Friday, March 22, 2013

Bezos recovers moon rocket engines from the bottom of the Atlantic

Last year billionaire Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder, blogged that a deep-sea exploration he financed and directed had found some of the huge F-1 rocket engines used by Apollo 11 in 1969. Now, components from several F-1 engines have been recovered.

The engines were about 14,000 feet under the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida. They had been there ever since July 16, 1969, when they'd been lit for about 150 seconds to boost Apollo 11's Saturn V launch vehicle off the launch pad and to the moon.
Bezos wanted to recover one or more of the engines for display, and is now reporting the successful removal from the seabed of components from several F-1 engines.

Contrary to Bezos' original identification, it's reportedly impossible to determine exactly which flights the engines came from. It's possible they are from Apollo 11's S-IC stage, but the Bezos Expedition site notes "many of the original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, which is going to make mission identification difficult."

For more of the Ars Technica story: arstechnica.com

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