Video: Revealed - The Mysterious Apollo Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea!
Wednesday, March 20, 2013 at 09:43PM
More pix and info at this BezosExpeditions webpage
The mysterious Apollo voyage to the bottom of the sea is really a by-product of every Apollo mission that left the Earth... the engines and booster stage returned to Earth after burning for approximately 165 seconds, reaching about 205,000 feet. Interestingly, the momentum carries the booster up to about 360,000 feet before it begins to descend. While falling, the booster stage assumes a semi stable engines-down position until impact with the ocean. The pieces and parts then make their way on down to the ocean floor.
And now, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos (who also founded the low-cost spaceflight development company Blue Origin) along with a very skilled team of deep sea searchers has located two of the Rocketdyne F1 engines used to launch an Apollo Saturn V rocket. These two engines might actually be from the Apollo 11 mission according to this page on the BezosExpeditions website. The info on that page is from nearly a year ago tho, so we may find that these engines are from a different Apollo mission. Makes no difference to me... spent F1 engines that can be recovered and restored for viewing are awesome no matter what mission they were on!
The engines were located 14,000 feet below the surface in the Atlantic Ocean about 400 miles east of Cape Canaveral, and as the video shows, they were viewed and recovered by Remotely Operated Vehicles. It's quite stunning to see these F1 engines in the cold blackness of the ocean so many years after they spent a brief amount of time in the cold darkness of the edge of space.
(click pic to enlarge) F1 rocket engine thrust chamber on ocean floor (Bezos Expeditions)
The Saturn V first stage (known as the S-1C) had five of the F1 engines mounted, one fixed engine in the center and four gimballed around it for controlling the flight path. These were, and still are, the most powerful rocket engines ever built: creating over 1,500,000 pounds of thrust on an empty weight of just 18,500 pounds. But just imagine the weight in the fuel tanks! 318,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and 203,400 gallons of kerosene - wow! Each F1 engine stands 19 feet tall and has a diameter of 12.3 feet. The total liftoff thrust produced by the S-1C and its five F1 engines for the Apollo 15 mission was 7,766,000 pounds!
Jeff Bezos has said that the recovered engines remain the property of NASA but is hopeful that after the National Air & Space Museum most likely gets one of them that maybe the Museum of Flight in Seattle might get the other one. Time will tell. Plus, they may be able to locate and recover more engines as well.
Check out this Space.com page that gives a nice overview and graphics of the amazing Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo missions.
You might also enjoy this extensive old-school NASA Apollo Saturn V first stage fact sheet that offers many interesting technical details of the S-1C.
Great job Jeff Bezos and team for helping us to get excited about the Apollo missions all over again!
Reader Comments (1)
Is the Apollo crashed by aliens???