Jeff Bezos Plans to Recover Apollo 11 Rocket Engines From Ocean Floor

Jeff Bezos Plans to Recover Apollo 11 Rocket Engines From Ocean Floor:

Billionaire Jeff Bezos announced plans to recover from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean at least one of the F-1 engines that carried the Apollo 11 rocket into space.
Founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Bezos already has his hands in several extreme undertakings, such as the private spaceflight company Blue Origin.
Bezos reported Mar. 28 on his blog that a team of engineers has recently used state-of-the-art deep-sea sonar and found the Apollo 11 engines lying 14,000 feet below the ocean’s surface. He wrote that he is currently making plans to raise them.
Wealthy patrons seem to be bringing about a resurgence in deep oceanic exploration, with director James Cameron’s recent dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench and Richard Branson’s similar plans to reach the ocean floor.
If recovered, the engines would be a crowning piece of Apollo memorabilia for Bezos. On his blog, he wrote that watching the moon landing as a 5-year-old helped inspire his passion in science, engineering, and exploration.
“[W]ith this endeavor, maybe we can inspire a few more youth to invent and explore,” Bezos wrote.

The five F-1 engines were the powerhouse of the Saturn V rocket, which remains the largest launch vehicle ever built in the United States. They produced 7.7 million pounds of thrust over 2.5 minutes and brought the rocket up to an altitude of 38 miles.
At the end of their burn, they plummeted back to Earth and splashed down into the Atlantic Ocean. The remaining parts of the spacecraft brought the Apollo 11 crew into lunar orbit and landed men on the surface on July 20, 1969.
Bezos has no idea what condition the F-1 engines are in, after crashing into the sea and sitting in corrosive salt water for the past 40 years. But he is planning to find out.
While the endeavor is being undertaken with private money, Bezos clarifies that the rockets remain NASA property. If one engine is raised, he imagines the agency would make it available to the public at the Smithsonian museum in Washington, D.C. Should he recover more than one, he has asked NASA to consider making the second one available at the Museum of Flight in Seattle.
Image: Engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center install and test the F-1 engines on the Saturn V rocket in 1965. NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.