Gas Generator and Manifold. Photo: Bezos Expeditions

A space history project led by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has exciting news out today: Apollo mission F-1 engines have been recovered from deep beneath the surface of the Atlantic ocean, as the "F-1 Recovery Project" years in the making reaches a successful conclusion.

Here's video of the Remote Operated Vehicles recovering the engines from the ocean floor.

The F-1 rocket engine is still a modern wonder — one and a half million pounds of thrust, 32 million horsepower, and burning 6,000 pounds of rocket grade kerosene and liquid oxygen every second. On July 16, 1969, the world watched as five particular F-1 engines fired in concert, beginning the historic Apollo 11 mission. Those five F-1s burned for just a few minutes, and then plunged back to Earth into the Atlantic Ocean, just as NASA planned. A few days later, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon.

And Boing Boing has a statement from NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden:

Nearly one year ago, Jeff Bezos shared with us his plans to recover F-1 engines that helped power Apollo astronauts to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We share the excitement expressed by Jeff and his team in announcing the recovery of two of the powerful Saturn V first-stage engines from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

This is a historic find and I congratulate the team for its determination and perseverance in the recovery of these important artifacts of our first efforts to send humans beyond Earth orbit.

We look forward to the restoration of these engines by the Bezos team and applaud Jeff's desire to make these historic artifacts available for public display.

Jeff and his colleagues at Blue Origin are helping to usher in a new commercial era of space exploration and we are confident that our continued collaboration will soon result in private human access to space, creating jobs and driving America's leadership in innovation and exploration.

And here is a snip from the blog post by Bezos, just published moments ago:

What an incredible adventure. We are right now onboard the Seabed Worker headed back to Cape Canaveral after finishing three weeks at sea, working almost 3 miles below the surface. We found so much. 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. 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.

Many of the original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, which is going to make mission identification difficult. We might see more during restoration. The objects themselves are gorgeous. The technology used for the recovery is in its own way as otherworldly as the Apollo technology itself. The Remotely Operated Vehicles worked at a depth of more than 14,000 feet, tethered to our ship with fiber optics for data and electric cables transmitting power at more than 4,000 volts. We on the team were often struck by poetic echoes of the lunar missions. The buoyancy of the ROVs looks every bit like microgravity. The blackness of the horizon. The gray and colorless ocean floor. Only the occasional deep sea fish broke the illusion.

Thrust Chamber and Fuel Manifold. Photo: Bezos Expeditions

F-1 Thrust Chamber. Photo: Bezos Expeditions

F-1 Thrust Chamber on ocean floor. Photo: Bezos Expeditions

Saturn V Stage Structure. Photo: Bezos Expeditions

Nozzle. Photo: Bezos Expeditions

]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/03/20/apollo-f-1-engines-recovered-f.html/feed 63 http://boingboing.net/2012/09/26/the-shuttle-shokunin.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/26/the-shuttle-shokunin.html#comments Wed, 26 Sep 2012 17:43:12 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=183748 accompanied Miles O'Brien to the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy Space Center. In attendance were present and past KSC directors, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, astronauts and space heroes of all eras—from Thomas Stafford to Cady Coleman—and many of the so-called "pad rats" who built spacecraft from the Apollo era through the Shuttle era.]]>
Discovery launch. Source: NASA.

This past weekend, I accompanied Miles O'Brien to the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy Space Center. In attendance were present and past KSC directors, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, astronauts and space heroes of all eras—from Thomas Stafford to Cady Coleman—and many of the so-called "pad rats" who built spacecraft from the Apollo era through the Shuttle era. Miles delivered an amazing speech dedicated to those pad rats.

If you're familiar with traditional Japanese craftsmanship culture or you've seen the film Jiro Dreams of Sushi, you'll know why he calls them "The Shuttle Shokunin."

Snip:

The recurring theme here is of an extraordinarily passionate, proud, meticulous workforce that embraces a philosophy that is lost on many Americans. Here they take tremendous pride in everything they do – and for all the right reasons.

The Japanese call this shokunin kihitsu. Literally translated: the craftsman’s spirit. But that doesn’t do it justice.

Those who ascribe to this way of life take pride in everything they do. In Japan, sushi chefs, fishermen, and carpenters all practice their craft— no matter how seemingly menial—with a driving sense of obligation to work to their utmost for the good of all.

And here is an essential point: shokunin make something for the pure joy of it; carefully, beautifully, and to the best of their ability. It has nothing to do with fame or fortune. It is nothing short of an unyielding pursuit of perfection. At KSC, they have mastered a trade that demands it—and they have risen to meet the challenge time and again.

