Jeff Bezos Finds Apollo 11's Saturn V
F-1 Engine Recovery, Bezos Expeditions
“I’m excited to report that, using state-of-the-art deep sea sonar, the team has found the Apollo 11 engines lying 14,000 feet below the surface, and we’re making plans to attempt to raise one or more of them from the ocean floor. We don’t know yet what condition these engines might be in – they hit the ocean at high velocity and have been in salt water for more than 40 years. On the other hand, they’re made of tough stuff, so we’ll see.”
Marc’s note: it will be very interesting to see what condition the engine(s) are in if they are able to raise one or more of them.
They also located one emerald necklace
Great!I was wondering about that just the other day.If the first stage came down like Soyuz,then there will be no damage.If there was no holes in the tanks I was thinking the first stage would have floated for days.They must have blown holes in it to make it sink.Bezos is doing what SpaceX did with a lot of small engines.Maybe he is thing of changing to one large engine.Much lower cost.I hope he gets the NASA crew contract.His design(biconic) comes in nose first .This is safest.The plasma stays on the heat shield and does not travel up to where the parachutes are housed and all kinds of other equipment.The are housed on top where it is cool.The crew layout is good.A lower deck is possible.Ejection seats on the flight deck are easy to install.The service section comes back.It can land at zero sink and forward speed.
The velocity and angle at which the stage hit the water would have completely destroyed the stage. However, the engines should remain intact even with violent impacts (see V-2 photos from London circa 1944 or Shuttle photos from Florida circa January 1986).
Note – they are still, and will always be, property of the US government / NASA.
I think Bezos should have the right to sell them back to NASA. You don’t normally retain property rights in something forty years after deliberately abandoning it in the ocean.
When it comes to shipwrecks, there are often conflicting laws and legal claims. These often end up in court. This Saturn V is almost certainly outside the 12-mile territorial waters of the U.S. I think it’s highly likely Bezos and the U.S. government will work out a deal since both parties probably just want the artifacts put on display to the public somewhere in the U.S. But if Bezos for some reason wanted to fight in court, he’d probably be awarded at least some portion of the value of the wreck under the centuries-old precedent of salvage rights.
No, he wouldn’t win. See US Navy wrt aircraft. See recent spanish galleon.
Charlie,
Whoever ends up “owning” them is going to faced with the very significant costs of whatever has to be done to them. so I wouldn’t be surprised to see NASA gladly hand them over to Bezos with best wishes.
Steve
Bezos has already discussed ownership issues with NASA, and apparently the F-1, if raised, could be placed on display at Seattle’s Museum of Flight.
Gus Grissom’s Liberty Bell 7 was in the ocean for 38 years and did remarkably well. Hopefully the F-1 engines are in similar shape.
I don’t know, Digging up old rocket engines from a bygone era seems like somebody’s got way, way too much time on his hands. Are these engines that interesting?
There is a lot of “lack of information” here. Did he find all 5 engines, are they still clustered together or spread over an extended area of the Atlantic, does any part of the tank still exist, etc.. If still with a portion of the tank or clustered, that is gonna be a job if NASA says only bring up one or two, having to cut them from the frame.
But still.. this is exciting!
how do they know it is Apollo 11 ?
The unique impact coordinates of each booster are known. They are published in Alan Laurie’s book “Saturn” (Apogee Press), for example.
The precise coordinates of every Saturn stage impact point is known and has been published. See Alan Laurie’s “Saturn” (Apogee Books), for example.
More recently, SpaceX had initially talked up being able to recover Falcon 9 first stages out of the drink to review/reuse/recycle/relaunch, but when pressed by someone (Clark over at HobbySpace?), they fessed up and admitted that the stages effectively shredded when they hit the water…. leading them to plan B (powered flyback).
If they shred,why does Soyuz come down in one piece with little damage?I have images of this for proof,several different so no fluke.The scaling of Soyuz,F-9 and Saturn-V is there.The weight to surface area is the same.Soyuz hits on its side.No bounce.It is deformed 2′ on the bottom.It looks like it is rotating like a pinwheel,so that might help.As proved by Mythbusters,water is softer than dirt.So no damage.People are forgetting air.It gets denser as it goes down,so the stage is not hurt from high G.From the damage of Soyuz,it looks like it lands at 50-100 mph.I do see some difference in the construction.Soyuz uses rings.It looks like F-9 uses closely spaced stringers.This would allow the tank to bend inward.This may account for the failure.I have seen a Saturn-V cut away and it looks heavily side strengthened.Baffles would help a lot.Is your analysis different and you have seen my posts before and disagree with it?
I took an image of Soyuz lying on the ground off of TV,from Space Tourists.I was going to upload it,but I do not see the plus anymore.I will try to upload it to my Website and I will give out the address.There is a picture of the strap ons vapor trails.You can see the spiraling from them as well.They come down in good shape.
Old Number 7 is built like a brick outhuose. They integrate it on its side and then raise it for fuelling & Launch. Apollo could not be integrated on its side, the bending loads as it was raised to vertical with the stages all attached would have caused it to buckle in the middle. Saturn was indeed strengthened, enough that it could support the 5 million pounds of fuel and payload as they were integrated and launched in the vertical orientation. But it would have folded like a cheap suit if they laid it on its side.
Saturns were strong enough to do the job they were designed to do, but not the one the way the Russians do the similar job.
The boosters on the R-7 also separate (I believe) lower & slower than the separation of the S-IC from the S-II stages on Saturn, resulitng in much higher impact energies. I’d be surprised if there was much more than the engine mounts and maybe the bulk of the lower tank left intact on any S-ICs on the ocean floor.
Paul
Thanks.The Soyuz core makes a good sonic boom.The Soyuz just uses widely spaced rings of about 2″ diameter.I did not see any baffles.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6…
Picture of a Soyuz strap-on booster.
Here is the Soyuz core as it landed. From Space Tourists on the Documentary Channel.Available on CD.Pretty small.Move it to a viewer and enlarge.Or use a magnifying glass. Notice the small damage on the bottom and how close it is to the house.
Given Bezos Inc. stupendous success with his Blue Origin spaceship line , this might be a useful skill set to develop and practice…
To show this is common,and the construction ,some more images. In the last one it looks like the kerosene tank has separated.They don’t always come down perfect.Because of the weight of the engines they would come down at an angle tail first.They would float tail down.Unless holes were blown in the tanks,there is no way for the water to get in the tanks to sink.The holes can be seen blown in the intertank of the the strap ons.No need for parachutes,take a barge and crane and pull them out.I can not see why F-9 would shatter.Even with para chute failure.With parachutes,no problem.Why they are having problems must be a trade secret.Glad to see SpaceX has formed an outside safety panel to review DragonRider.If they say there is no problem with flames burning up one side,then ok even though they have Astronauts on the panel.