Science: Canaveral Undertakers

When a new-style missile is about to be fired at Florida's Cape Canaveral, a small group of serious, weatherworn men examine it carefully. They learn how its parts fit together, what they are made of, what fuels its engines burn, where its "destruct" charge is placed and how it can be inactivated. The scientists who have nursed the missile to the testing stage watch the ceremony with some edginess; they know that the weathered men are the "undertakers" of the missile world. Their job: fishing aborted missiles from the bottom of the sea.

Chief of the rocket retrievers is Louis Berger, 55, who used to run a Florida barge line. In 1954, when he heard that the Air Force needed a team of skilled men to recover missiles corpses, Berger bid for the contract and got it. Now he does his missile-age body snatching with three 65-ft. towboats manned by highly trained divers, navigators, sonar operators and other specialists. With missiles flying off the Cape at ever shorter intervals, the search for cracked-up bodies has become a scramble.

Whenever a firing is scheduled, Berger's boats deploy off the Cape well in advance. One of their duties is to shoo away yachts, fishing boats, shrimpers or any other craft that might get hurt or see too much. If the missile plunges into the sea or is blown up by the range safety officer, the nearest Berger boat races toward the splash and looks for floating fuel, marker dye or other signs of the body's location.

If there is no such clue, the tracking experts at the launching pad analyze the records of the missile's flight and figure out where it probably landed.

Combing the Bottom. Then Berger' men go after the missile. Sometimes the body is in shallow water and easily visible from the surface. More often, it must be searched out by skindivers, mostly former Navy frogmen, who start from a buoy marking the most likely spot and comb the bottom around it. If the body still eludes them, Berger's boats may drag the bottom with shrimping nets. Another trick that often proves useful in clear water is to put a skindiver on a sled pulled by a boat. By working the sled's vanes, he can make it dive and skim along just above the bottom.

Each aborted missile presents a different problem. Often its destruct charge is still unexploded and must be brought to the surface before it can be defused. Another hazard for divers is sharp edges of a missile's torn steel. Sometimes the bod) is still full of poisonous or explosive fuel Once a diver attached a line to an undamaged, unfired upper-stage rocket that could have taken off at any moment and rode it to the surface. Cried he: "I might have gone into orbit."

If a missile stays on the bottom more than a few days, a different sort of problem develops: all kinds of sea creatures, including sharks and octopuses, move into the empty shell. When divers off Grand Bahama Island found a big booster that had been in the water for two months, they had to flush out of it four 6-ft. sharks. When they finally got the body on board, they discovered that it was also inhabited by more than 100 lobsters.