Amazon CEO pulls Apollo engines from ocean floor
Mar 20, 2013, 12:08 PM | Updated: 1:07 pm
An expedition led by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos pulled up Apollo's engines from the ocean floor. The team is now headed back to Cape Canaveral. (bezosexpeditions.com)
(bezosexpeditions.com)
Two mammoth rocket engines that helped boost Apollo astronauts to the moon have been fished out of the Atlantic.
An expedition led by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos pulled up the engines and is headed back to Cape Canaveral, Fla., after three weeks at sea.
Bezos and NASA announced the recovery on Wednesday.
“We’re bringing home enough major components to fashion displays of two flown F-1 engines,” Bezos wrote on the Blue Origins website.
The sunken engines were part of the mighty Saturn V rocket used to fly astronauts to the moon during the 1960s and 1970s. After liftoff, they fell into the ocean as planned.
Bezos wrote in depth about the images of the debris scattered across the ocean floor.
“The buoyancy of the ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles) looks every bit like microgravity. The blackness of the horizon. The gray and colorless ocean floor.”
The engines are the property of NASA. The space agency congratulated Bezos on his efforts. The team planned to restore the artifacts for later display.
Bezos’ space company, Blue Origins, has a NASA contract to develop a private space taxi to the International Space Station.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
