This week, Bonhams hosted an auction of historical space items in Manhattan. The Space History Sale featured troves of objects and documents, both American and Soviet, dating back to the heyday of the space race. And Gizmodo got the chance to take a peek.
For a brief period in the American saga, the astronaut was the man of the moment. No profession commanded as much awe and admiration. Widely regarded as the personification of all that was best in the country, the first astronauts were blanketed with the adulation usually accorded star quarterbacks, war heroes, and charismatic movie stars. Yet this was never part of NASA’s agenda.
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Space is a weird place, and the quest to explore its mysteries in person has been no small source of strangeness and surprise. Here are some lesser-known facts about humanity’s ongoing missions beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
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In the early 1960s, when the Apollo missions were underway and America was hellbent on reaching the moon, NASA researchers faced a nearly endless litany of technical hurdles and engineering obstacles nobody had even dreamed of up to that point. Chief among them: Once you shoot three guys across 238,900 miles across space at an orbiting body with just a fraction of the mass of Earth, how do you put them safely on the surface? That answer: lots and lots of practice in this gangly hardware simulator.
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The Saturn V is the tallest, heaviest, and most powerful rocket humans have ever built. In 13 missions, it took 24 astronauts beyond earth’s orbit, including all 12 who ever set foot on the moon
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NASA successfully landed six moon missions from 1969 to 1972 — and had one legendary failure
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Yesterday was the 44th anniversary
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It was just a few months ago that the folks working with Jeff Bezos and Bezos Expeditions headed to the depths of the sea to bring up a new collection of NASA history. This week it’s made clear – and confirmed – what they actually found: these F-1 engines belonged to none other than NASA’s mission Apollo 11. If there’s one tribute to the greatness of that moon exploration mission that we’re guessing Neil Armstrong wouldn’t have expected, this would be it.
The 20th of July will be the 44th anniversary of the original moon landing, and here in a mission that brought us down in the other direction to the ocean’s floor, the recovery of a big batch of hardware components brings the whole missing into clear view once more. The parts recovered here have become a whole heck of a lot more important than they were without identification here in the summer of 2013.
What’s been found – amongst other identifying markings, of course – is a simple 2044 stenciled in black paint on the side of one of the thrust chambers of these F-1 engines. This discovery was part of an in-depth exploration of the hardware’s markings and identifying bits and pieces, leading to the understanding that these units are connected to history as follows:
Rocketdyne serial number 2044 discovered stenciled in black paint
2044 correlates with NASA serial number 6044
Serial number 6044 F-1 Engine #5 belongs to Apollo 11
The connections are unmistakable – but wouldn’t just be left to a simple paint marking to hold solid. Upon deeper digging, corrosion removal delivered another clear “Unit No 2044″ stamped into the surface of the metal.
This post-sea in-depth exploration was and is continuing to be done by the conservation team at Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson, Kansas. The announcement on this confirmation – stamps and all – was made here on the 19th of July, 2013.
Thanks for the tip, Jack!
SOURCE: Bezos Expeditions
Bezos Apollo 11 F-1 engine recovery confirmed: the real number 2044 is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Last year, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that he would be hiring a team of explorers to locate the remains of the Apollo 11 rocket and recover them from the ocean floor. Almost an exact year later, Bezos has announced that the Apollo 11 rockets have indeed been recovered and are in the process of making their way back to land where they’ll be put on display.
The F-1 engines, as they’re called, came off of the famous Saturn V rocket that took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon. It was the mission that allowed humans to step foot on the moon for the first time on July 20, 1969. The rockets have been lying on the bottom of the ocean for more than 40 years, and Bezos and his team have recovered two out of the five engines.
However, Bezos is not 100% sure that the engines are, in fact, from Apollo 11, since the corrosion of the serial numbers will make it difficult to verify, but there’s certainly confidence that the recovered engines are from Apollo 11. Bezos wants to display the engines at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, although NASA may be involved in the decision on where they will ultimately be displayed.
The Saturn V is still the largest and most powerful rocket that was ever built in the US, and each engine is almost 20 feet tall and 13 feet wide. Each engine also weighs over 17,500 pounds. The massive size of the engines produced quite the thrust — around 7.7 million pounds of thrust to be exact, and it had a top speed of over 6,000 mph.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recovers Apollo 11 rockets from the ocean is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
You’d think running a company like Amazon would keep a guy busy. But like many of his fellow billionaires, Jeff Bezos still has big dreams. Space dreams. As of late, the exec’s been spending time onboard the Seabed Worker (much of which has apparently involved working on his computer from the cabin), alongside a crew tasked with recovering F-1 engines from the Apollo program, which are now a part of an “incredible sculpture garden…that tells the story of a fiery and violent end.” Seems Bezos has been exercising his poesy muscles in the cabin, as well. The team has apparently recovered enough F1-parts to construct two engines, which will go on display to help “inspire something amazing.” More striking images from the expedition can be seen in the source link below.
Source: Bezos Expeditions
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