38 Years at the Bottom of the Atlantic

The Mercury capsule's hatch was designed to be blown open deliberately by the astronaut inside, using a plunger, in the event of an emergency egress on land or water. Grissom always maintained he never touched it.

Without the physical hatch to examine, NASA had no way to fully settle the question. Grissom, one of the most respected pilots in the astronaut corps, spent years carrying a reputational cloud that no amount of flawless subsequent flying seemed to fully lift.

He went on to command Gemini 3 in 1965 and was selected to command Apollo 1, the first crewed Apollo mission. He never got the chance to fly it. Grissom died with two crewmates in a cabin fire during a launch pad test in January 1967, more than three decades before his capsule would ever be seen again.

Liberty Bell 7 rested in roughly 15,000 feet of water, deeper than most shipwrecks ever recovered, for the better part of four decades. Ocean engineer Curt Newport spent years pursuing the capsule, including an unsuccessful attempt in the early 1990s before the right combination of sonar technology, funding, and precise historical tracking data finally came together.

In 1999, a Discovery Channel-sponsored expedition located and raised Liberty Bell 7 from the ocean floor, 38 years after it sank, bringing a piece of the earliest days of American spaceflight back into the light.

The recovered hatch offered no single, definitive proof of what caused it to fire. But engineers who examined it found nothing to support the theory that Grissom had panicked and triggered it himself, the closest thing to vindication the physical evidence could offer, arriving 32 years after his death.

After conservation, Liberty Bell 7 went on public display at the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas, giving the public a rare chance to see a flown Mercury capsule up close, and to see the hatch that had shadowed a good pilot's reputation for far too long.