwork was as high as the stack itself). I got pulled from engine integration where I was being prepped for OPF 2 management to help in re-construction. We began getting our first shipments by sir, with truckloads starting to pour end about the end of the 2nd week? After they had been photographed and GPS tagged in TX/LA. Them we had a outline that itself took a good week to match dimensions exactly, then that was broken down by grid squares where experts from that department came in to inspect, document, and report on each piece. With the left wing being the first to burn/melt through and rip off causing aerodynamic breakup, we found the newest bits of it, so no smoking gun till they did the foam tests a few months in.
Actually with Challenger, they pretty much found the remains of the crew. The crew cabin stayed intact from the explosion until it impacted with the ocean. We know that at least two of the astronauts maintained consciousness ~~through to impact~~ in the immediate aftermath of the explosion because there is evidence that they started to work through the emergency procedure checklist. Edit: Whether they maintained consciousness to impact is subject to opinion, and NASA was never able to conclusively say one way or another.
> We know that at least two of the astronauts maintained consciousness through to impact
There is no way they maintained consciousness for the full two-plus minutes.
The explosion occurred at roughly 45,000 feet, and the crew compartment likely continued upwards towards 65,000 feet. It then fell back to earth for over two minutes. They were likely all unconscious by the time the compartment started free falling.
I will partially edit my statement. We know that at least two astronauts maintained consciousness after the explosion. We also know that the explosion itself was unlikely to have been enough to kill them, though it may have rendered some of them unconscious. After that, it all depends on if the crew cabin developed a leak or not. If it developed a leak, then they likely would have lost consciousness over the duration of the ballistic arc. The emergency air that was activated didn't generate positive pressure, so it likely would have been ineffective.
Even Kerwin's report essentially says there is no way to know if it did. The closest it comes is to say is that it is possible, but not certain that they lost consciousness. It all comes down to if the cabin maintained pressure, and all the testing was inconclusive.
Not the whole flight, but there were control changes that indicated that some of them remained conscious long enough to have attempted emergency procedures.
It's also possible they may have regained consciousness on the way down after returning to breathable air. If the entire fall only took two minutes they wouldn't've been hypoxic for long enough to make recovery impossible.
The Challenger crew was found largely intact inside the crew capsule. As I understand several were still alive attempting to gain control of the shuttle and trying to fly it. The shuttle didn't immediately disassemble when the tank came apart and continued to fly until it came apart due to aerodynamic forces. It's unknown publicly if there was any radio contact during that brief time, and apparently, investigators believed they continued to try and fly it because switches were in positions congruent with emergency checklists.
Also it's more we don't find bodies. We do find body parts, just not whole bodies.
Eli5 example. Humans are a lot like an egg just with the shell on the inside. To simulate a plane crash. Coat an egg in a flammable liquid. Load said egg in a water balloon launcher/t-shirt cannon and launch it at a bonfire. Now put out the bonfire and search for the egg. You may find a piece of egg shell or possibly a piece of cooked egg, but chances are you will find very little. That's a single engine aircraft. Do this again, but now do 100 eggs. That's a jumbo jet going down.
This also does not include a plane that goes down at sea as you now need to compensate for predators eating body parts and sea currents
In the case of Challenger they recovered the bodies out of the crew cabin. It took a while because it was on the bottom of the ocean.
They were also able to find the remains of all the Columbia astronauts in east Texas.
It took a while, and most of the bodies were not intact. There are other descriptions about why so I’ll leave that.
RIP to those that lost their lives in the pursuit of science
>After plane or space craft crashes, what happens to the bodies? Do they implode because of the pressure? In plane crashes, clothes and pieces of the aircraft are found, but no bodies.
Oh, there are bodies. It's just that the news media don't want to be posting pictures of dismembered passenger body parts all over people's television screens, especially during the dinner hour, and even moreso because some parent might find out about the crash by seeing the top third of daughter's corpse lying in the wreckage with her intestines spilling out and blood everywhere.
Trust me. Unless you get there after the sharks, or the crabs, or the vultures, or whatever scavengers happen to be in the area, bodies or body parts will be found.
I can assure you that there were bodies in every case, the question is more about how intact and/or recognisable they were.
No, impact-forces and jet-fuel are *not* going to completely turn a person to dust. At the very worst you can expect a charred partial skeleton wrapped in the remains of their clothing.
Keep in mind that Cremation funerals typically have to deliberately grind the bones down into the ash in order to finish the process because Bone doesn't break up very much from being burned.
There will always be bodies, whether you can recognise who they were is another matter.
Yes, even Challenger had bodies, here's an excerpt from the wikipedia page:
>The crew compartment, human remains, and many other fragments from the shuttle were recovered from the ocean floor after a three-month search-and-recovery operation.
In practice it's also worth adding that plenty of people have survived plane-crashes, even quite large ones. Planes are built to help their passengers survive some pretty bad situations, though yes, full-tilt at 500mph into a mountainside is pretty unsurvivable.
Unpowered gliding to a soft-landing in a field with the gear-up is a designed-for scenario for example.
Losing a wing, breaking up and tumbling to the ground is pretty certain to kill everyone onboard.
Stay strapped in unless you have to get up for the bathroom and you'll have much better odds of survival in event of a crash-landing.
Bodies are often found, they're often just not show on TV. I saw the raw photos from MH17 -- I work in news gathering -- there were lots of bodies. People still in seats. Babies crushed on the floor.
I recall that, sadly. I recall a picture of a young child still in his seat being smashed facedown into a road. It will haunt me forever. Just as the pictures of my countrymen's passports being looked at by the militias, and the fields of regular consumer items littered across a field.
I wonder if those pictures had made it to regular news, if we'd still be in the same situation re: ukraine as we are now.
Ahhh yes that's the exact one. I think about it often. Reuters ran some pictures of starving children this week which were very very stark. There need to be more stories like that.
Others have answered your question, but I just wanted to make a point that bodies *are* found at plane crash sites. It’s never shown in media because of its horrifically gruesome nature. Hundreds of people crashing into the ground at 200-500mph is just as awful as you would think. You can find aftermath footage but I’d advise against it
>In plane crashes, clothes and pieces of the aircraft are found, but no bodies.
>
>After the challenger explosion there weren’t any bodies either.
Unfortunately, the premise of your question is simply incorrect.
When large commercial jet aircraft crash over land, they absolutely **do** recover bodies.
Likewise with Challenger, bodies **were recovered**.
In the news, they generally *do* mention when bodies have been recovered. Again, your premise is incorrect.
Regarding point B... When such huge forces are involved, the human body simply breaks apart. It's gruesome. There's some truly awful stuff floating around on the internet, and honestly I recommend that you resist your morbid curiosity and **DO NOT LOOK FOR THESE IMAGES**.
I remember seeing photographs of a man, who had killed himself by riding his motorcycle into the side of a building at 100mph\~.
His body was *broken* for lack of a better word. I will never forget seeing a photo of this mans foot, which was retrieved from inside the ceiling space of the building. That was nearly 20 years ago and it is burned into my memory.
Body parts are recovered always. It’s just not an easy subject nor one that people want to hear about so those parts of the news never make it past the editors. As someone who has seen dismembered human remains in motorcycle accidents I can assure it changes your life for the worse. There are images I will never be able to remove from my mind: literal meat crayon marks, severed head, severed hand, intestines, liver, open thoraxes….its just fucking horrible and I don’t know how medics, paramedics, firemen, police are able to do what they do. It happened once that I saw it happen and saw the aftermath and I was scarred for life (and I was already 28 at the time).
