The booster rocket used in the Ares I-X test flight was found to be badly dented when divers located it in the Atlantic Ocean.

One of the three 150-foot-wide parachutes designed to gently lower NASA’s Ares 1-X first stage booster to the Atlantic Ocean after a dramatic six-minute test flight Wednesday deflated after deployment, officials said Thursday, resulting in a harder splashdown than expected.

Photographs taken by the recovery crew show the four-segment shuttle booster floating upright in the Atlantic Ocean shortly after splashdown. An initial inspection, sources said, revealed the sort of paint blistering that is typically found on shuttle boosters, along with an area of apparent buckling in the lower segment.

The test of the new parachute system was one of several major objectives of the Ares 1-X test flight, intended to generate data needed to perfect the design of NASA’s planned shuttle replacement, the more-powerful Ares 1 rocket.

While the 1-X test version featured a less powerful first stage booster and a dummy upper stage, it weighed roughly the same as an Ares 1. The full-scale parachute system used for its first flight test was designed to handle the heavier weight of the Ares 1 and its fall from a higher altitude.

A NASA spokeswoman said late Thursday the test rocket’s drogue parachute, used to slow and stabilize the vehicle before the main parachutes are released, deployed normally. All three main chutes then released and began inflating as planned in a two-step procedure. Two of the mains apparently inflated fully, but the third collapsed.

A source said the deflated parachute contacted one of the others as it whipped about in the wind, causing a partial deflation. That could not be immediately confirmed, although a splashdown in that condition might explain the buckling seen in the lower segment of the rocket’s case.

Shuttle boosters, which are lowered to the ocean by two 130-foot-wide parachutes, can be damaged depending on the impact angle and sea state, engineers say. But it’s not yet known what caused the problem with the Ares 1-X booster.

The 327-foot-tall Ares 1-X was launched Wednesday from complex 39B at the Kennedy Space Center. The major goals of the unmanned test flight were to collect engineering data on how the tall, slender rocket flew through the dense lower atmosphere, how the structure responded to aerodynamic and acoustic forces and how the new parachute system, scaled for the planned Ares 1 rocket, performed.

The first stage boosted Ares 1-X to an altitude of about 25 miles and a velocity of 4.5 times the speed of sound in two minutes of powered flight. Explosive charges then fired to separate the spent first stage from the dummy second stage and small upward-facing rockets fired to pull the first stage away.

In a surprise, the upper stage went into a slow, flat spin instead of continuing upward on a nose-forward trajectory as expected. A moment after separation, another set of small rockets fired as planned to put the first stage into a similar spin to prevent a nose-down re-entry that might interfere with parachute deployment.

The two stages appeared to come close to each other as they tumbled, but that could have been an illusion due to the viewing angle of a long-range tracking camera.

The behavior of the first stage appeared normal during powered flight and after separation. A drogue parachute, used to slow and stabilize the rocket before main parachute deployment, could be seen in video from the rocket, but the on-board views cut off before the main chutes could be seen.

Recovery crews consisting of closed circuit rebreather divers and technical divers are expect to finish towing the big rocket back to a processing facility at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station early Friday. Engineers will be standing by to remove an on-board data recorder that is expected to provide a wealth of information about the rocket’s performance.

A retired Air Force missile-tracking ship intentionally sunk to create an artificial reef in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary opened Saturday, May 30, to the public.

The 523-foot-long Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg is situated about seven miles south of Key West. The bottom of the ship’s hull rests on sand in depths that average 145 feet. But the ship is so massive that the superstructure begins about 45 feet below the surface.

“I’ve dove a lot of ships,” said Tom Kanczuzewski of South Bend, Ind., after surfacing Saturday. “This is the ship of all ships. I’d love to come back in a year and see all the fishes.”

Saturday morning, a lone barracuda patrolled the superstructure of the ship that once tracked the U.S. space program’s launches off Cape Canaveral, monitored U.S. defense missile test launches and eavesdropped on Russian missile launches during the Cold War.

But project organizers think it’s just a matter of days before additional marine life takes up residence.

The wreck is already fulfilling its promise of attracting visitors to the Florida Keys.

“We have calls coming in from as far as Germany and Norway from people planning to come just to dive this wreck,” said Bob Holston, owner of Dive Key West and president of the Keys Association of Dive Operators. “We have more pre-bookings for the summer now than we’ve had in 38 years of being in business.

“This is probably going to be one of the world’s classiest wrecks to dive,” Holston said. “And it’s just a corner piece of the wreck trek of the Florida Keys.”

Monroe County Commissioner Mario Di Gennaro, who helped find public money to fund the project, says the project will help take recreational dive pressure off natural coral reefs.

“It’s going to protect our reef and put heads in beds and increase our tourism, which is our main industry down here,” he said. “That’s the goal of this whole project, to protect our environment and also to benefit our economy.”

Dive instructor Megan Collins thinks the Vandenberg’s mammoth size should be appealing to scuba divers of different skill sets.

“It’s the possibilities for people of all levels without having to jeopardize their safety,” she said. “There’s so much to look at on the superstructure of the Vandenberg that no matter your temptation, you don’t have to go inside.”

Project initiator Joe Weatherby, who 13 years ago chose the Vandenberg from 400 ships rusting away in “mothball fleets across” the country, was ecstatic after his dive.

“I think it’s exactly what we planned it to be,” said Weatherby, after assisting Di Gennaro who smacked a champagne bottle against a ship stanchion 70 feet below to celebrate the project’s completion. “It’s the world’s best wreck dive.”