Byline: John Noble Wilford
A preliminary analysis of tape recordings from the space shuttle Challenger indicated that in the final seconds before the explosion the crew was unaware of the impending disaster, the space agency said on Thursday.
The recording of engineering data and voices of crew members speaking on the cabin intercom stopped at the same time as the last communications were received at Mission Control in Houston, which occurred 73.631 seconds after the shuttle lifted off Jan. 28, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It was thus impossible to determine from the recordings if the seven crew members died instantly or lived through all or part of the cabin's plunge into the Atlantic Ocean.
The agency said it had no plans to release a transcript of the tapes. Barbara L. Schwartz, a spokesman for the Johnson Space Center, in …
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