[video link].

There's a wonderful NASA image gallery here of historic photographs related to KSC's 50th anniversary, and here's a video montage they played at the dinner.

Mercury Mission Control, Astronaut Scott Carpenter. Astronaut Scott Carpenter stands in front of the Mercury Control Center at Cape Canaveral. Carpenter was the pilot for the Mercury-Atlas 7 mission aboard Aurora 7, which launched May 24, 1962.

[Video Link]

A few weeks ago, I blogged about my new obsession with early to mid-era Pink Floyd oddities. Following the death of astronaut Neil Armstrong this weekend, the NYT Lede blog points to a special rarity: a moon landing jam session the band recorded at a BBC TV studio during the descent of Apollo 11, the first time human beings ever set foot on another world. David Gilmour in the Guardian:

It was a live broadcast, and there was a panel of scientists on one side of the studio, with us on the other. I was 23. The programming was a little looser in those days, and if a producer of a late-night programme felt like it, they would do something a bit off the wall. Funnily enough I’ve never really heard it since, but it is on YouTube. They were broadcasting the moon landing and they thought that to provide a bit of a break they would show us jamming. It was only about five minutes long. The song was called Moonhead — it’s a nice, atmospheric, spacey 12-bar blues.

More at the Lede. From the video upload description by "Psych Prog Folk Blues Garage":

A instrumental piece used for a tv-programme on the evening of the first moonlanding July 20, 1969. The programme was a used by the BBC in between the coverage of the actual moonlanding -and was called 'But what if it's made of green cheese'. The theme was the first verse and the coda, with various actors reading quotes and poetry about the moon over. The rest of the programme was information, discussions and sketches. Later in the show, Moonhead was performed uninterrupted. The music can be heard on the bootlegs 'With/Without' and 'Wavelenghts'. The song has also been known as 'Trip On Mars'.

Two thoughts: First, I really want a copy of those bootlegs. Second, holy crap, what if NASA events were accompanied by this kind of free-form live art happening today? How awesome would that be?

* The footage in this fan-made video appears to be from the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, not from Apollo 11.

[video link]

This data visualization of the Apollo 11 moon mission gathers social and technical data from the 1969 lunar landing in video form. The horizontal axis is an interactive timeline.

The horizontal axis is an interactive timeline. The vertical axis is divided into several sections, each corresponding to a data source. At the top, commentators are present in narratives from Digital Apollo and NASA technical debriefings. Just below are the members of ground control. The middle section is a log-scale graph stretching from Earth (~10E9 ft. away) to the Moon. Utterances from the landing CAPCOM, Duke, the command module pilot, Collins, the mission commander, Armstrong, and the lunar module pilot, Aldrin, are plotted on this graph. The graph is partially overlaid on a composite image of the lunar surface.

More about the data presented, and the story told, at the project's Vimeo page. The project comes from the MIT Laboratory for Automation, Robotics, and Society, and was directed by David Mindell. Via Maria Popova. As noted on Flowing Data, my only disappointment is that they didn't get to the "One small step for [a] man" part!

Additional credits: Visualization Design by Yanni Loukissas, and Francisco Alonso served as Research Assistant. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/01/09/the-story-of-the-apollo-11-moo.html/feed 3 http://boingboing.net/2011/12/07/the-last-space-suit-on-the-moo.html http://boingboing.net/2011/12/07/the-last-space-suit-on-the-moo.html#comments Wed, 07 Dec 2011 17:25:30 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=133201 This is the space suit worn by Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan, the last human being to set foot on the Moon.]]>

This is the space suit worn by Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan, the last human being to set foot on the Moon.

Side note: I knew these suits were heavy. I had not realized how heavy. With 26 layers of material in the suit, a portable life-support system strapped on, and other mechanical systems attached, the whole thing weighed in at 185 pounds on Earth.

This week marks the 40th anniversary for Apollo 15, the less famous of manned lunar missions including Apollo 11, Apollo 13 ("NASA's finest hour"), and Apollo 14 (the one where Alan Shepard played golf on the moon). Ben Cosgrove of LIFE points us to a related gallery of classic images, and explains:

While Armstrong and Aldrin walking on the lunar surface was mind-blowing, the idea of Irwin and Scott cruising around on a 450-pound moon buggy that they'd carted a quarter-million miles from Earth -- during a basically flawless mission when Scott and Irwin spent three full days on the moon's surface -- makes XV the coolest of all the Apollo missions.