These included not just the cockpit instrument panels, with gauges and switches registering activity on the flight deck during Challenger’s final moments, but also every one of the five general-purpose computers that had controlled the spacecraft in flight, crushed flat by the impact with the ocean, yet otherwise intact. More important, the men of the Preserver brought up from the ocean floor the six tape machines that had recorded everything happening inside the orbiter during its seventy-three seconds of flight—including the two channels of the crew’s conversation over the internal intercom
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