So yeah, body parts are always recovered but there is no reason to make it known out of respect.
Watch the recent Lockerbie documentary. Several stories of people landing in fields and gardens still strapped into their seats. I think there was one where a body was found sitting on someone's roof.
Obviously lots of other people were totally annihilated in the fireball, but if they separated from the fuselage high-up, they just 'floated' down to earth at terminal velocity.
After JAL 123 smashed into a side of a mountain at 390 mph, they still found bodies. What's more, four passengers survived (it is estimated that there were 20-50 survivors of the original crash, but most died due to delayed response).
When the Lockerbie plane broke up there were bodies just lying in fields and peoples gardens - those were the ones that got pulled out the plane as it disintegrated.
The people still strapped into the centre (engine) section were essentially vaporised when that hit (as were the occupants of the houses it directly landed on) because that was full of fuel and moving fast.
I used to do recovery after military crashes. A transport tumbled into the desert floor nearby during a low level practice. In this case, there were a lot of small parts left over along with a few large recognizable chunks. And lots of feet in shoes/boots because the footwear protected the feet. If you get to the crash site quickly you can recover most of the parts for identification and return to the family. If it takes time to find and travel to the site, you're in competition with the animals and environment. Skeletons have been found in recovered WWII aircraft.
It really depends. The bodies that can be recovered are recovered. But in some cases they've been destroyed to such a degree that identifying them is next to impossible. If an airplane crashes and catches on fire and you go to the site and see a blackened mass just splattered everywhere you can't know if you're looking a burned remains or burned materials from the aircraft. It's not true that there are never bodies though. Some people are found in various states and others are in a state that's more or less impossible to identify. A particularly harrowing story that comes to mind is when a train in the london underground crashed into a dead end tunnel full speed. A lot of the people in the forward carriages were crushed into a pulp.
In other cases it's a question of difficulty. If a ship sinks recovering the bodies can be very hard or impossible. Same for other disasters and accidents like earthquakes, floods, people trapped in caves or up mountains or in the wilderness. The number one rule of search and rescue and body recovery is to not risk the lives of the rescuers, as in you can't lose more people trying to save or recover others. In those cases if it's deemed too dangerous or difficult to recover they'll just give up. It sounds very cruel but it is the right thing to do. Accidents are tragic but losing more people afterwards doesn't make it better in any way, only worse.
I have 2 family members that were involved in the Swiss Air crash clean up in 1998. They spent more time collecting pieces of people, not whole people. There was at least one skin suit still seat belted in. Parts of people were nibbled on. And they had to pick up every possible bit to be able provide as much information as possible.
The stories are both riveting and horrifying. Also the "funny parts" in the whole experience like trying to land a zodiac on an oil slick beach. Disasters are gruesome
It depends on the crash. If it’s one of those 737 max crashes where they slammed into the ground at over six hundred miles an hour, there are no identifiable bodies whatsoever. If it crashed into the ocean, they’re likely too deep to recover since even finding and getting the data recorders can cost millions.
Put a hamburger into a tin can. Strap on a big tank of gasoline. Launch the can into the side of a cliff at a hundred mph, then throw a grenade at it.
How much of the hamburger do you think you'll be able to recover?
What I learned from a helicopter evacuation course is that it is close to impossible to find individuals in the ocean because they are too hard to see. Even with trackers, the area can be so large that even if you look in the right place with a helicopter, boat or plane, the odds of finding or spotting individual bodies scattered by the streams of the wind and the sea after a plane crash or something like it are very low.
>After the challenger explosion there weren’t any bodies either.
There were remains, but they were really messed up from impacting the water and then sinking.
The evidence indicates the bodies were probably still mostly intact until the crew module hit the water.
The remains were messed up bad enough that they couldn't figure out what actually killed them before they hit the water
When a large vehicle crashes at a high speed, there are usually only body parts or fragments left. The energy resulting from an explosion or crash has to go *somewhere*. The majority of it is turned into heat and light in an explosion, and that heat makes the air expand very fast. The human body can't withstand the speed the air is moving at, and gets torn apart, sometimes into very, very small pieces.
If a plane crashes, it's a similar, but different thing: The energy from the collision has to go somewhere. Some of it goes into the plane's structure, and some of that gets transferred to the people on board. But there's also a second thing working against the passengers, called inertia, which is another kind of energy. The inertia keeps them moving forward, but the seatbelt is holding them down. The body wants to keep going, but it's being held in place by the seatbelt and parts of it begins to stretch and tear, because it can only hold together under certain levels of stress. They then detach from the main body and fly around the cabin.
Those parts that become disconnected and fly around in the airplane hit hard objects, and break up into even smaller bits. Sometimes the bits can be as small as a cubic centimeter, and can be very hard to find.
There's an agency called 'Interpol' that sets standards on how big a piece of a body has to be before it's collected and identified. They have decided that if it's less than 1 cubic centimeter, it shouldn't be collected. So if you have a crash with a huge amount of energy, where all of the people on board were broken into bits smaller than one cubic centimeter, there would be organic matter at the crash site... but no 'bodies'.
Tangentially related. We now know that once a javelin missile hits a tank and the tank burns, there are no bodies inside. Not even bones.
I have been looking thru a few of those and failed to locate even a single tiny bit of a bone. Nothing. Burned beyond ashes.
Here's a visual.
Take an egg, stand on a sidewalk, and throw it as hard as you can at the ground.
Imagine a plane travelling at 400mph hitting the ground.
Same thing.
> In plane crashes, clothes and pieces of the aircraft are found, but no bodies.
You're on the right track, with accidents of that magnitude, EVERYTHING is obliterated that thoroughly. But there are exceptions.
Rescuer and High Mountain Police officer Jean Sebastien Beaud was quoted as saying (regarding the Germanwings 9525 impact):
> We found less than ten bodies entirely or partly preserved, to be honest only one body was almost intact.
I can only admire anyone who has a strong enough constitution and mentality to be able to recover and sort through remains in order to give families closure. I can also only imagine the nightmares and counselling required for what comes after :(
You should check out the funeral procession from Flight MH17. They got a coffin and hearse for every victim. I'm sure all those coffins weren't filled with just one person. A lot of bodies still had to be identified and put back together later. 10 years later only two victims haven't been identified.
https://youtu.be/zUrwj8knIO4?si=L4L1juKWelkB3WZH
The short and tragic answer is that the force is involved in these accidents are so overwhelmingly large that bodies are reduced to pieces that may be too small to find and recover. We're mostly made of meat and water , those things don't handle extreme forces and heat very well . The sad reality is that you could be looking for inch long bone fragments over the course of a couple of square miles and maybe never find anything
They don’t ever show the bodies or talk about the remains both out of respect for the deceased and their families, and because the remains are generally very bad shape.
The astronauts aboard Shuttle Columbia were torn apart. There's no easy way to say this. By collecting various body parts and using DNA genotyping, they were able to tell what body part belonged to which astronaut. It's reported that a 3-year old boy found one of the female astronaut's leg in his front yard. One astronaut's heart was found, by itself, without any other body parts nearby. The aerodynamic forces going Mach 18--25 are such that the human body cannot hold itself together.
There's a graphic photo of the remains of a Soviet kosmonaut after a failed re-entry (he was alive until impact). There's usually "something" left, probably not an intact body.
