Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

Amazon CEO and his Expeditions team recover Apollo 11’s F-1 engines from ocean floor

bezos expeditions 1It’s probably not the kind of thing you’d find on most people’s to-do list, but for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, diving to the ocean floor to recover the engines of the space rocket that helped take humans to the moon for the very first time was an adventure he couldn’t resist.

Of course, Bezos himself didn’t don a wet suit and single-handedly pull the Apollo 11 engines to the surface, though he may well have looked into the possibility. Instead, the feat was accomplished by the Bezos Expeditions team, a ship called Seabed Worker and several rather boringly named Remotely Operated Vehicles (aka ROVs).

“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,” billionaire Bezos wrote on his Expeditions blog on Wednesday. “We photographed many beautiful objects in situ and have now recovered many prime pieces. 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 expeditions 3
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Bezos and his team located the engines – part of the Apollo 11 rocket that took Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon in July 1969 – on the seabed 14,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, about 360 miles from the rocket’s launch site in Cape Canaveral.

Writing about the technology that helped bring the engines to the surface, Bezos, who was just five when the first manned moon mission took place, said the ROVs were tethered to the Seabed Worker “with fiber optics for data and electric cables transmitting power at more than 4,000 volts.” He added, “We on the team were often struck by poetic echoes of the lunar missions. The buoyancy of the ROVs looks every bit like microgravity. The blackness of the horizon. The gray and colorless ocean floor. Only the occasional deep sea fish broke the illusion.”

The recovered engines, which Bezos described as “gorgeous”, will be restored to 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,” the Amazon founder said. “We’re excited to get this hardware on display where just maybe it will inspire something amazing.”

Commenting on Bezos’s efforts to recover the engines, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said, “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.”

bezos expeditions 4
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Topics
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
The 5 best websites like Craigslist in 2024

For years, Craigslist has been the go-to website for scoring a free sofa or finding an apartment. But there are plenty of other alternatives to Craigslist that do an equally fine job, oftentimes with a more attractive interface and fewer spam postings. The 5 best Craigslist alternatives are:

Facebook Marketplace
OfferUp
Locanto
Mercari
Recycler

Read more
How to stop spam emails in Outlook, Gmail, and more
A person sitting on the grass and taking notes at a laptop.

Spam and other unwanted emails are a nuisance, and it can seem like keeping them away from your inbox is a losing battle. But while you won't be able to prevent every piece of spam from landing in your inbox, it is possible to significantly reduce the number of messages that show up.

In this guide, we'll show you how to use filters, blocking, and spam reporting features to help stop spam from invading your inbox. We'll also go over a few more tips on how to reduce unwanted messages overall.
How to stop spam in Gmail
If you use Gmail, the most popular email client, you will eventually start getting spam. Here are our two favorite ways to deal with it.
Block spam in Gmail

Read more
How to add a signature in Gmail on desktop and mobile
how to file for stimulus

Email signatures are a great way to automatically include your contact information to your email correspondence. If you'd like to add a signature to your emails in Gmail, it's easy enough to add one. You'll just need to go through your Gmail settings to do it.

In this guide, we'll show you how to add a signature in Gmail whether you're using the desktop website version of Gmail or its mobile app.
How to add a signature on your desktop
Step 1: Launch your favorite browser and log into your Gmail account as you normally would.

Read more