Apollo 11 rocket engines may be dredged from the sea

Lisa Grossman, reporter

(Image: NASA)

James Cameron would love this. A couple of weeks before the centenary of the Titanic's sinking, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced the discovery of another set of historic relics at the bottom of the ocean: the engines that launched the Apollo 11 spacecraft towards the moon.

A private expedition financed by Bezos used state-of-the-art sonar to spot the five F-1 engines (shown in the forefront of the image above) at a depth of 4.3 kilometres below the surface of the Atlantic.

He will try to bring at least one of them back up to the surface. After more than 40 years under water, no one knows what sort of condition the engines are in. "On the other hand, they're made of tough stuff, so we'll see," Bezos writes on his website.

Despite their long submarine rest, the engines are still NASA property. He expects that the first engine to resurface will go on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, alongside the Apollo Lunar Module and the space shuttle Discovery. If the team can recover another one, Bezos has asked NASA to donate it to the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington (where Amazon is based).

Bezos hopes the recovered engines will help inspire the next generation of space explorers. "I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration," he writes. "With this endeavor, maybe we can inspire a few more youth to invent and explore."

It may seem a little backwards to inspire the future by literally dredging up the past. But Bezos is investing in future space flight more directly, too. His private space flight company Blue Origin is working on a vehicle called New Shepard to carry people and equipment on suborbital missions, and he has his sights set on getting into orbit as well.

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