Bezos Expeditions Recovers Pieces of Apollo 11 Rockets 119
skade88 writes "Jeff Bezos has been spending his time fishing up parts of the Apollo 11 rockets. From his blog 'What an incredible adventure. We are right now onboard the Seabed Worker headed back to Cape Canaveral after finishing three weeks at sea, working almost 3 miles below the surface. We found so much. We've seen an underwater wonderland – an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program. We photographed many beautiful objects in situ and have now recovered many prime pieces. Each piece we bring on deck conjures for me the thousands of engineers who worked together back then to do what for all time had been thought surely impossible.'"
Re:Ownership of recovered artifacts (Score:5, Interesting)
Military ships remain the property of the owning government.
Spain has used this to claim the salvage of gold from treasure ships and won.
Re:Dammit, editors! (Score:4, Interesting)
It's possible this stage is from another launch with a similar ground track and they can't confirm it until they find an intact serial number, but it's likely these are Apollo 11.
You can't make that assessment. There were 10 test launches, each of which would have left some debris in the ocean. There were an additional 6 unmanned launches, and 12 manned missions. There were an additional 5 launches using the same launch technology. That's a total of 33 flights which had the same hardware as the materials they've recovered. Only one of those 33 was Apollo 11. You can't say it's likely -- the odds are against it. At best, it's an educated guess.
Maybe not 11, but definitely Apollo (Score:5, Interesting)
The F1s were only used on the Apollo missions, and they were truly awesome -- they shook the ground like nothing you've ever experienced. My dad worked for NASA and we saw the flights. Even three miles away, it was scary powerful. To give you an idea, one of those F-1 has more power than 3(!) Shuttle MAIN engines -- and there were FIVE F-1s at the bottom of Saturn's first stage. So that's like fifteen shuttles taking off at once. You have no idea what that's like...
Re:Maybe not 11, but definitely Apollo (Score:2, Interesting)
Most of the noise of a shuttle launch came from its solid rocket boosters, not the main engines. It was actually nearly as loud as the Saturn V was on liftoff, but because of its superior intitial thrust:weight ratio (1.5:1 for shuttle, 1.1:1 for Saturn V), it spent less time near the ground where you can hear it. The Saturn V also had a greater low frequency component to its noise, by all reports, so the sound was physically felt as a series of slaps on the chest.