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Apollo 11 Booster located in 14000 ft of water


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Apollo 11 leaves for the moon, July 16, 1969. AFP/Getty Images

"Eleven, ten, nine, ignition sequence start. …"

It remains as one of the defining events of the last century: Apollo 11, on a pillar of fire from its five F-1 rocket engines, leaving for the moon in July 1969.

"… Three, two, one - all engines running - and liftoff on Apollo 11…."

The Saturn V booster generated 7.5 million pounds of thrust. The rocket lumbered into the sky. Two minutes later, as scheduled, its first stage dropped off and went tumbling into the Atlantic.

Among the hundreds of millions of people affected by Apollo 11 was a 5-year-old boy named Jeff Bezos - yes, the Jeff Bezos who grew up to found Amazon.com, one of the Internet's great success stories.

Now, he says, an expedition he funded has found the five booster engines with sonar lying in 14,000 feet of water off the Florida coast. He'd like to bring them back up, he says in a blog post; they belong in a museum.

"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," Bezos writes. "On the other hand, they're made of tough stuff, so we'll see."

Bezos, who went to Wall Street before starting Amazon, remained, all the while, a space enthusiast. With Amazon humming along, he used some of his profits to start a company called Blue Origin. He's said very little about it, but it is one of the many companies competing to bring the efficiencies of private enterprise to space travel, "so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system."

Amazon and Blue Origin may be hard-headed businesses, but Bezos admitted to sentimentality in his effort to recover the booster engines of Apollo 11.

"NASA is one of the few institutions I know that can inspire 5-year-olds," he wrote. "It sure inspired me, and with this endeavor, maybe we can inspire a few more youth to invent and explore.

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Interesting. What makes me wonder is that it took 40 years for somebody to finally start looking for them?

So where are the first stages of Apollo 8 thru 17? They should be close, since the trajectory should have been the same, I'ld guess?

Edited by Lancer512
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Interesting. What makes me wonder is that it took 40 years for somebody to finally start looking for them?

So where are the first stages of Apollo 8 thru 17? They should be close, since the trajectory should have been the same, I'ld guess?

The other boosters are probably along a line which includes Apollo 11's booster but a small difference in velocity when the booster separated could mean a fairly large difference in distance down range. Unless you think a thousand miles or so is "close".

I think it's cool, I hope they're in good enough shape to warrant recovery. I saw the Apollo 11 CM on Ford Island after it was recovered. I also saw a couple of others but 11 is the only one I remember for sure. My dad was a fire inspector for the Navy and his badge could get us places the general public couldn't get to.

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Neat. I too would like to see how the pieces look after all this time. Are they attached to the booster? Are they all busted up? Are they encrusted with growth? Is Amelia under one of them?

Stuff like that.

Rick L.

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I quickly created these maps with the theoretical impact sites* of the Saturn V - S-IC stage boosters from Apollo 8 through Apollo 17.

Overview:

S-IC-Impact_Overview.jpg

The S-IC boosters of the Apollo missions 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 16 impacted within an area about the size of 40 by 15 kilometers.

Here's a close-up with a scale at the lower left, giving an idea of the distances of the theoretical impact sites.

S-IC_Impactsite_details.jpg

*source: "Apollo by the numbers"

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Looks like NASA is playing the classic government game... "Hey boys, those rockets belong to me!" I wish Jeff luck on bringing the rockets to the surface, but I don't think Big Brother will be letting him keep them. I guess 42 years wasn't enough time for NASA to retrieve them. :wasntme:

Darth Tater

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I would think that they would be subject to marine salvage law after all of this time. I would say, "pay me for all I have done to retrieve them, then you can have them back." Realistically, he is not going to put one in his back yard. I'll be his intent all along was to give it to NASA for display at KSC or the Smithsonian.

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This isn't so much "classic government game" as classic people-with-lawyers behavior. Nonetheless, I did think NASA's response was less-than-classy, and I too, wondered about salvage law in this case. The U.S. may simply have lost any claim to this equipment by virtue of having never attempted to retrieve it. Then again, I wonder what salvage law would say about shuttle boosters, which NASA did retrieve regularly.

And as an additional thought, in the long run, if NASA lost in ensuing litigation (which I doubt will happen), it could open the door to interesting problems. Whoever arrives on Mars first, in the future, could lay claim to derelict rovers, too, thereby denying Smithsonian these historic vehicles.

Edited by Fishwelding
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This isn't so much "classic government game" as classic people-with-lawyers behavior. Nonetheless, I did think NASA's response was less-than-classy, and I too, wondered about salvage law in this case. The U.S. may simply have lost any claim to this equipment by virtue of having never attempted to retrieve it. Then again, I wonder what salvage law would say about shuttle boosters, which NASA did retrieve regularly.

