Amazon CEO recovers sunken Apollo engines
SEATTLE -- Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos says his private expedition team has successfully recovered two Apollo program rocket engines from the ocean floor.
Writing on the Bezos Expeditions website, Bezos said the team is headed back to Cape Canaveral after recovering the engines from nearly 3 miles below the surface.
"We've 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 program," he wrote. "We photographed many beautiful objects in situ and have now recovered many prime pieces."
Bezos had set out to recover the engines from the Apollo 11 mission that first landed men on the moon, but wrote that the original serial numbers are missing or partially missing from the recovered engines, so it was not immediately clear which Apollo mission they were from.
"We might see more during restoration. The objects themselves are gorgeous," he said.
The F-1 engines were part of the mighty Saturn V rockets used in the Apollo launches.
The five engines, which produced nearly 7.7 million pounds of thrust, dropped into the sea as planned minutes after liftoff.
The search team led by Bezos said last year that they had located the engines using high-tech sonar.
Following the discovery announcement, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said NASA retains ownership of any artifacts recovered and would likely offer one of the Saturn V F-1 engines to the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
"If the Smithsonian declines or if a second engine is recovered, we will work to ensure an engine or other artifacts are available for display at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, as Jeff requested in his correspondence with my office," Bolden said at the time.
In a statement released Wednesday, Bolden applauded Bezos and his team on the recovery.
"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," he said.
In his post on Wednesday, Bezos said his team was bringing home enough major components to fashion displays of two flown F-1 engines.
"The upcoming restoration will stabilize the hardware and prevent further corrosion," he wrote. "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. We're excited to get this hardware on display where just maybe it will inspire something amazing."
Bezos also thanked NASA for its assistance with the recovery and said "We're excited to be bringing a couple of your F-1s home."
Writing on the Bezos Expeditions website, Bezos said the team is headed back to Cape Canaveral after recovering the engines from nearly 3 miles below the surface.
"We've 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 program," he wrote. "We photographed many beautiful objects in situ and have now recovered many prime pieces."
Bezos had set out to recover the engines from the Apollo 11 mission that first landed men on the moon, but wrote that the original serial numbers are missing or partially missing from the recovered engines, so it was not immediately clear which Apollo mission they were from.
"We might see more during restoration. The objects themselves are gorgeous," he said.
The F-1 engines were part of the mighty Saturn V rockets used in the Apollo launches.
The five engines, which produced nearly 7.7 million pounds of thrust, dropped into the sea as planned minutes after liftoff.
The search team led by Bezos said last year that they had located the engines using high-tech sonar.
Following the discovery announcement, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said NASA retains ownership of any artifacts recovered and would likely offer one of the Saturn V F-1 engines to the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
"If the Smithsonian declines or if a second engine is recovered, we will work to ensure an engine or other artifacts are available for display at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, as Jeff requested in his correspondence with my office," Bolden said at the time.
In a statement released Wednesday, Bolden applauded Bezos and his team on the recovery.
"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," he said.
In his post on Wednesday, Bezos said his team was bringing home enough major components to fashion displays of two flown F-1 engines.
"The upcoming restoration will stabilize the hardware and prevent further corrosion," he wrote. "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. We're excited to get this hardware on display where just maybe it will inspire something amazing."
Bezos also thanked NASA for its assistance with the recovery and said "We're excited to be bringing a couple of your F-1s home."
The Moon landing never really happened. A few of us know the true story
@BuddyHolly Yes, You and OJ believe it.
"In situ"?
Who talks like that?
I'm really disappointed by how many churlish people are commenting negatively on this story.
Just stay in your caves and pout, the rest of us are looking up at the stars.
I'm surprised by the number of people griping about this as being a waste of money.Bezos spent his money to find and recover these engines, so they and the history represented by them could be shared with everyone.Sure there are plenty of better things which could have been done with the money, but there are also plenty of bad things (just think about the billions wasted on negative campaign ads during our last yearâs election).The United States would be a pretty poor country culturally if no one spent the money or took the time to find and preserve historic items such as these.All that stuff in the Smithsonian didnât just appear by magic, someone found and in many cases spent a lot of money restoring and preserving it so it could be enjoyed by future generations.
Personally, this story put a broad smile on my face, but unlike some others who commented, I love history and the spirit of adventure which helped make our country great.
NASA has done great things with our money and they have also wasted great amounts of our money. I too remember landing on the moon and the pride the country had during the landing.
