Amazon's Jeff Bezos, founder of the online retail and home delivery giant, has recovered parts of the giant rocket engines that helped deliver the first men to the Moon.
A year after discovering the Apollo 11 moon mission engines on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, Bezos Expeditions collected "many prime pieces" of the engines, Bezos recently wrote on his blog dedicated to the search.
Bezos wrote that the ship Seabed Worker and its crew spent about three weeks at sea, in the effort to secure the remnants of the engines that lay almost three miles below the water's 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," Bezos further wrote in the blog. "Each piece we bring on deck conjures for me the thousands of engineers who worked together back then to do what for all time had been thought surely impossible."
Bezos reported in March 2012 that, by using deep sea sonar, his crew had spotted the Apollo 11 engines lying 14,000 deep. He said back then he hoped recovering the rockets would inspire youth to invent and explore other worlds, like the NASA missions inspired him.
On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon.
"We're 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. 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 blogged.
Bezos noted how the equipment his crew used for the recovery, as well as the deep-sea environment itself, evoked images of that first human visit to the Moon.
"The technology used for the recovery is in its own way as otherworldly as the Apollo technology itself," he wrote. "We on the team were often struck by poetic echoes of the lunar missions...the blackness of the horizon. The gray and colorless ocean floor. Only the occasional deep sea fish broke the illusion."
The expedition team discovered many of the rocket engine's original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, meaning it will take added time to identify the parts.
Nonetheless, "the objects themselves are gorgeous,"Bezos said in the blog. "We're excited to get this hardware on display where just maybe it will inspire something amazing."
EXPEDITION VIDEO (Courtesy Bezos Expeditions):
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