Lisa Grossman, physical sciences reporter
(Images: Bezos Expeditions)
Rockets that sent people to the moon have just been pulled from the bottom of the ocean. Billionaire Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and of the private space-flight company Blue Origin, announced yesterday that his team has recovered parts of a Saturn V rocket used on Apollo missions to the moon.
Driven by five F-1 engines at its base, the powerful Saturn V is the only rocket that has ever taken humans to another world. About 2 minutes after launch, these engines would run out of fuel and the bottom section of the rocket would separate and fall into the sea. Until recently, the fate of these lost pieces of history was unknown.
About a year ago, Bezos announced that his expeditions team had found some of the F-1 rocket engines from the Apollo flights about 4.3 kilometres below the surface of the Atlantic. The team has now dredged up parts of them using remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) - but not before taking haunting photos of the 40-year-old relics sitting on the ocean floor.
"We on the team were often struck by poetic echoes of the lunar missions," Bezos wrote on his expedition website. "The buoyancy of the ROVs looks every bit like microgravity. The blackness of the horizon. The gray and colorless ocean floor. Only the occasional deep sea fish broke the illusion."
Pieces recovered so far are enough to reconstruct two full F-1 engines - but it's not yet clear if they are from Apollo 11, the first mission to land on the moon, or some other Apollo flight. Future restoration efforts may reveal the details. After restoration, Bezos hopes one of the engines will go on display at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, where Amazon is based. The other engine will probably go to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.
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