A Jeff Bezos-funded team of sea explorers has located the Apollo 11 rockets that helped get man get to the moon.
On July 16th, 1969, five F-1 rockets powered Apollo 11 off the ground with one and a half million pounds of thrust, and 32 million horsepower. A few minutes later, the first stage rockets detached from the space craft and plummeted 38 miles to the ocean.
Jeff Bezos wanted to know what happened next. So he tapped his immense fortune to fund an ambitious project to track the rockets down. Today, he reports a success:
I’m excited to report that, using state-of-the-art deep sea sonar, the team has found the Apollo 11 engines lying 14,000 feet below the surface, and we’re making plans to attempt to raise one or more of them from the ocean floor. We don’t know yet what condition these engines might be in – they hit the ocean at high velocity and have been in salt water for more than 40 years. On the other hand, they’re made of tough stuff, so we’ll see.
Now, the tricky part: Getting those rockets off the ocean floor. [Bezos Expeditions via Scientific American via The Scuttle Fish]
Image courtesy of NASA
