Posted on 03/28/2012 5:24:03 PM PDT by Pyro7480
Amazon.com's billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, says he's funded a successful effort to locate the mammoth rocket engines that sent the Apollo 11 mission on the first leg of its mission to the moon — and now he's planning to bring them up from the Atlantic Ocean floor....
The five F-1 rocket engines were on the first stage of Apollo 11's Saturn 5 rocket, which dropped into the Atlantic just minutes after liftoff in 1969. In an online statement, Bezos acknowledges that the undersea artifacts, like other hardware associated with the space effort, still belongs to NASA — and he imagines that one of the engines would go on display at the Smithsonian. But in today's announcement, he says he's asked NASA to consider having another engine sent to the Museum of Flight — which happens to be in Seattle, Amazon.com's hometown.
Rocketdyne built more of the 18-foot-tall F-1 engines than were needed for the Apollo missions, and some of those surplus engines have been placed on display, either attached to Saturn stages or as standalone exhibits. One can be seen at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, for example, and there's another at the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia....
(Excerpt) Read more at cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com ...
I think it’s because we weren’t lawyered up back then.
Well, someone lacks the will and the vision
and it sure isn’t Newt.
As much money as this administration has squandered
would have put us on the way by now in a vehicle
of modern design and materials.
Lot more fun then....
The Technical Record of the Apollo Program? A Space Junkyard
Huh? It’s called history.
Do you think we should demolish Mt. Vernon, plow under the battlefields of Gettysburg and put in a parking lot?
Don’t mean to be snide but it’s up to ‘us’ to preserve the past, teach it to our kids and show them what America means!
tet68 didn’t say we can’t build a Saturn V today, he said we can’t build something like that today.
We can’t build a ‘57 Chevy either, why would we?
Today we build things that are better.
Put it in a Muslim and I’ll drive go see it in and pay $15 bucks
Put it in a Muslim and I’ll drive go see it in and pay $15 bucks
No, NASA has merely lost the blank check used to build the Saturn V.
I keep reading that yet there is a complete Saturn V sitting on its side at JSC Houston. If they really wanted to build one, wouldn’t they just reverse engineer the one sitting in their front yard?
They’re trying, but they don’t know how the parts go together or even what they do. The problem is that to meet Kennedy’s goal of reaching the moon by 1970, Von Braun subcontracted most of the Saturn V design work out to hundreds of different vendors, most of whom went out of business in the 1970s after Apollo ended. Only Von Braun and his key team members knew how it all went together and worked, and they are dead now.
I'm guessing that you didn't bother to check my two links which explain why NASA can't build Saturn V's anymore...
“Into which ocean are they going to dump the Obamacare bill?”
You can’t do that!!!! The sheer volume will raise sea level by 20 feet!!!
bflr!
Seems like a waste of money.
Note: this topic is from MARCH 28, 2012. Thanks Pyro7480.
IMHO it would be worth trying to rehab them and return them to working order. The F1 engines never failed in launch, and were so well designed that they were test-burned on the stand for much longer than they had to burn during flight, suggesting they'd be great candidates for a new reusable booster. Plus, I love antiques.
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