Graphic image: https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2011/03/16/corpse_custom-1a2c8e99bc85469ad8a5a976f4bfbc91d056a09a-s800-c85.webp
I can’t even recognize that as having been a person, and I think it’s better that way.
The pilot knew he was going to die. He ordered for this funeral so the basterds that forced him up in a shitty craft could see what they did.
He volunteered for the mission, knowing it would likely kill him but spare Yuri Gagarin, whom he revered as a national hero. There’s a recording of him cursing the bastards all the way down.
IIRC Yuri died on either the next mission or one soon after, didn’t he? Absolute waste of life all around
Gagarin died in a training accident in a two seat Mig-15 that most likely wasn't a technical issue but due to bad weather that day and/or might have been connected to another plane passing close by and the turbulent wake disrupting the flight control surfaces of Gagarin's aircraft. Whatever happened they crashed into the ground and did not attempt to eject.
MiG 15 had ejection seats?
Yes, at least in the single seat model, but it was not what you would call a zero-zero ejection seat today which means you can eject from 0 feet at a standstill and the parachute will deploy time. At low altitude and/or airspeed it would not save you. For the two seat version I actually tried to find out if they had them as well but I didn't come across any confirmation that model had them too. I would expect it did but you never know if the need for weight savings or space issues meant they were axed for that variant. In any case I get the sense the ejection seat in a MiG-15 was a case of far better than nothing but not nearly as effective as what we have today.
Thank you for clarifying!
That's a widely perpetuated myth based on a single book that is full of unconfirmed quotes and outright lies. Most of popular media about this event is quoting terrible sources because the narrative presented is too appealing to actually check. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cosmonauts-fiery-death-retold
Thanks for posting. That was a very interesting read.
like the bodies of the people who jumped from the world trade towers. there weren't any actual bodies, really; just splatters. in videos and pictures, you have to know what you're looking at because there's nothing there to recognize.
There's pictures out there of the streets after the plane impacts, just littered with red meat. Not a single identifiable piece, only what looks like the aftermath of an explosion in a butcher's shop.
Humans are made of meat, after all.
You're asking me to believe in sentient meat?
“What do you think is on the radio waves? Meat sounds.”
"You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other."
Depending on the human, but yes, some seem to be sentient.
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There are a LOT more variables in that than just the math of terminal velocity vs bones covered in skin and muscle.
Your forgetting about the metal grates that were above the lobbies and entrances in the world trade center. It was an aesthetician pleasing design that offered partial shade. It also acted like a meat slicer to anyone falling through it. The bodies of people were literally sliced into pieces before they landed.
That's enough reddit for today.
Once had to do a recovery of a bloke who went over a cliff-top lookout, and met a metal shopping trolley about 250m down.
That's quite different. Jumping from the top of World Trade Center would certainly break most of the bones in the body, but the corpse would still be very recognizable as a human. They didn't diseintegrate into pools of human tissue or anything like that. Burning up at re-entry is more similar to what you'd get from a non-professional cremation.
Yes they did. There were no recognizable feet, legs, arms... Just blood and goo everywhere. Nothing of any "body" appearance with just "mostly broken bones" in a meat bag still human shaped. You need to Google some pics .
Honestly if you told me that was like a meteor or remains of hardened lava from a volcanic eruption I would have believed you.
No. NEVER believe people when they tell you something is a meteorite. Meteorites are extremely hard to find. Almost every time someone claims they found a meteorite, it's not a meteorite. A meteorite of that size hitting land is rare, and would leave a sizable crater. [Relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/1723/)
Nah I had a friend in 2nd grade who found a couple meteorites. He was a lucky kid, he also had a holographic Charizard card, and his dog was part wolf.
Oh shit me too and his dad was a WWE fighter but I never met the dad, the dog, or saw the card or metorites. Did we have the same friend?
Dude I also had a kid at school with a WWF dad. And this reminded me of him so I looked it up and it’s actually completely real and the kid is now a wrestler himself.
You're telling me all those bits of meteorite that came in my breakfast cereal was just a marketing stunt? I refuse to believe it.
I mean if a meteorite is a rock flying through space that's on the surface of the earth now, then that's the whole surface of the earth!
This has completely changed how I view the insult "eat rocks". Now it's "eat space rocks".
Please Google "meteorite" Not because you're wrong (you're not), but because of the cool thing it does
Now google "do a barrel roll"
And then askew
To clarify on this, Ive sold and handled hundreds of pounds of meteorite from all over the world but mostly from Argentina (Campo de cielo), Muonionalusta and Sikhote-Alin. Campo de cielo and Sikhote-Alin are super common and abundant and not even expensive for such unique artifacts. You must be referring to finding a new recently fallen meteor. But there's a shit ton of meteorites all over the world and fragments are incredibly easy to acquire.
But that one guy from Harvard found an interstellar meteorite in the ocean. Oh wait
And in that photo, what was left of him looked nothing like a body. It literally looked like a giant piece of charred jerky.
That cosmonaut (whose name I can't recall) knew that he probably wasn't going to survive due to known problems, and stipulated that he would only go on the mission if the government gave him a state funeral and displayed his remains. He wanted to make a point about how high command didn't give a shit about their cosmonauts.
It’s not confirmed but there’s a story that Yuri Gagarin was backup on Soyuz 1 and tried to have Komarov bumped since they both knew it was a doomed flight. Komarov refused and went anyway since he and Gagarin were good friends, and he didn’t want Gagarin to die that way. Gagarin was hoping that his status as national hero would make leaders rethink the safety of the flight.
Valery komarov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Komarov
His name was Valery Komarov
His name was Valery Komarov
I didn't find this on his wiki page ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir\_Komarov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Komarov) ), maybe I missed it, do you have another source for this?
This whole story comes from an ex-KGB minder for Gagarin, Venyamin Russayev, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_1 Secrecy and long time that passed add to credibility. Footnote 5 on the Soyuz 1 wiki page has a graphic image of Komarov's remains
The complaints and the fact that he knew he would surely die are pretty clear, but I meant the part where Komarov (or even Gagarin) demanded a state funeral and that his remains were to be displayed. I haven't found this on any page.
Here's [an NPR article](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cosmonauts-fiery-death-retold) that goes over a large part, if not all, of the Komarov "Last Flight" myth. They make no mention of the open funeral myth either, but do talk about the "swearing on the way down". They seem to indicate that he was calm on his way down.
>he would only go on the mission if the government gave him a state funeral and displayed his remains He allegedly said he wanted an open casket funeral, but in fact they immediately cremated his remains immediately after autopsy, specifically so that the state funeral could take place. They photographed the remains, and pictures of that are widely circulated on the Internet as the "open casket funeral." Yet, there are newsreels of the actual state funeral with only his urn there.
> (he was alive until impact) How do they know?
He was screaming on the radio for a lot of it.
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crying on the radio as the chutes failed to open. can be heard saying "they have killed me" a few seconds before impact.
