Installation of the Apollo 11 engines. Credit: NASA Marshall Space Flight Center
As the commercial space race has taken off over the last decade, we've gotten used to the idea of millionaires and billionaires building the spacecraft for the next generation of space travel and exploration. Now many of the same high-rollers are using their means to go after our own planet's next great frontier: the unexplored depths of the oceans.
But leave it to Jeff Bezos to do both space and the ocean at once.
Bezos, the Amazon.com billionaire and man behind the secretive space company Blue Origin, announced today that he intends to recover at least one of the Apollo 11 engines from the bottom of the sea. After those five engines blasted Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins into space back in July 1969, they fell into the Atlantic Ocean and haven't been seen since. Today, Bezos reported on his blog that his team of undersea explorers had located the engines via "deep sea sonar," and that he plans to try to raise up at least one of them.
The Apollo announcement follows a wave of press about the ocean bottom, as filmmaker and explorer James Cameron just returned from a trip to the Mariana Trench in a one-man sub. Besides Bezos and Cameron, the new breed of celebrity explorers also includes Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic. In addition to bankrolling Virgin Galactic, which would fly anyone willing to pay the steep ticket price to suborbital space, Branson is also working with seasoned submersible builders on his own deep ocean explorer called Virgin Oceanic.
Some have called this a "race to the bottom," but the growth of ocean exploration offers so much more than that. We're waiting to see what other projects these adventurers come up with.
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