I’m embarrassed to admit this, but, according to my parents, when I was a mere three years old and watching the Apollo 11 launch July 16, 1969, on our tiny low-def TV, my infant vocal cords supposedly uttered “Aw, he broke” after the first-stage Saturn V engine separation.
On July 16, 1969, a camera mounted in a U.S. Air Force aircraft photographed the expended first stage of the Saturn V F-1 engines drop away from the rest of the Apollo 11 rocket. The separation happened at an altitude of some 38 miles (61 kilometers) above the Atlantic Ocean. NASA photo
That rocket, in case you don’t know, propelled three humans on their historic journey of some 240,250 miles (384,400 kilometers) to our only natural satellite. Two of them — Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin — eventually became the first carbon-based life-forms we know of to step foot on the Moon (or a terrestrial soundstage, depending upon your Conspiracy Quotient). And how noble is Michael Collins to willingly stay aboard the orbiting command module at this time! I would’ve challenged old Neil and Buzz to a serious game of
Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock to see who got left onboard.
Anyway, I didn’t know about this alleged “out of the mouths of babes” utterance until I was in college and read it in a scrapbook my mom kept while chronicling my tender years. Ever since, I’ve bristled at the thought that I would ever spout such a cheesy remark, despite my littleness at the time, and I once even challenged my parents openly about the veracity of this scrapbook notation.
While I didn’t win that argument, all of this flooded my memory when I learned of the discovery of those very same “broken” Saturn V rocket sections some 14,000 feet (4,267 meters) below the Atlantic’s surface on March 28.
This scrapbook entry by Carol Raymond, mother of Astronomy’s managing editor, records her son’s alleged reaction to the Apollo 11 rocket’s first-stage separation when he watched it live as a three-year-old. Chris Raymond photo
According to Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who founded
Bezos Expeditions — the crew that made the discovery and announced it — he started to wonder about a year ago if, “with the right team of undersea pros, could we find and potentially recover the F-1 engines that started mankind’s mission to the moon?” Like me, Bezos was a mere lad (five years old) when he too watched the Apollo 11 mission “unfold on television.” Unlike me, given his wherewithal, Bezos could do something about it. Using state-of-the-art deep-sea sonar, the Bezos-funded team located the Apollo 11 rocket engines and currently plans to raise them, if possible.
NASA still owns these deep-sea artifacts, regardless of their condition, but the hope is that one or more of the engines might end up at the
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Visitors to the museum can already view the
Apollo 11 command module Columbia, along with many other mission artifacts.
Not only do I find the retrieval of these historic rocket engines fascinating, but I also admire Bezos because of why he’s doing this. He concluded
his rocket-discovery announcement on March 28 with: “NASA is one of the few institutions I know that can inspire five-year-olds. It sure inspired me, and with this endeavor, maybe we can inspire a few more youth to invent and explore.”
That’s a sentiment I’m sure every
Astronomy magazine reader can get behind.