But, with the history of the times it is easy to see that if we were not in a military arms race with Russia, American would most likely have still been restricted to the face of this earth. If it was not for the ability of Kennedy to give a great speech Russia would have been to the moon first.
This is what really hurts when you compare the strengths of NASA then to NASA today. Then, they had the might of the American people behind them for the American people believed this was being done to further our peacetime capabilities. If the American people knew then that most of the costs of going to the moon was to bolster our military might (and mostly the pockets of the military war machine) things would have been a lot different with the funding.
We should have manned space colonies on the moon today. We should have manned mining expeditions to the asteroid belt. We should have been capturing comets and asteroids into the earths orbit to use as weapons against the asteroid or comet that will wipe out life on earth. We should have colonies on Mars working to enhance the atmosphere so that plants and people can survive without enclosures.
We have benefited greatly as a human race based upon our space capabilities. We have instant world wide communications, we can navigate to within feet of almost any object on earth without maps. We can harness the power of the sun to create electricity. We can stick ourselves to the walls with Velcro while drinking Tang freeze dried ice cream floats.
But we have not solved war. We can't feed our hungry before they die. We can't home our homeless before they succumb to the elements here on earth let alone extraterrestrial locations.
Sooner then later I think earth will be in a serious enough threat either from earth based threats or space based treats that will convince the majority of the countries to work together to solve long term space habitation be it in satellites or on satellites or even other planets. We first though have to overcome our feelings of superiority with either religion or wealth. Unfortunately we have to want these things and I am afraid that this want will only come with a need and that need will be too late to either save this earth from destruction or the human race from destruction or both.
For NASA to claim salvage rights to these rocket engines when they did not lift a finger to retrieve them is exactly the attitudes that will keep humans from reaching the stars and beyond.
If NASA owns it, they should be required to clean it up! Just imagine how much rocket trash is at the bottom!
Amazon is awesome.
This guy has way too much time and money on his hands. Doubt that scrap will recoup the costs. Just pieces of mechanical garbage.
@Klondiko except this scrap is a representation of one of the pinnacles of human achievement for all time ever. Not too distant an achievement from the people who figured out how to put jars of water all over the place so they could increase their hunting and traveling range. Call it what you want, but be accurate.
@Klondiko It's all relational, how much 'mechanical garbage' would we find in your home, you know something that you value but to other people makes no sense. How much did you pay for that in comparison to your net worth? We all have hobbies and we all collect some things that we either have no real use for or things that we never use to justify to cost.Â
"Awesome! I love it when they post stories about billionaires who don't know what to do with their money, so they blow it on obscenely expensive crap and it always makes news headlines." - Everyone
You wanna do something amazing? Â Help put a ding in the national debt!
@AdAckbar And how much more have you sent to the general fund to "Help put a ding in the national debt!" that you did not have to? Do you just send the IRS 25% of your income when you only had to send 20%? I think what Bezos did here is great in comparison to some rich movie stars that can't stay out of rehab or some lottery winner that blew all their money in a year.Â
One reason why it's nice to be a billionaire, they get to play with cool stuff, well the ones with intelligence anyway who don't spend it on Russian mail order brides and ridiculous toupees ha ha
Sounds to me there is no squabble over ownership. Both engines will end up in museums, as they should. Personally I find this fascinating. I remember well the moon landings, the thrill. Never dreamed it was the end of our nation's dreaming. Well, the wealthy got their tax breaks and the masses got their social programs. I guess that is all that matters. People hardly noted Neil Armstrong's passing last year. Quite a shame, really.
@HagarBezos and NASA must have had a previous agreement on ownership. These clearly fall under Maritime ownership laws that have been in place for a few thousand years.
Having said that, what a find. These things are a tribute to ALL the men and women who worked on them. I doubt that their equal could be built today even with the improvements in technology. Fact was, back then even the person screwing parts for the space toilet together was absolutely committed to the process. With Millions of parts and an allowable failure rate of .001 still leaves a lot of parts that can fail.Those engines are incredible and the power they make is astounding. Without them we never would have made it to the moon, reliable is an understatement.
The arrogance and disregard for old salvage rights expressed by the NASA chief tells everyone how government power has gone to the heads of it's employees.Â
Good on you Bezos.
Now see, this is what happens when rich people do cool things and why America can be so great. Too bad the America I live in today, I am getting taxed to death to keep our social programs going for the lazy and am about to get taxed more so the Illegals can get a low cost education.
@dkgiovenco no, you are not.  quit whining.
http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/the-best-life/2010/04/21/anger-is-high-but-tax-rates-arent
Cool.
