<P> During the recovery of the remains of the crew, Gregory Jarvis' body floated out of the shattered crew compartment and was lost to the diving team . A day later, it was seen floating on the ocean's surface . It sank as a team prepared to pull it from the water . Determined to not end the recovery operations without retrieving Jarvis, astronaut Robert Crippen rented a fishing boat at his own expense and went searching for the body . On April 15, near the end of the salvage operations, the Navy divers found Jarvis . His body had settled to the sea floor, 101.2 feet (30.8 m) below the surface, some 0.7 - nautical - mile (1.3 km) from the final resting place of the crew compartment . The body was recovered and brought to the surface before being processed with the other crew members and then prepared for release to Jarvis' family . </P> <P> Navy pathologists performed autopsies on the crew members, but due to the poor condition of the bodies, the exact cause of death could not be determined for any of them . The crew transfer took place on April 29, 1986, three months and one day after the accident . Seven hearses carried the crew's remains from the Life Sciences Facility on Cape Canaveral to a waiting MAC C - 141 aircraft . Their caskets were each draped with an American flag and carried past an honor guard and followed by an astronaut escort . The astronaut escorts for the Challenger crew were: Dan Brandenstein, Jim Buckley, Norm Thagard, Charles Bolden, Tammy Jernigan, Dick Richards, and Loren Shriver . Once the crew's remains were aboard the jet, they were flown to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to be processed and then released to their relatives . </P> <P> It had been suggested early in the investigation that the accident was caused by inadvertent detonation of the Range Safety destruct charges on the external tank, but the charges were recovered mostly intact and a quick overview of telemetry data immediately ruled out that theory . </P> <P> The three shuttle main engines were found largely intact and still attached to the thrust assembly despite extensive damage from impact with the ocean, marine life, and immersion in salt water . They had considerable heat damage due to a LOX - rich shutdown caused by the drop in hydrogen fuel pressure as the external tank began to fail . The memory units from Engines 1 and 2 were recovered, cleaned, and their contents analyzed, which confirmed normal engine operation until LH2 starvation began starting at T + 72 seconds . Loss of fuel pressure and rising combustion chamber temperatures caused the computers to shut off the engines . Since there was no evidence of abnormal SSME behavior until 72 seconds (only one second or so before the breakup of Challenger), the engines were ruled out as a contributing factor in the accident . </P>

Who was involved in the space shuttle challenger