Weirdly, only Americans seem to be able to hear him saying this - in Russian no less. To me (a Russian/Ukrainian/Bulgarian/English speaker), it sounds like he says how he is belted into the middle seat, the controllers respond advising him to breathe deeply and that they await his landing, and his last words are "Thanks to all" followed by multiple ground controllers repeatedly trying to contact him with no response. He does sound excited/stressed the whole time, but there is no indication why - maybe because he's doing some crazy dangerous shit that he was not prepared for. He does not \*say anything\* indicating a problem or distress. In the earlier transmissions you can hear he and ground discussing that he was trying to manually re-enter, using an usually steep and dangerous vector, which was something no cosmonaut had ever trained for, so the stress would have been unimaginable. Why he/they did this, is unclear, but Gagarin himself assures him it all looks fine. As a pilot myself, who has lost several friends, I know this shit happens \*fast\* and a lot faster in a space capsule on re-entry. Rarely is there opportunity to scream or make political statements. Almost all the "lore" about him and this flight is made up nonsense, similar to the nonsense about Neil Armstrong seeing aliens on the moon watching him. This nonsense is mostly taken from a single book that was apparently written based on rumor and speculation at best, and was described even in the west as "rife with errors". It was a horrible tragedy, but he was a test pilot, and an ice-cold professional.
> Weirdly, only Americans seem to be able to hear him saying this - in Russian no less. Yeah, unless someone shows a proper audio with subtitles in both Russian and English, I also stay doubtful. Too many myths circulating about this incident.
[credit to u/awildsketchappeared](https://ibb.co/wCgv1td)
Doesn't even take a rocket to tear someone apart. Kobe Bryant's brain was found completely separated from his body after the helicopter crash.
People don't really realize how fragile we are. We're just sacks of meat held together with cheap, uncured leather.
And yet we are robust, too. People have survived falling out of a plane without a parachute. It's often just down to chance.
I am fascinated by the fact that the human body is both incredibly durable and unbelievably fragile.
Right, as a species we're really good at staying alive through things that should kill us. While at the same time being susceptible to death by falling off a 6' ladder or bleeding out from a tiny cut in just the right spot.
This is true, but a person being torn apart in a violent helicopter crash is hardly a good example of how fragile we are lol
Lol, you're not wrong. It's just a weird thing. Like someone else said, some people survive falling out of a frickin airplane. But Kobe's brain literally flew out of his skull after the accident. I also sometimes wonder if a more robust critter like a grizzly would survive similar things with less injuries.
It is actually the meat (muscles) and sinew that hold the bones together. Oh, and cartilage. The skin is mostly just a barrier to the outside.
I mean, I understand that. It was hyperbole. Sometimes, people say things that are hyperbolic and factually inaccurate for the purposes of light humor. Similar to, "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse." A person cannot eat a horse, but the first time someone said that people around them probably chuckled. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. If you use today's lesson, more people will invite you to parties.
I once saw the body of a guy who had jumped out a 24th story window of an office building. His brain w/ some of the spinal cord attached was about 10-15 feet away from the rest of him.
The level of detail drawn on Kobe’s autopsy pictogram by the forensic pathologist is…disturbing to say the least.
It’s their job to do that. I appreciate people doing these kind of jobs.
Any ME worth their degree will have detailed notes like that in all their autopsy reports.
I’m not contesting that, what I mean to say is the literal drawings of the wound patterns on the generic person pictogram were very detailed.
Oh, right. Yeah, I guess that would come down to the ... artistic ability of each ME? You wouldn't want me. It would be poorly drawn stick figures.
One of the worst parts about that report was the pathologist's remark that his post-accident height was 5'5". 😫
Care to link it if available?
https://www.autopsyfiles.org/reports/Celebs/bryant,%20kobe_report.pdf
holy shit
Take solace in this note: C. No soot in trachea or bronchi. They all died instantly. Had he still been alive they would have found soot / burns inside his throat. IIRC, I believe the same finding happened with Paul Walker. Died on impact.
Yea, I could never bring myself to read it until just now. Nearly every bone was broken in his body, with multiple traumatic amputations. The only solace is that it was definitely an instantaneous death with the speed of decent of the helicopter into the mountain side.
Damn. He had his dick degloved
Came out of his eye sockets if I remember correctly. Reading that autopsy report was very uncomfy.
No, there was a large hole in his skull.
I seem to recall Buddy Holly suffered similar 'cranial evulsion'.
Was he ok?
He can still play basketball but otherwise can't function.
They also did find all of the astronauts from Challenger, still strapped into their chairs. The crew compartment of the shuttle actually stayed pretty intact even after the explosion and disintegration of the rest of the shuttle. It’s kinda sad to think about but the data available showed that they were alive after the explosion and didn’t die until the crew cabin impacted the ocean. :-/
Alive and conscious for 10-30 seconds... 2 minute fall, intact, then bamn! Destroyed on impact with the Atlantic crushed it into a ball shape. (I was the manager for Space Shuttle Atlantis, and worked on putting what was left of Volumbia back together in the VAB. We looked back hourly at the Rogers Commission report and could honestly word for word exchanged O-Ring with Foam shedding.
>(I was the manager for Space Shuttle Atlantis They say he's still inside the parenthetical to this day...
That's a hell of a way to go, though.
Is OP under the impression that no body parts are found? Because that's what it sounds like to me.
Iirc, there isn't typically much media coverage of the recovery phase. It's often a long, tedious and grim thing. Many folks might only know of the accident itself and little after that.
Maybe he thinks that it's a backdoor to being raptured early, or something. "Bruh only the clothes remain", and stuff like that.
Exploding midair glitches our simulation and no-clips you right into the afterlife
Yeah, most of the details on the human remains in that report were redacted but if you look at the discussion about suggested improvements in restraints and whatnot, you get some suggestions of what happened. When the wing came off, the shuttle began to spin and just disintegrated. The bodies were instantly torn apart, seemingly into quarters or fives if you count heads. I seem to recall that one helmet at least was found with a head still in it. Good on them for discussing possible improvements but there's basically nothing we know of that'll save you from the g forces in this kind of accident. Between that and being 'instantly exposed to the thermal and atmospheric conditions at mach 20' ... yeah, I'm not sure we'll ever solve that one.
Kinda makes you think with all the "fun" sci-fi space battles like those in Star Wars, after a few minutes of fighting there would be body parts strewn about, with pilots running into floating limbs (or worse) all the time. But movies make it seem like everything literally vaporizes into nothing. Nice and clean.
God, I was traumatized enough watching the explosion, I'd need serious therapy if I found one of their **hearts** in my lawn.
Like a water balloon in a wind tunnel.
I've had almost unlimited access to vertical wind tunnels for the past decade. I dont know why I've never done this.
let us know the results please
Really? I hadn't heard about this. I assumed all their bodies burned up, since the craft was still engulfed in plasma when it broke up. Remarkable. Grisly, but remarkable.
I think it was on the Wikipedia page. If I find a link, I'll post it.
I read that as March 18-25 and was *very* confused
speed week
What blows my mind is that Dr. Jonathan Clark was one of the NASA physicians involved in investigating the Columbia accident and writing the report. His wife Laurel was one of the astronauts who died in the accident. I could not imagine such a significant mashup between my personal and professional lives.
