Two days ago, Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos announced his plan to recover one of Apollo 11's engines from the bottom of the Atlantic. Employing a team of underwater experts, state-of-the-art sonar technology has revealed the engines locations. The proposal has sparked some interesting reactions around the Internet. Some see Bezos' plan as little more than a stunt and others see it as inspirational, but not too many have questioned whether or not the engines the team found are Apollo 11's at all. And if they aren't, does it matter?The engine in question is an F-1. Five of these mammoth engines were grouped together at the base of the Saturn V's first stage. Together, they generated 1.5 million pounds of thrust and burned through 6,000 pounds of fuel per second. They powered the rocket through its first stage of flight, which lasted just two minutes and 41.6 seconds.Apollo 11 launched from pad 39A a little after 1:30 the afternoon of July 16, 1969. At T-2 seconds, all five engines were up and running at full power and, at liftoff, they slowly started lifting the huge rocket off the ground. After one minute and 21 seconds of flight, the engines reached their maximum dynamic pressure and the Saturn V had sped up to 2,636.7 feet-per-second. Two minutes and 15 seconds after liftoff, the centre engine shut down; at this point the Saturn V was 145,600 feet off the ground, about 27 vertical miles, traveling at 6,504 feet-per-second. At two minutes and 41.7 seconds after launch, the remaining engines shut down, and a second later the second-stage engine fired. The spent first stage fell into the Atlantic from an altitude of 42 miles up and the rocket sped up to 9,059.1 feet- per-second.During its ascent, the Saturn V didn't fly straight up. It rolled and flew in an angle — the azimuth — from the launch pad so it would end up in the right orbit, ultimately giving it the crew the most direct path to the Moon. Launch pad 39A is aligned north-south, and the Apollo crew hatch faced due east. If the rocket rolled and flew directly east, its azimuth would be 90 degrees. Apollo launches could range between 72 degrees and 108 depending on where each rocket's payload was heading. For Apollo 11, heading for the Sea of Tranquility that lies pretty close to the lunar equator, its launch azimuth was 72.058 degrees.The problem for Bezos is that 13 Saturn V's launched from Cape Canaveral between 1967 and 1973. Apollo 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, and 16 all had similar azimuths. Only Apollo 15 and 17, which landed at more northern points on the Moon's Earth-facing side, launched at more pronounced angles — 80.088 degrees and 91.503 degrees respectively. The other flights were the unmanned Apollo 4 and 6, and the first Skylab.So does it matter if the engine Bezos brings up is from Apollo 16 instead of Apollo 11? Probably not. In a letter announcing his intentions, Bezos calls the F-1 a modern wonder, even 50 years later. It is an inspirational piece of history. He went on to call NASA "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." If inspiration is the goal, I'm sure Bezos will find a big audience for the project, including NASA. Charles Bolden, the agency's administrator, called Bezos' proposal a "bold venture."What to do with the engine once it's recovered might be a little trickier. Bolden stated that NASA retains ownership of its hardware, even if that hardware has been in the Atlantic for 43 years. Its a difficult bit of maritime law, but with pieces of spacecraft littering the oceans you can bet NASA knows what its rights are. Bezos hopes the recovered engine will find a home at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, but it's likely NASA will pass ownership to the Smithsonian. If a second engine is recovered NASA may be willing to fulfill Bezos' wish for its display in Seattle.This isn't Bezos' first space-related project. He owns Blue Origin, a company working towards developing a reliable and cost-effecient method of getting humans into Earth orbit. In November, the company made its second successful short flight demonstration with a prototype of its suborbital vehicle. Eventually, Blue Origin will take the technology into orbit.As for the F-1, the recovery effort is in the planning stages. No one's sure what shape it will be in either since saltwater corrodes metal — we've all seen what the Titanic is looking like these days. But rocket engines are made of tougher stuff. We'll all just have to wait and see how the recovery effort plays out, but it's certain to draw a crowd.Connections:
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