Jeff Bezos' Recovered Apollo Rocket Parts Have Been Preserved

Illustration for article titled Jeff Bezos&#39; Recovered Apollo Rocket Parts Have Been Preserved

Back in 2012, Jeff Bezos, the founder of, announced that Bezos Expeditions discovered the location of several long-lost rockets used by the Apollo program to launch people to the moon. Now, those rockets are on display.


At the time, Bezos noted that they weren’t sure if they could recover the rockets: time spent on the seafloor might have destroyed them:


In 2013, they were able to successfully recover the rockets, bringing them up from the seafloor. Since their recovery, conservationists at the Cosmosphere International SciEd Center and Space Museum have been hard at work preserving the machines.

In the process, they’ve discovered some interesting things:

“We were able to identify part numbers and serial numbers as we got deeper into the treatment process,” Remar said. “There was a stencil painted on one of the Apollo 12 thrust chambers that was still visible, so we were able to identify that via the stencil. But other components were [discerned by] finding the part number and serial number.”


Additionally, they discovered that they had recovered “a thrust chamber, a liquid oxygen (LOX) dome and injector plate, a turbo pump and a heat exchanger from Apollo 11,” as well as “two thrust chambers and a LOX dome with an injector plate from Apollo 12 and a heat exchanger, a turbine and inlet manifold from Apollo 16.” The conservators also believe that they have some parts from Apollo 13.

There’s no word yet on when the parts will go on display, but according to CollectSpace, the Apollo 11 parts will be headed for the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, while the conservators are working with other locations.


[CollectSpace via]

Image Credit: CollectSpace



Adding “recover classic space debris/memorabilia from the bottom of the ocean” to my top ten awesome things to do when I’m ridiculously rich.