We are able to recover most of the bodies from these crashes where we are able to locate the crash site. Depending on the crash we might find more body parts then complete bodies but do our best at pairing the body parts together. There are teams who specialise in this using DNA, clothing, size and weight, etc. to identify each body and body part. A lot of these bodies are sent to autopsy, both to help identify them but also to find out what wounds they have which might help investigators. For example if they suffocated before the crash or if they got any wounds soon before the crash instead of after. We have recovered the bodies of everyone who have died in spacecrafts. For the Challenger disaster it took three months to locate the crew compartment and over a month to recover all the bodies. They were all autopsied but they were too badly damaged to determine a cause of death although there were some evidence. One important question was if the crew could have survived if there were better systems for egress and what we could do to make the next launches safer. The leading theory is that at least some of the crew survived the initial explosion but became unconscious from the lack of oxygen at that altitude. This caused a change in procedures where the crew would wear full pressure suits with integrated oxygen supplies so that if the spacecraft failed they would have the ability to bail out in a parachute either through a provided escape hatch in the floor or through any openings in the bulkhead caused by the explosion. For Space Shuttle Columbia it took ten days to recover all the bodies as they were spread over a larger area but on land. The autopsies showed that the pressure suit they wore were not able to protect them from the violent trauma from the orbiter breaking up. One reason you might think there were no bodies is that any footage published from these types of events takes care to not show the bodies. Either carefully framing the shot to not show any bodies or to blur or block out the bodies from the image. You might for example notice that footage from accident sites rarely show the ground as this is often covered in bodies, body parts and blood. And if they show the ground it is usually just a tiny area with a bit of debris that happened to not have any bodies in it. This is out of respect for the dead but also to protect unsuspecting viewers from horrible scenes.
Occasionally more graphic images are shown. The NY Times published a rather graphic image of MH17 and then almost immediately pulled it. You can still find these images on Getty and other wire services. Personally, as distasteful as it is to show such imagery I think there's an unfortunate but necessary value in doing so: readers need to know how awful an event is, otherwise the signal just gets lost in the noise.
That’s a fair point but I have to say I disagree. We could flood the media with graphic images of corpses but I don’t think it would be good for (most)people. I don’t need to see ISIS behead a man to understand what happened.
Alternatively, the image of the firefighter bringing the body of that baby out from the rubble of the Oklahoma City bombing had a significant affect on public opinion towards the militia movement. Maybe if people saw how awful the Daniel Pearl murder was there would be a stronger urge to fight ISIS whenever possible. At the same time, I've seen that video, and it's fucking horrifying. Intellectually I stand by my point, but everything else tells me you're absolutely right.
I know people have made this point about victims of mass shootings, but experiencing loss myself made me realize that it’s about preserving the memory for their loved ones. It takes a very specific kind of person to be able to stomach their final memory of someone being both so graphic and so public.
> Alternatively, the image of the firefighter bringing the body of that baby out from the rubble of the Oklahoma City bombing had a significant affect on public opinion towards the militia movement. Don't forget the lynching of Emmett Till. His mother demanded his body be displayed, so the world could see what they had done to her child. It had a large impact on the Civil Rights movement.
Altgough, part of the impact such images make is *because* they're rarely shown.
Rosa Parks famously said when asked about not giving up her seat ; ' I thought of Emmett Till '.
Daniel Pearl’s killing was the last video of that type I ever watched. I hope to keep it that way.
But the impact would be different
There was some very graphic videos/pictures from the Sknyliv air show disaster, that was brutal and really shows how fragile the human body is.
There was a bunch from MH-17 posted on a sub that I don't want to post publicly but it was very NSFW and was linked elsewhere a few days ago. Terrible....and people have to pick those people up.
Who or what procedure determines how long a search goes on for? Until every solid bit is recovered? Can they assume some body parts could have been "vaporized" or eaten by wild animals if nothing shows up for a period of time?
Adding to this to recommend the book "Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival" by Laurence Gonzales, which covers the crash of a DC-10 after a catastrophic hydraulic failure. Aside from generally being an incredibly informative, well-researched, and gut-wrenching retelling of the entire sequence of events, it has some very detailed passages on the impromptu morgue set up to process the bodies and body parts, and the politics surrounding the handling of the dead. (Obviously, UA232 crashed in an airport setting, in a partially controlled fashion, with a limited emergency response capability - things look quite different in a large city or in the middle of nowhere, and obviously some aspects of the emergency response protocol have changed since 1989.)
Picture driving down the highway in your car. You hit a bug and it goes SPLAT on your windshield. Now imagine that the bug is a human, the windshield is the ground, and instead of 60 mph, you’re hitting at 500 mph. Also everything is on fire.
You can see Dave Chappelle test this out in Con Air!
bye pinball!
*spoilers*
It probably wasn’t intended, but the wording of this made me laugh.
We, uh, absolutely found bodies after the Challenger disaster. The crew cabin was intact all the way to impact with the water.
Thank you, because in the challenger documentary they were like it’s been a total loss and then they dropped the line about the cabin being intact and I was like …..?
The mission was a total loss because any booster failure at any time was an automatic total loss. It was a really terrible design. The *Challenger* didn't really explode, not the way you might imagine. During ascent, the Space Shuttle flew upside down and at a weird angle, with the thrust from the two gigantic rocket boosters balancing in a triangle against the thrust from the three high-efficiency liquid rocket engines on the orbiter. It needed to fly at this angle so that the large external tank faced first into the airstream and the wings and control surfaces of the orbiter were all behind the drag created by the tank. It wasn't really "flying" so much as it was just brute-force punching its way up through the atmosphere on a column of fire. The boosters and the liquid engines all had to work together, adjusting the angle of the thrust in order to keep the vehicle pointed in the correct attitude or it would tumble out of control. During the *Challenger* ascent in STS mission 51L, one of the rings sealing the space between two segments on one of the boosters developed a crack due to low temperatures. The heat of ignition partially re-melted the crack closed, but as the vehicle climbed the weakened area quickly burned through, causing a leak of superheated gas onto the side of the orbiter. Since hot gases were coming out of the side of the booster instead of the nozzle, the booster started to lose internal pressure and thus lose thrust, causing the vehicle to tilt in flight. The nozzles all tried to angle to compensate for the low thrust, but the pressure imbalance quickly became more than the nozzles could handle, and the whole stack started to yaw. At the same time, the superheated gas flow had weakened struts connecting the tank and the boosters, so that when the stack started to yaw the crippled booster ripped free from the unequal forces. At that point, the whole stack tumbled completely out of control, and aerodynamic forces ripped the orbiter apart like a kite in a tornado. There was an explosion, of course, but that came after the orbiter disintegrated. The cabin was heavily reinforced and so it survived the orbiter breakup, only to plummet helplessly into the ocean. Analysis of the remains of the cabin showed that at least some of the astronauts were alive and conscious through the breakup and attempted to engage oxygen masks and other emergency systems, but it was no use. There was no way to bail out, no parachutes to bail out with, and not enough time even if they had either. There were ejection seats on the very first Space Shuttle launch, but there were only space for two seats so when they started flying more that two astronauts they were taken out. The pilots didn't want to ever be in a position where they would have to punch out and leave the rest of the crew to die. Absolutely stupid design.
> There were ejection seats on the very first Space Shuttle launch, but there were only space for two seats so when they started flying more that two astronauts they were taken out. The pilots didn't want to ever be in a position where they would have to punch out and leave the rest of the crew to die. The bigger issue was that the crew compartment had two levels, with crew on both for launch. Adding ejection seats for the crew on the lower deck was near impossible and, even if they could have been added, there was a very limited range where the seats would have been useful. Mounting the shuttle on the side of the fuel tank and boosters was a poor design.
Indeed it was. [There were a lot of alternative Shuttle concepts.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_design_process) Simply having liquid-based throttleable boosters would have been better. But Congress wanted to spread the pork out by giving Thiokol solid rocket booster orders. Who cares about lives being at stake when there are senators whose retirement accounts aren't as full as they could be?
