Bone Found in Shuttle Debris Search

A bone with blue fabric attached washed up on a beach, and medical techinicians examined it to see if it belonged to one of the seven astronauts killed in Tuesday's shuttle explosion.

The bone was found near Indialantic, 35 miles south of Cape Canaveral, and taken to a hospital at nearby Patrick Air Force Base. NASA spokesman Hugh Harris said the bone and tissue fragment measured four inches by six inches by one inch.

NASA officials did not know what kind of bone it was, and there nothing was to link it to an astronaut.

"An anonymous citizen found a navy blue sock with what appeared to be a burned bone fragment attached to it at 11:30 a.m. [yesterday] at the high water mark on the beach," said Steven Okes, an Indialantic police communications officer.

He said police called NASA, which instructed them to refrigerate the find, then "20 minutes later they told us to take it to the hospital at Patrick Air Force Base."

Jim Mizell, a spokesman for the Kennedy Space Center, called the area offshore "the missile graveyard of the world" because it contains the wreckage of scores of failed rockets and the discarded first stages of hundreds more.

"It will take some real expert to take pieces and say it's not Snark, Redstone, Pershing, Atlas and on and on," he said. Snark and Redstone are two of the early missiles of the 1950s.

Thousands of pounds of small pieces of debris found floating on the sea were aboard ships running search patterns over 8,000 square miles, northward from Cape Canaveral to Daytona Beach.

"To my knowledge no personal effects of the astronauts have been recovered," said Simpson of the Coast Guard.

Also found were two cone-shaped objects described as "about 10 feet" in diameter. One had an attached parachute, indicating it came from one of the solid rocket boosters blown up. Each booster is 12 feet in diameter and contains four parachutes designed to lower the spent rockets to the ocean for retrieval.

"The ships have begun picking up a great deal more debris, larger and more varied pieces," Simpson said. "One ship alone is bringing in 1,000 pounds of debris. They're finding tubing, they're finding electronic-looking pieces."

Experts had not studied the electronic control panel to see from which part of the shuttle it might have come. There are many such panels on the flight deck and middeck and also on the fuel tank and booster rockets.

Both at the Florida launch site and in Houston where the ascent to space is directed, engineers studied computer tapes that recorded performance of the shuttle's systems every one one-thousandth of a second.

Officials said the tapes might be the most crucial piece of evidence in the investigation. They could reveal whether the fireball was caused by something that went wrong with the spaceship's huge external fuel tank or whether the fault lay with one of the two solid fuel rocket boosters.

A memorial service, attended by President and Mrs. Reagan, is to be held today at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the astronauts trained for their ill-fated flight. The President planned to meet first privately with the families.