Apollo 12 engine rescued by Amazon’s Bezos goes to Museum of Flight

Jeff Bezos was 5 when the Apollo moon landings fired a passion for space travel.

Years later the Amazon chief funded and led an expedition that in 2013 found and recovered the remains of several Apollo booster rocket engines from 14,000 feet down on the bottom of the Atlantic.

On Thursday, he announced that at his request NASA is donating the restored remains of a booster engine from the Apollo 12 rocket to Seattle’s Museum of Flight.

On Nov. 19, 1969, Apollo 12 became the second mission to land men on the moon.

“It took a lot of 21st-century underwater tech and an extraordinary team of skilled professionals to find and recover these historical treasures and — thanks to them, NASA and The Museum of Flight — now a whole new generation of young people will be able to see these amazing engines on display,” Bezos said in a statement.

“When I was 5 years old I watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon, and it imprinted me with a passion for science and exploration,” he added. “It’s my hope that these engines might spark a similar passion in a child who sees them today.”

The Apollo F-1 cone-shaped engines, arrayed in a cluster of five at the base of each rocket, each delivered 1.5 million pounds of thrust and burned 6,000 pounds of rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen every second.

The massive engines, each more than 18.5 feet tall and 12 feet in diameter, burned for just a few minutes, long enough to boost the 50-ton Saturn V rocket to the edge of space.

Then the first stage, including the engines, fell away and plunged some 40 miles back to Earth and into the Atlantic, as NASA planned.

Bezos Expeditions used state-of-the-art deep-sea sonar to locate the engines off the coast of Cape Canaveral in Florida, nearly three miles down.

Operating unmanned undersea vehicles tethered to a ship with fiber optics and electric cables, Bezos’s team recovered enough major components to make displays of two F-1 engines.

One section of the Apollo 12 engine will be previewed at the Museum from Nov. 21 until Jan. 4, 2016.

Then it will be moved to the museum archives until 2017, when it will return as part of a new permanent Apollo exhibit showcasing salvaged Apollo 12 and Apollo 16 engine remains, other Apollo artifacts including lunar rocks, and a display on the career of Apollo 12 Commander Pete Conrad.

Bezos’s expedition also recovered the remains of an Apollo 11 engine that helped to put the first men on the moon on July 20, 1969. Bezos has said he intends to donate that engine to the Smithsonian museum in Washington, D.C.

Bezos has his own space rocket company, Blue Origin, which is expected to launch its second test flight of a new rocket by the end of the year. Blue Origin is also developing a new rocket engine that’s vying to replace the Russian rockets currently used to launch U.S space rockets.

This story was originally published November 19, 2015 at 1:43 PM with the headline "Apollo 12 engine rescued by Amazon’s Bezos goes to Museum of Flight."