Zeenews Bureau
Cape Canaveral: An expedition team led by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos pulled up two mammoth rocket engines from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean that helped boost Apollo astronauts to the moon more than 40 years ago.
Bezos and NASA announced the recovery on Wednesday. The engines are the property of NASA and the team plans to restore the artifacts for later display.
Bezos, the founder of Amazon had last year announced plans to search the sea floor for rocket motors shed during Saturn V launches to the moon during the 1969, 1972 Apollo program.
The Saturn V rocket engines were retrieved from three miles beneath the Atlantic Ocean.
NASA sent seven missions to the moon, six of which successfully carried astronauts to the lunar surface. Bezos said because the serial numbers on the retrieved engines are missing or partially missing, identifying which mission they were used for will be difficult.
"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," Bezos wrote on the project's website on Wednesday.
"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," he added.
Bezos’ space company, Blue Origins, has a NASA contract to develop a private space taxi to the International Space Station.
With Agency Inputs
First Published: Thursday, March 21, 2013, 10:52