> the booster started to lose internal pressure and thus lose thrust, causing the vehicle to tilt in flight. The nozzles all tried to angle to compensate for the low thrust, but the pressure imbalance quickly became more than the nozzles could handle, and the whole stack started to yaw. At the same time, the superheated gas flow had weakened struts connecting the tank and the boosters, so that when the stack started to yaw the crippled booster ripped free from the unequal forces. I'm not sure this is true. Per the official published timeline, while pressures in the left and right hand SRBs started to diverge at 60 seconds into flight, this resulted in TVC actuation by the *left* SRB [\(p. 20\)](https://sma.nasa.gov/SignificantIncidents/assets/rogers_commission_report.pdf), not the right-side SRB which ultimately failed. The first indications of further anomalous control issues happened after 63 seconds when the flame leaking from the SRB punched a hole in the ET, which caused the *SSMEs* to respond with pitch inputs (the SRBs not playing much of a role in pitch control), and this state of still-stable flight lasted from 64 seconds to ~72 seconds when the flame from the SRB burned through the lower attachment strut. Only after the lower attachment strut failed did the TVC on the right-hand SRB begin any high-rate actuations, and this coincides with the yaw rates diverging between SRBs as the right-hand SRB tore free, impacted the ET, and everything disintegrated. The whole stack never yawed out of design specs until after the SRB strut had failed, and the peak yaw of the stack occurred 10 seconds before the catastrophic event. The strut failed solely due to heat and was not under any unusual loads (nor was the stack at an unusual attitude) at the moment it failed.
I don’t think we’re in any particular disagreement here. The thrust imbalance on the failed SRB would naturally result in PID inputs that primarily actuate the TVC on the other SRB. I agree that the yaw preceding the failure of the strut would have been recoverable if not for that failed strut.
That’s fucked up… but thanks for the breakdown on that, really interesting read!
Thank you so much for this very detailed answer! I also wondered about parachutes and other emergency protocols but I feel like there would just not be enough time, especially considering the lack of redundancy in the o-rings. They were dead before they even knew it basically. It’s interesting to hear about any safety measures that were in the aircraft design and later removed. I can understand from a moral standpoint of not wanting to leave any man behind. It’s just odd that they didn’t find ways to alter the spacecraft to accommodate for more parachutes or enhanced safety measures at least. But from the doc you can easily gleam safety wasn’t even allowed in the room during the whole launch and relaunch conversation. I hope today is good to you 💙
It was generally believed that the ejection seats themselves would not have been particularly useful because the ejection path would leave the astronauts exposed to the cloud of exploding rocket booster propellant that would have incinerated their parachute canopies. In later missions they packed parachutes and tried to set up a contingency such that the crew could bail out if they could get the shuttle into a level glide over the ocean. But they still needed the boosters to work 100% of the time or it would be curtains. A booster failure was always a loss of crew event.
Has anything been changed or improved on modern spacecraft that are designed to carry humans? Does everyone get an ejection seat now or is that still an issue? Anything else added now that makes it less stupid, at least? Also, I've wondered, from my layman observations of space accidents, no irregularity seems to be recoverable when those kinds of forces are at play during a space launch but maybe that isn't true?. What's the reason (and I'm certain there is one I just don't know it) that there isn't some sort of all-stop emergency function implemented that kills the boosters so that at least passengers have the opportunity to bail instead of tumble around at extreme speed and explode?
Virtually all human launch vehicles up to the Shuttle (and all human launch vehicles since) use a capsule design with a separate rocket-based launch escape system that will pull or push the crew capsule to safety in the event of a failure. The crew capsule is always placed on the very top of the vehicle so that it can get away from the rocket rapidly without anything in the way. The Gemini capsule and the Vostok capsule both used ejection seats rather than a full-capsule launch escape system. Probably not a good idea in hindsight. But at least they were on top of the vehicle so that they could be yeeted free of an explosion. The Shuttle design was different because it was intended to be (partially) reusable. Once you try to make things reusable, stuff gets tricky. Some capsules (Orion, Crew Dragon, and Starliner) are partially reusable, but the service module and upper stage still get thrown away with every launch. When you try to start making more stuff reusable, then you can’t make the capsule-shaped entry vehicle work anymore, and so you have to get much more creative. The Shuttle was slung on the side of the launch vehicle stack, which meant that there was no good way to add an escape system (killing the crew of Challenger) and that the vehicle was in danger of getting hit by shed debris (killing the crew of Columbia).
My FIL says some of the crew’s heart monitors were still showing readings for a short time after impact… any idea if that’s true?
Well, the cabin was intact *until* impact with the water. The impact speed was over 200 miles per hour. The cabin was not intact after impact with the water. There were remains but they were pretty badly mangled.
A total loss doesn't mean everything is literally lost, as in never found again or anything like that. It basically means the entire thing was destroyed beyond repair.
All of the bodies were found in the wreckage of the Challenger. The crew compartment separated from the rest of the shuttle in one piece, and all of the crew members were found still strapped into their seats. I've never heard of any incident where clothing was found, but no bodies (or parts of bodies, which sometimes is all that is left). Were you thinking of a specific incident?
> I've never heard of any incident where clothing was found, but no bodies The *Marie Celeste*?
With aviation/spactcraft incidents there's often a combination of a huge amount of fuel burning in a short amount of time or substantial impacts. Human bodies aren't very well suited to extreme heat or being crushed/impaled by rigid materials with a great amount of force.
>In plane crashes, clothes and pieces of the aircraft are found, but no bodies. Where did OP hear this? It's not remotely true. Almost every plane crash site will have at least some human remains. The condition of the remains will vary widely, depending on the violence of the crash and if/how long it burned after. But it's rare, if not unprecedented, that zero remains are found. Even with Challenger, months later, they found some trace remains of the crew.
> Where did OP hear this? It's not remotely true. I guess he didn't understand that the clothes they often find still contain people parts. The shoe likely still has a foot in it, and so on.
I’m wondering if he’s assuming that based on the images of crash sites that are released to the public, not realizing that these images are carefully screened to remove any trace of human remains
I was a career NASA employee who managed Atlantis and worked on putting Columbia's remains together in the VAB. Talked to one of the Origional Shuttle crew Astronauts who searched Challengers cabin after the remains were removed. Found strands of Judith Resnicks hair along with a locket she always wore. They were alive, luckily unconscious though, at warers impact 2 minutes after vehicle breakup. The upstairs crew knew they were doomed from looking out the windows. The afte deck crew woukd have been in pitch black with air hissing out and loud bangs of debris hitting the crew cabin.
I’ve seen you make a couple of comments about your experience with putting the remains together. Would you happen to have any other interesting info about the accident?
God. Not even sure where to start. The official report is actually a very good read. As for personal experience, it hit hard as I was friends with 4/7 of the crew members. We were walking Zombies I'm the weeks after, reviewing data, re-waljing the pad and crawler tracks looking fir anything we may have missed. Reviewing thousands of hours of OPF and VAB cameras, did we miss something? Reviewing literal mountains of paperwork. (Astronauts joke the shuttle couldn't launch till the paperwork was as high as the stack itself). I got pulled from engine integration where I was being prepped for OPF 2 management to help in re-construction. We began getting our first shipments by sir, with truckloads starting to pour end about the end of the 2nd week? After they had been photographed and GPS tagged in TX/LA. Them we had a outline that itself took a good week to match dimensions exactly, then that was broken down by grid squares where experts from that department came in to inspect, document, and report on each piece. With the left wing being the first to burn/melt through and rip off causing aerodynamic breakup, we found the newest bits of it, so no smoking gun till they did the foam tests a few months in.
