Confirmed: F-1 Rocket Engine Salvaged By Amazon's Bezos Is From Apollo 11

willith writes "The folks at Bezos Expeditions have confirmed that faintly visible serial numbers on one of the large engine components they lifted from three miles below the ocean's surface match the serial number of F-1 engine F-6044, which flew in the center position on Saturn V number SA-506 — Apollo 11. With the 44th anniversary of the first lunar landing coming up tomorrow, the confirmation comes at an auspicious time. The F-1 engine remains to this day the largest single-chamber liquid fueled engine ever produced — although NASA is considering using a newer uprated design designated as the F-1B to help boost future heavy-lift rockets into orbit."

Re:Interesting indeed

[willith]

The "paperwork" has never been lost—every shred of documentation is intact and on file. In fact, engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center have been spending the past year busily disassembling and working with components from several stored F-1 engines. They've constructed highly detailed CAD models of the engines, and even done hot firing on one of the gas generator segments.

I penned a very detailed piece [arstechnica.com] on this over at Ars Technica earlier this year, including photos and video of one of the gas generator hot-fires. The piece includes multiple interviews with senior propulsion scientists at MSFC, and thoroughly debunks the "but the blueprints are lost!" urban myth.

Re:Designs were not lost but tooling is gone

[AnotherAnonymousUser]

A fun anecdote to this - I have an uncle who works at NASA and he said that the engineers of today were trying to figure out how the engineers of the Apollo program had solved a particular kind of problem. No documentation existed, and no one still working there had been part of the original program, so they had to go over to their own space museum to tear apart a section of the rocket to see how they'd done it. There's a lot of experiential knowledge that comes with actually solving problems, rather than just using someone else's notes, and a lot of that kind of information was lost.