Apollo Saturn V F-1 Engines

It's turning out to be a huge week for well-heeled amateur adventurers. Just days after filmmaker James Cameron took his one-person submersible down to the deepest point on Earth, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced a plan to recover the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V rockets that took the Apollo 11 astronauts to the Moon four decades ago.

Bezos, writing on the Bezos Expeditions blog for his personal venture capital fund, said Wednesday that a "team of undersea pros" backed by the fund has located the five Rocketdyne F-1 engines that fell into the Atlantic Ocean as part of the first stage (S-IC) of the rocket that launched Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins on their historic trip on July 16, 1969.


Located several hundred miles off the east coast of the United States (see this cool GeoHack map identifying the location of S-IC wreckage from the Apollo missions), the engines remain the property of NASA. Bezos said that if one engine was recovered, the space agency would likely want it displayed at the Smithsonian but he's asked NASA to allow a subsequent recovery by his privately funded team to be housed at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Wash., where Amazon is headquartered.

The F-1 engines were designed by Boeing subsidiary Rocketdyne to power the 138-foot-tall, Boeing-built first stage of the Saturn V rockets used for the Apollo and Skylab missions from 1967 to 1973. The Saturn V's S-IC engines originally had four F-1 engines that could be hydraulically gimballed to control the rocket, but a fifth, fixed F-1 was added on later Apollo missions to add more thrust to compensate for heavier payloads.

From the Apollo 9 mission on, they burned for roughly 165 seconds after launch to take the Saturn V to a height of about 40 miles above sea level, producing 1,525,000 pound-force (lbf) of thrust apiece, or about 7,500,000 lbf altogether when all five were firing.

"I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration," Bezos wrote, explaining his interest in recovering the mission's powerful rocket engines. "NASA is one of the few institutions I know that can inspire five-year-olds. It sure inspired me, and with this endeavor, maybe we can inspire a few more youth to invent and explore."