And as an additional thought, in the long run, if NASA lost in ensuing litigation (which I doubt will happen), it could open the door to interesting problems. Whoever arrives on Mars first, in the future, could lay claim to derelict rovers, too, thereby denying Smithsonian these historic vehicles.

In classic Government Vs. Government smack down, I then want NASA in the cross hairs for the environmental impact of leaving these out there for decades :touche: If they do indeed, belong to NASA why haven't they taken better care of them? This Taxpayer wants to know! :taunt:

Its the classic little kid who didn't want to play with that toy until he saw the other kid with it! :coolio:

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If they do indeed, belong to NASA why haven't they taken better care of them? This Taxpayer wants to know! :taunt:

Its the classic little kid who didn't want to play with that toy until he saw the other kid with it! :coolio:

You're looking for some sort of strict accountability from NASA regarding preservation of Apollo assets? A piggy-bank guarding, bean-counting accountability? Really?

Apollo was constructed by a society that barely mouthed sentiments about limited government, and socialistically lavished billions of taxpayer dollars on technology development through the Pentagon and it's auxiliaries. This is the same society that heavily subsidized air travel through Strategic Air Command, transistor and solid-state circuitry through the Signal Corps, and science and engineering education through defense grants to universities and students. The Apollo Project itself was a show, a fanfare, an artistic presentation, a big, lavish May Day Parade from here to the moon, to celebrate Johnson-era, Great Society, War-on-Poverty optimism and human achievement. If we can reach the moon, we can do anything! Now, NASA is a depleted relic of that civilization, quite different from our own.

Now, in order to have any space-travel development at all, we pretend that it's being done by private enterprise. Well, so be it. NASA has always been at the center of our most cherished hopes, fictional or otherwise. I wish the very best to Elon Musk and his SpaceX work, and Bezos' proposed rival. Godspeed to both, and any others besides.

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Maritime salvage law honestly makes little sense to me. Spain recently sued and WON a case to recover gold coins from a treasure ship lost in 1804. "yeah, we knew they were there. We were just waiting to pick them up." LOL

http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/01/world/europe/spain-u-s--treasure-dispute/index.html

This sort of thing unfortunately does a disservice to the historical community. Say I go out and find 500 million dollars worth of gold coins off the coast of Florida tomorrow. I'm saying nothing to no one, and I'm sadly going to MELT THEM DOWN and say I dug the hunks of gold out of the ground. Sorry, I'm not loosing out on that much money (and I'm an actual historian).

England has a pretty cool deal on stuff like this. If someone finds some old roman coins, the government claims them, BUT they pay fair market value for them. I think they even let the finder keep a few of the coins.

John

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Sorry, I'm not loosing out on that much money (and I'm an actual historian).

Your students will suddenly be stunned to see you wheel up in a Ferrari, wearing a $12,000 suit.

"Dude, I'm switching my major. Forget Chem/Pre-Med. It's grad school for history."

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If I recall, there was a long running bun fight with the USN in recovering aircraft from WWII. I seem to recall there being a discussion on ARC aboot that issue. What was ever resolved bu the USN aboot that, or was it?

Alvis 3.1

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At what altitude and speed did the booster separate? Did the second stage get up high enough to burn up coming back?

After 2.5 minutes, the first stage is discarded at about 38 miles altitude. Speed at that moment is about 6,000 miles per hour. They impact 9 minutes after launch about 350 miles downrange.

The second stage's five J-2 engines burn for about 6 minutes, pushing the Apollo spacecraft to an altitude of nearly 115 miles and a velocity of about 15,300 miles per hour. After burnout the second stage drops away and retrorockets slow it down for its fall into the Atlantic Ocean west of Africa, about 2,300 miles downrange and around 20 minutes after lift-off from the pad.

It is my understanding that the second stages did not burn up during reentry.

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there was a long running bun fight with the USN in recovering aircraft from WWII. What was ever resolved bu the USN aboot that, or was it?

Not entirely resolved. The Navy still claims all lost aircraft and makes it next to impossible for civilians to recover them, but some new blood at the Naval Historical Center has at least tossed out the "Preserve Them In Place For Future Generations" policy (AKA "Let 'em Rot") and has begun authorizing official recoveries under the auspices of the Naval Aviation Museum. In the past two or three years they've pulled up a Hellcat and Corsair from Lake Michigan, and a Helldiver from a reservoir in California, and plans are in the works to recover a TBD off the coast of California.

SN

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