Bezos Expeditions Recovers Lost Apollo 11 Rocket Engines from the Deep

More than 40 years ago, Apollo 11's Saturn V launch vehicle was propelled by engines off of the launch pad and to the moon. Only lit for about 150 seconds, these engines then found a watery grave at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean--until now. Amazon.com founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos has announced that he has finally recovered the components from several F-1 engines that lay deep beneath the the ocean waves.

The underwater expedition, named Bezos Expeditions, was far from easy. The engines were located nearly three miles beneath the surface--two thousand feet deeper than the wreck of the Titanic. Since the pieces were far out of range of human divers, the expedition employed Remote Operated Vehicles (ROVs) that were controlled from the surface. These machines were tethered to the team's ship with fiber optics for data and electric cables that transmitted power at more than 4,000 volts, according to Bezos Expedition website.

In addition to finding them, the team also had to deal with the mechanics of actually lifting the engines from the seabed--a feat in and of itself. The engines are massive, and a fully assembled one is about 19 feet tall and weighs about 20,000 pounds. Since seawater corrodes metal and makes it more brittle, the team had to be extremely cautious when moving the enormous pieces of machinery.

While the findings are certainly historic, it's not certain that these engines are actually from the Apollo 11 mission. Since many of the serial numbers are either missing or partially missing from the equipment, identification will be difficult. Each F-1 engine was hand-built and manually assembled, and each major component had a distinct serial number that could potentially allow researchers to track which mission it belonged to. However, that assumes that the team will be able to decipher the partially destroyed serial numbers in order to determine which Apollo flights they came from.

So what is the expedition team planning to do with these engines? They intend to restore the components in order to stabilize the hardware and prevent further corrosion. The team hopes that during the restoration, more serial numbers might be revealed. 

Want to see the ROVs in action? Check out the video below, courtesy of Bezos Expeditions.