During powered flight of the space shuttle, crew escape was not possible. (Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour were built with no ejection seats)
Inside the twisted debris of the crew cabin were the bodies of the astronauts, which were nearly unrecognizable after ten weeks of immersion in salt water.
Navy pathologists performed autopsies on the crew members, but due to the poor condition of the bodies, no exact cause of death could be determined for any of them.
The crew transfer took place on April 29, 1986, three months and one day after the accident. [...] they were flown to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to be processed and then released to their relatives.