After lying on the ocean floor for more than 40 years, two Apollo rocket engines that helped deliver astronauts to the moon are once again seeing the light of day.

A team organized by Jeff Bezos spent three weeks fishing at sea to recover the corroded F-1 engines, which sat more than 4 kilometers below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. Bezos does not yet know precisely which Apollo mission the engines flew on as the original serial numbers on the objects are missing. He is hoping they are the Apollo 11 engines that brought the first men to the moon. On Mar. 20, his team’s ship was heading back to Cape Canaveral in Florida with the aged pieces to restore them and perhaps determine which mission they came from.

“We’ve seen an underwater wonderland – an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program,” Bezos wrote in a blog post. “We photographed many beautiful objects in situ and have now recovered many prime pieces. Each piece we bring on deck conjures for me the thousands of engineers who worked together back then to do what for all time had been thought surely impossible.”

[More @ Wired Science]

(Source: Wired)