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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recovers Apollo spacecraft engines from the bottom of the ocean

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recovers Apollo spacecraft engines from the bottom of the ocean

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Apollo rocket recovery
Apollo rocket recovery

Last year, Amazon CEO and space enthusiast Jeff Bezos discovered the underwater whereabouts of Apollo 11's F-1 engines and announced his plans to bring them up to the surface. Now, nearly a full 12 months later, Bezos' team has recovered a number of F-1 engine parts and brought them out of the ocean — his blog goes into full detail, with a variety of great photos and a quick video showing the underwater recovery. Bezos says that his team recovered enough "major components" to put together displays of two flown F-1 engines. "We want the hardware to tell its true story, including its 5,000 mile per hour re-entry and subsequent impact with the ocean surface," Bezos writes. Unfortunately, many of the serial numbers from the recovered parts are missing, which will make determining which exactly Apollo mission the parts are from quite a bit more difficult.

While Bezos didn't indicate whether he still hopes to display the rockets in the Smithsonian and the Seattle Museum of Flight, it definitely appears that this engines will be on public display somewhere, once some restoration to prevent further corrosion is complete. Bezos also gave some details on the technology behind the recovery — the team used remotely operated vehicles that dived 14,000 feet below sea level. The ROVs were tethered to the ship with fiber-optic cables for data and electricity, and you can see some video footage from the recovery dive below.