Two sailors looked up toward the sky.
"The Challenger is going to launch," they told him.
Nelson, a career Navy man who had lived in Orlando, Fla., had seen shuttle launches before. They go straight up and disappear, he said.
Not this time.
"I saw the Challenger blow up," he said. "Two fuel pods spiraled off."
What he saw didn't make sense to him, he said from his Visalia home Wednesday. Like the news photographs of people at Cape Canaveral looking up on that fateful day, he, too, did not immediately grasp what went wrong, he said.
The Challenger disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean at 8:39 a.m.
In less than an hour, the Aubrey Fitch, a guided-missile frigate returning from the Bahamas, turned around to begin search-and-rescue operations for the Challenger shuttle.
It was the first ship on the scene, he said.
"We were expecting the worst," he said. "We were expecting to find bodies."
From sunrise to sunset, Nelson and four enlisted men under him took turns looking through the ship's "big eyes," two 20-power, nitrogen gas-filled binoculars. The heavy, 30-inch-long binoculars, mounted on stationary pedestals, were typically used to identify other ships at sea.
But 25 years ago, the "big eyes" on the Aubrey Fitch were used to find remnants of a shuttle launch gone wrong.
Nelson searched for reflections in the water, sunlight hitting metal pieces from the space shuttle. The Aubrey Fitch recovered large fuselage panels, propulsion components, tiles and an orbiter landing gear among several tons of evidence collected.
"I was constantly looking," he said. "Once you see it, you stay right on it."
Without turning his head, he said aloud the object's exact location and the officer on the deck would turn the ship into it.
For Nelson, the first items recovered were the most memorable: an astronaut's helmet and a fecal bag.
