Moon rocket engines recovered from bottom of Atlantic ocean

A year ago, Amazon.com founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos blogged on his Bezos Expeditions venture fund site that an undersea exploration (financed and directed by Bezos himself) had located some of the enormous F-1 rocket engines used by Apollo 11. The engines were about 14,000 feet (about 4,270 meters) below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida and had been there ever since July 16, 1969, when they'd been lit for about 150 seconds to propel Apollo 11's Saturn V launch vehicle off the launch pad and to the Moon.

Bezos' intent was to recover one or more of the engines for display, and this morning he is reporting success: after more than 40 years resting on the seabed, components from several F-1 engines have been raised back to the surface.

A crewman sprays water over a recovered injector plate. Clearly visible are the holes through which 1 ton of RP-1 fuel and 2 tons of liquid oxygen was forced... per second.

Bezos Expeditions

Contrary to Bezos' original note, it's currently impossible to determine exactly which flights the engines came from. It's possible they are indeed from Apollo 11's S-IC stage, but the Bezos Expedition site notes that "many of the original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, which is going to make mission identification difficult." Every F-1 engine flown was hand-built and manually assembled, and each major component of an F-1 engine had some form of serial number on it in order to track it through the manufacturing process. If the serial numbers on the recovered components can be deciphered, it will then be a simple matter to determine which Apollo flights they came from.