Hutchinson ? The man who recovered the Liberty Bell 7 space capsule visited Hutchinson to see the capsule at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center.

Curt Newport spent 14 years studying whether the capsule could be recovered. It sank to the ocean floor near Bermuda in 1961 when a hatch door opened prematurely, causing the capsule to flood. Astronaut Gus Grissom was rescued.

Newport said he researched declassified NASA documents and studied upper-level winds that helped pinpoint the capsule’s location.

“The most difficult part of the operation was still finding the spacecraft with sonar,” Newport said. “It’s still remarkable we were able to do that. It’s cold and dark, a place that’s a very desolate, inhospitable environment. We got a little bit lucky.”

Newport returned to Hutchinson on Friday and Saturday to see the Liberty Bell 7 at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center and promote his book “Lost Spacecraft: The Search for Liberty Bell 7.”

Newport said the Discovery Channel had first showed interest in pursuing the search for the Liberty Bell in the early 1990s.

“We composed a letter about the project, but didn’t think it would go anywhere,” he said. “I thought they’d maybe do a documentary about the idea of finding the Liberty Bell.”

Discovery Channel officials took Newport’s leap of faith in 1999, when the mission was in line with Discovery’s new show “Expedition Adventure,” which explored some of the world’s unsolved mysteries. Newport understood why it took 38 years for a sponsor to provide funding to rescue the capsule.

“It’s very difficult to get projects like this funded because they’re so risky,” he said. “It’s technically feasible, but you always have limitations with time, weather or equipment problems. The timing was perfect for us.”

Max Ary, the Cosmosphere’s former president, joined Newport on the still carried some doubt.

Newport, 52, from Potomac, Md., said some skeptics questioned the value of recovering a long-lost capsule.

“But once the capsule was rescued, a lot of people changed their minds,” he said.