Two of the massive Apollo-era rocket engines that launched astronauts to the Moon more than 40 years ago have been recovered, from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, by a private expedition led by the founder of Amazon.Com.
When NASA's mighty Saturn V rockets were launched on missions to Earth orbit and the Moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the five F-1 engines that powered each of the boosters' first stages dropped into the Atlantic Ocean and sank to the seafloor.
A year ago, Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, announced his private expedition had located what they believed to be the engines from the 1969 Apollo 11 mission that began the journey to land the first humans on the Moon, Space.Com reported.
"Nearly one year ago, Jeff Bezos shared with us his plans to recover F-1 engines," said NASA administrator Charles Bolden in a statement.
"We share the excitement expressed by Jeff and his team in announcing the recovery of two of the powerful Saturn V first-stage engines from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean," Bolden said.
"This is a historic find and I congratulate the team for its determination and perseverance in the recovery of these important artifacts of our first efforts to send humans beyond Earth orbit," Bolden said.
Bezos and his team are now heading back to port in Cape Canaveral, after working for three weeks at sea on the Seabed Worker, a multi-purpose support vessel.
The team located a tangled pile of F-1 engine parts strewn across the ocean floor at a depth of more than 4,270 metres.
"We found so much. We have seen an underwater wonderland - an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo programme," Bezos said.
The Bezos expedition returned enough major components to rebuild two Saturn V F-1 engines - out of the 65 that were launched between 1967 and 1973 - for display.
Despite claims last year that the engines were specifically from Apollo 11, Bezos said the history of the engine parts he recovered may not be known.
Bezos said that many of the parts' original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, which may make mission identification difficult.
Once the engine parts are back on land, they will undergo a restoration to stabilise the hardware and prevent further corrosion from their decades-long exposure to the ocean's salt water.