Thats cool, shows the kids we did have a space program at one time. If we were on the moon in the 60's we should have been on Mars in the 80's but we poured all our resources into a shuttle that was neat but couldnt do much besides take people and satellites into low orbit.
Thats how the government works; they never want to do the dirty work but then claim ownership once someone else has done the work. Just like your tax dollars.
Great piece of history from the American space program, as time dates many of us watching the first men on the moon that July night of 69 was something special...
I'd say FINDERS KEEPERS on this one. Â The same with ship wreck booty. Â These businesses have no problem letting everyone pay the expense to recover the booty BUT when they DO get it, then they claim ownership of it. Â Finders keepers, losers weepers.Â
@Slingerss Uhh hu... You said booty
@Slingerss That is what sea salvage laws also state.
All the political garbage aside I remember the days when those rockets blasted off. Incredible it was. But how little did I know at the time that this country had reached a zenith in space accomplishment never to be equaled again. Such accomplishment in future manned space exploration will only be repeated by other countries like China, for example, perhaps on a manned mission to Mars someday after my time has passed.
@growlerxrunner Sad, but true.  We are a nation in decline.  We've given up the principles that made us great, and turned to the failed socialist policies that never work (in the long run), while the former communist countries learned their lessons and have gone capitalist and are now kicking our a**.  People who voted for the current adminisrtraton deserve what they get, the problem is they are taking the rest of us with them
@PlumBUSTED!  I just read this week where it will take over 100 years to pay for Bush and Cheney's failed Iraq and Afghanistan invasion that murdered thousands of young American's. That darn pesky President Obama, how dare he pull our troops out of Afghanistan and not send them into Libya.
@D90 @PlumBUSTED! When Obama said he would pull out the troops I was encouraged, but NOW 4 years later our guys and gals are still getting killed and maimed and treated like dirt by the VA when they come home. There hasn't been a federal administration since way before lincoln that was worth a thimble of warm spit.
NASA:Â "We have no problem throwing our space junk away in the ocean and leaving it there to rot. But if anybody happens to swim down three miles and grab it, it belongs to us."
I call BS on this one. It may be somehow legal, but does not make sense.
@acepaul Well technically tax dollars paid for it, so really it belongs to the people, NOT NASA.
@BluefireJaguar But NASA threw them away like so much garbage in the ocean and abandoned them.  Other than just being what they are for 'visual appearance' they probably would not even get enough as scrap weight to pay for the recovery, Â
Is Bezos unaware that NASA is claiming ownership or something? From what I gather here he seems blissfully unaware. I smell a messy lawsuit soon...
@Jumblemuffin Bezos and the rest of us should ignore NASA- it is now a political animal.
@Jumblemuffin This is the super-rich guy version of catch and release fishing. But it does seem that Bezos Expeditions could reasonably demand compensation for recovering NASA's artifacts  for them (don't take a check, Jeff!)
@nodozr @Jumblemuffin If I was Bezos and was told hand it over I would go dump it back in the ocean and tell NASA to get it themselves.
@Jumblemuffin @nodozr They would probably sic the EPA on you  :-)
@Jumblemuffin NASA cannot claim anything.  It's salvage plain and simple.  That stuff had been abandoned for over 35 years.  If they wanted it, they would have recovered it by now.  NASA is S.O.L.
@PlumBUSTED! @Jumblemuffin This seems to be pretty similar to the treasure hunters that found a Spanish galleon a few years ago. It was lost for hundreds of years, the private treasure hunting company researched the wreck, explored for several years, finally found the wreck and recovered hundreds of millions of dollars worth or lost treasure from international waters. The courts ruled that the treasure rightfully belonged to the Spanish government and the treasure hunters were S.O.L Government greed and their ability to burry any private enterprise in legal procedings is re-writing a lifetime of maritime laws.
i would be tempted to dump it back overboard in an undisclosed location and tell Spain to go pound sand.
Then pick it up piecemeal and sell it off quietly.
@Snohomish_G8r Thanks..... sad....
@PlumBUSTED! @Snohomish_G8r Here is an article related to the Spanish Galleon recovery. Pretty sad what governments are getting away with.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57382369/$500m-salvaged-treasure-being-returned-to-spain/
@Snohomish_G8r That would be terrible if it worked out that way.  Bezos has deep pockets, but the government can always borrow more from China.  I wonder how much money NASA or the government would be willing to waste in court for a couple of useless engines though? Â