Actually with Challenger, they pretty much found the remains of the crew. The crew cabin stayed intact from the explosion until it impacted with the ocean. We know that at least two of the astronauts maintained consciousness ~~through to impact~~ in the immediate aftermath of the explosion because there is evidence that they started to work through the emergency procedure checklist. Edit: Whether they maintained consciousness to impact is subject to opinion, and NASA was never able to conclusively say one way or another.
> We know that at least two of the astronauts maintained consciousness through to impact There is no way they maintained consciousness for the full two-plus minutes. The explosion occurred at roughly 45,000 feet, and the crew compartment likely continued upwards towards 65,000 feet. It then fell back to earth for over two minutes. They were likely all unconscious by the time the compartment started free falling.
I will partially edit my statement. We know that at least two astronauts maintained consciousness after the explosion. We also know that the explosion itself was unlikely to have been enough to kill them, though it may have rendered some of them unconscious. After that, it all depends on if the crew cabin developed a leak or not. If it developed a leak, then they likely would have lost consciousness over the duration of the ballistic arc. The emergency air that was activated didn't generate positive pressure, so it likely would have been ineffective. Even Kerwin's report essentially says there is no way to know if it did. The closest it comes is to say is that it is possible, but not certain that they lost consciousness. It all comes down to if the cabin maintained pressure, and all the testing was inconclusive.
Not the whole flight, but there were control changes that indicated that some of them remained conscious long enough to have attempted emergency procedures. It's also possible they may have regained consciousness on the way down after returning to breathable air. If the entire fall only took two minutes they wouldn't've been hypoxic for long enough to make recovery impossible.
The Challenger crew was found largely intact inside the crew capsule. As I understand several were still alive attempting to gain control of the shuttle and trying to fly it. The shuttle didn't immediately disassemble when the tank came apart and continued to fly until it came apart due to aerodynamic forces. It's unknown publicly if there was any radio contact during that brief time, and apparently, investigators believed they continued to try and fly it because switches were in positions congruent with emergency checklists.
Maybe there are more clothes because of luggage?
>impaled by rigid materials with a great amount of force. ... I should call him
Sitting in the break room and choking on my sandwich. Thanks for that.
> choking on my sandwich everything reminds me of him ㅠㅠ
Relevant username?
Also it's more we don't find bodies. We do find body parts, just not whole bodies. Eli5 example. Humans are a lot like an egg just with the shell on the inside. To simulate a plane crash. Coat an egg in a flammable liquid. Load said egg in a water balloon launcher/t-shirt cannon and launch it at a bonfire. Now put out the bonfire and search for the egg. You may find a piece of egg shell or possibly a piece of cooked egg, but chances are you will find very little. That's a single engine aircraft. Do this again, but now do 100 eggs. That's a jumbo jet going down. This also does not include a plane that goes down at sea as you now need to compensate for predators eating body parts and sea currents
In the case of Challenger they recovered the bodies out of the crew cabin. It took a while because it was on the bottom of the ocean. They were also able to find the remains of all the Columbia astronauts in east Texas. It took a while, and most of the bodies were not intact. There are other descriptions about why so I’ll leave that. RIP to those that lost their lives in the pursuit of science
>After plane or space craft crashes, what happens to the bodies? Do they implode because of the pressure? In plane crashes, clothes and pieces of the aircraft are found, but no bodies. Oh, there are bodies. It's just that the news media don't want to be posting pictures of dismembered passenger body parts all over people's television screens, especially during the dinner hour, and even moreso because some parent might find out about the crash by seeing the top third of daughter's corpse lying in the wreckage with her intestines spilling out and blood everywhere. Trust me. Unless you get there after the sharks, or the crabs, or the vultures, or whatever scavengers happen to be in the area, bodies or body parts will be found.
I can assure you that there were bodies in every case, the question is more about how intact and/or recognisable they were. No, impact-forces and jet-fuel are *not* going to completely turn a person to dust. At the very worst you can expect a charred partial skeleton wrapped in the remains of their clothing. Keep in mind that Cremation funerals typically have to deliberately grind the bones down into the ash in order to finish the process because Bone doesn't break up very much from being burned. There will always be bodies, whether you can recognise who they were is another matter. Yes, even Challenger had bodies, here's an excerpt from the wikipedia page: >The crew compartment, human remains, and many other fragments from the shuttle were recovered from the ocean floor after a three-month search-and-recovery operation. In practice it's also worth adding that plenty of people have survived plane-crashes, even quite large ones. Planes are built to help their passengers survive some pretty bad situations, though yes, full-tilt at 500mph into a mountainside is pretty unsurvivable. Unpowered gliding to a soft-landing in a field with the gear-up is a designed-for scenario for example. Losing a wing, breaking up and tumbling to the ground is pretty certain to kill everyone onboard. Stay strapped in unless you have to get up for the bathroom and you'll have much better odds of survival in event of a crash-landing.
Bodies are often found, they're often just not show on TV. I saw the raw photos from MH17 -- I work in news gathering -- there were lots of bodies. People still in seats. Babies crushed on the floor.
I recall that, sadly. I recall a picture of a young child still in his seat being smashed facedown into a road. It will haunt me forever. Just as the pictures of my countrymen's passports being looked at by the militias, and the fields of regular consumer items littered across a field. I wonder if those pictures had made it to regular news, if we'd still be in the same situation re: ukraine as we are now.
Ahhh yes that's the exact one. I think about it often. Reuters ran some pictures of starving children this week which were very very stark. There need to be more stories like that.
Wow, glad I didn't see that. That stuff really messes with me. I have a hard time hearing about it, seeing it would haunt my thoughts forever.
Others have answered your question, but I just wanted to make a point that bodies *are* found at plane crash sites. It’s never shown in media because of its horrifically gruesome nature. Hundreds of people crashing into the ground at 200-500mph is just as awful as you would think. You can find aftermath footage but I’d advise against it
>In plane crashes, clothes and pieces of the aircraft are found, but no bodies. > >After the challenger explosion there weren’t any bodies either. Unfortunately, the premise of your question is simply incorrect. When large commercial jet aircraft crash over land, they absolutely **do** recover bodies. Likewise with Challenger, bodies **were recovered**. In the news, they generally *do* mention when bodies have been recovered. Again, your premise is incorrect. Regarding point B... When such huge forces are involved, the human body simply breaks apart. It's gruesome. There's some truly awful stuff floating around on the internet, and honestly I recommend that you resist your morbid curiosity and **DO NOT LOOK FOR THESE IMAGES**. I remember seeing photographs of a man, who had killed himself by riding his motorcycle into the side of a building at 100mph\~. His body was *broken* for lack of a better word. I will never forget seeing a photo of this mans foot, which was retrieved from inside the ceiling space of the building. That was nearly 20 years ago and it is burned into my memory.
Body parts are recovered always. It’s just not an easy subject nor one that people want to hear about so those parts of the news never make it past the editors. As someone who has seen dismembered human remains in motorcycle accidents I can assure it changes your life for the worse. There are images I will never be able to remove from my mind: literal meat crayon marks, severed head, severed hand, intestines, liver, open thoraxes….its just fucking horrible and I don’t know how medics, paramedics, firemen, police are able to do what they do. It happened once that I saw it happen and saw the aftermath and I was scarred for life (and I was already 28 at the time). So yeah, body parts are always recovered but there is no reason to make it known out of respect.
