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Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

Moon rocket engines recovered from bottom of Atlantic ocean


A year ago, founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos blogged on his Bezos Expeditions venture fund site that an undersea exploration (financed and directed by Bezos himself) had located some of the enormous F-1 rocket engines used by Apollo 11. The engines were about 14,000 feet (about 4,270 meters) below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida and had been there ever since July 16, 1969, when they'd been lit for about 150 seconds to propel Apollo 11's Saturn V launch vehicle off the launch pad and to the Moon.

Bezos' intent was to recover one or more of the engines for display, and this morning he is reporting success: after more than 40 years resting on the seabed, components from several F-1 engines have been raised back to the surface.

Enlarge / A crewman sprays water over a recovered injector plate. Clearly visible are the holes through which 1 ton of RP-1 fuel and 2 tons of liquid oxygen was forced... per second.

Contrary to Bezos' original note, it's currently impossible to determine exactly which flights the engines came from. It's possible they are indeed from Apollo 11's S-IC stage, but the Bezos Expedition site notes that "many of the original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, which is going to make mission identification difficult." Every F-1 engine flown was hand-built and manually assembled, and each major component of an F-1 engine had some form of serial number on it in order to track it through the manufacturing process. If the serial numbers on the recovered components can be deciphered, it will then be a simple matter to determine which Apollo flights they came from.

Enlarge / One of the serial number plates from F-1 engine number 6049, currently being used at the Marshall Space Flight Center for gas generator testing.
Lee Hutchinson

The Bezos Expedition page includes a video showing some of the recovery process. The depth of nearly three miles—two thousand feet deeper than the wreck of the Titanic—puts the engines firmly out of reach of human divers, so the operation was carried out with Remote Operated Vehicles (ROVs) controlled from the surface. The engines themselves are truly massive: a fully assembled F-1 is 19 feet (5.8 meters) from nozzle to fuel inlets and weighs about 20,000 lbs (about 9,000 kg). Lifting that much mass from the bottom of the ocean—especially when the parts have been corroded by seawater and made brittle—required a tremendous amount of skill. Fortunately, the team behind the recovery is quite experienced in underwater exploration and salvage—it's headed up by Rory Golden, who previously worked with Dr. Robert Ballard in locating the Titanic.

Enlarge / An F-1 engine (with nozzle extension) on display at MSFC. Author's wife standing next to engine for scale.
Lee Hutchinson

The expedition has pulled up enough parts to reconstruct two full F-1 engines. The parts need to be restored and stabilized to counteract the effects of air exposure after being immersed in seawater for so long, but Bezos promises that the reconstructed engines will be part of a grand museum-quality display: "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," notes the blog entry. "We're excited to get this hardware on display where just maybe it will inspire something amazing."

Bezos isn't the only one interested in bringing the past back to life. We reported two months ago on efforts at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center to resurrect heritage F-1 components and actually subject them to "hot-fire" tests; that effort is still underway and has evolved into a full-scale project to create an entirely new large-scale RP-1/LOX engine, which will compete for the chance to be used in strap-on boosters for NASA's Space Launch System heavy-lift vehicle. This new gigantic engine will be christened the "F-1B," and is being designed to operate at roughly the same performance levels as the uprated F-1A design from the 1960s—about 1.8 millions pounds of thrust (about 8 meganewtons). Ars spent several days at MSFC last month interviewing the engineering team behind the effort, and we've got a lot more F-1B engine coverage coming up soon.

Listing image by Bezos Expeditions

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