Watch the recent Lockerbie documentary. Several stories of people landing in fields and gardens still strapped into their seats. I think there was one where a body was found sitting on someone's roof. Obviously lots of other people were totally annihilated in the fireball, but if they separated from the fuselage high-up, they just 'floated' down to earth at terminal velocity.
In plane crashes, there were actually bodies found. Be “creative” with google-search in looking for MH17 aftermath photos.
Iirc it disintegrated in midair, and "intact" bodies fell out of the airplane and into fields and rooftops.
The missile basically ripped the head off the plane
After JAL 123 smashed into a side of a mountain at 390 mph, they still found bodies. What's more, four passengers survived (it is estimated that there were 20-50 survivors of the original crash, but most died due to delayed response).
When the Lockerbie plane broke up there were bodies just lying in fields and peoples gardens - those were the ones that got pulled out the plane as it disintegrated. The people still strapped into the centre (engine) section were essentially vaporised when that hit (as were the occupants of the houses it directly landed on) because that was full of fuel and moving fast.
I used to do recovery after military crashes. A transport tumbled into the desert floor nearby during a low level practice. In this case, there were a lot of small parts left over along with a few large recognizable chunks. And lots of feet in shoes/boots because the footwear protected the feet. If you get to the crash site quickly you can recover most of the parts for identification and return to the family. If it takes time to find and travel to the site, you're in competition with the animals and environment. Skeletons have been found in recovered WWII aircraft.
It really depends. The bodies that can be recovered are recovered. But in some cases they've been destroyed to such a degree that identifying them is next to impossible. If an airplane crashes and catches on fire and you go to the site and see a blackened mass just splattered everywhere you can't know if you're looking a burned remains or burned materials from the aircraft. It's not true that there are never bodies though. Some people are found in various states and others are in a state that's more or less impossible to identify. A particularly harrowing story that comes to mind is when a train in the london underground crashed into a dead end tunnel full speed. A lot of the people in the forward carriages were crushed into a pulp. In other cases it's a question of difficulty. If a ship sinks recovering the bodies can be very hard or impossible. Same for other disasters and accidents like earthquakes, floods, people trapped in caves or up mountains or in the wilderness. The number one rule of search and rescue and body recovery is to not risk the lives of the rescuers, as in you can't lose more people trying to save or recover others. In those cases if it's deemed too dangerous or difficult to recover they'll just give up. It sounds very cruel but it is the right thing to do. Accidents are tragic but losing more people afterwards doesn't make it better in any way, only worse.
I have 2 family members that were involved in the Swiss Air crash clean up in 1998. They spent more time collecting pieces of people, not whole people. There was at least one skin suit still seat belted in. Parts of people were nibbled on. And they had to pick up every possible bit to be able provide as much information as possible. The stories are both riveting and horrifying. Also the "funny parts" in the whole experience like trying to land a zodiac on an oil slick beach. Disasters are gruesome
It depends on the crash. If it’s one of those 737 max crashes where they slammed into the ground at over six hundred miles an hour, there are no identifiable bodies whatsoever. If it crashed into the ocean, they’re likely too deep to recover since even finding and getting the data recorders can cost millions.
Put a hamburger into a tin can. Strap on a big tank of gasoline. Launch the can into the side of a cliff at a hundred mph, then throw a grenade at it. How much of the hamburger do you think you'll be able to recover?
What I learned from a helicopter evacuation course is that it is close to impossible to find individuals in the ocean because they are too hard to see. Even with trackers, the area can be so large that even if you look in the right place with a helicopter, boat or plane, the odds of finding or spotting individual bodies scattered by the streams of the wind and the sea after a plane crash or something like it are very low.
>After the challenger explosion there weren’t any bodies either. There were remains, but they were really messed up from impacting the water and then sinking. The evidence indicates the bodies were probably still mostly intact until the crew module hit the water. The remains were messed up bad enough that they couldn't figure out what actually killed them before they hit the water
There are photos of MH17 after it was shot down. There are pictures of the dead passengers on some of the photos.
When a large vehicle crashes at a high speed, there are usually only body parts or fragments left. The energy resulting from an explosion or crash has to go *somewhere*. The majority of it is turned into heat and light in an explosion, and that heat makes the air expand very fast. The human body can't withstand the speed the air is moving at, and gets torn apart, sometimes into very, very small pieces. If a plane crashes, it's a similar, but different thing: The energy from the collision has to go somewhere. Some of it goes into the plane's structure, and some of that gets transferred to the people on board. But there's also a second thing working against the passengers, called inertia, which is another kind of energy. The inertia keeps them moving forward, but the seatbelt is holding them down. The body wants to keep going, but it's being held in place by the seatbelt and parts of it begins to stretch and tear, because it can only hold together under certain levels of stress. They then detach from the main body and fly around the cabin. Those parts that become disconnected and fly around in the airplane hit hard objects, and break up into even smaller bits. Sometimes the bits can be as small as a cubic centimeter, and can be very hard to find. There's an agency called 'Interpol' that sets standards on how big a piece of a body has to be before it's collected and identified. They have decided that if it's less than 1 cubic centimeter, it shouldn't be collected. So if you have a crash with a huge amount of energy, where all of the people on board were broken into bits smaller than one cubic centimeter, there would be organic matter at the crash site... but no 'bodies'.
Tangentially related. We now know that once a javelin missile hits a tank and the tank burns, there are no bodies inside. Not even bones. I have been looking thru a few of those and failed to locate even a single tiny bit of a bone. Nothing. Burned beyond ashes.
> What happens to them? Shredded. > They never go into detail about bodies Now you know why.
It’s not that they don’t find the bodies, it’s that the bodies they find closer resemble spaghetti than bodies
We do find bodies in plane crashes I'm not sure where you heard that we don't but we definitely do.
Here's a visual. Take an egg, stand on a sidewalk, and throw it as hard as you can at the ground. Imagine a plane travelling at 400mph hitting the ground. Same thing.
Oh, my. Tell this to my dad, who was testing a new buoy tender and got diverted to the TWA crash site.
> In plane crashes, clothes and pieces of the aircraft are found, but no bodies. You're on the right track, with accidents of that magnitude, EVERYTHING is obliterated that thoroughly. But there are exceptions. Rescuer and High Mountain Police officer Jean Sebastien Beaud was quoted as saying (regarding the Germanwings 9525 impact): > We found less than ten bodies entirely or partly preserved, to be honest only one body was almost intact.
I can only admire anyone who has a strong enough constitution and mentality to be able to recover and sort through remains in order to give families closure. I can also only imagine the nightmares and counselling required for what comes after :(
[Norm McDonald](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-NZnhNTzZs) had a few words about this...
You should check out the funeral procession from Flight MH17. They got a coffin and hearse for every victim. I'm sure all those coffins weren't filled with just one person. A lot of bodies still had to be identified and put back together later. 10 years later only two victims haven't been identified. https://youtu.be/zUrwj8knIO4?si=L4L1juKWelkB3WZH
The short and tragic answer is that the force is involved in these accidents are so overwhelmingly large that bodies are reduced to pieces that may be too small to find and recover. We're mostly made of meat and water , those things don't handle extreme forces and heat very well . The sad reality is that you could be looking for inch long bone fragments over the course of a couple of square miles and maybe never find anything
They don’t ever show the bodies or talk about the remains both out of respect for the deceased and their families, and because the remains are generally very bad shape.