A Saturn V rocket powered by five massive F-1 engines launched Apollo 11 from Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969 at 13:32:00 UTC (9:32:00 a.m. local time), where it enterede orbit 12 minutes later.

The five F-1 engines burned for a few minutes and plunged back to Earth into the Atlantic Ocean as planned, never to be seen again. That is until a team led by Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos -- who is worth $18.4 billion according to Forbes -- tracked down the old rocket engines at a depth of 4.300m (14,000 ft)

Bezos said the team had used “state-of-the-art deep sea sonar” to locate the engines 14,000 feet below the surface and was making plans to raise one or more of them from the ocean floor.

“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 said. “On the other hand, they're made of tough stuff, so we'll see.”

Bezos said the engines were still the property of NASA and if the team was able to recover any one of the engines that “started mankind on its first journey to another heavenly body, I imagine that NASA would decide to make it available to the Smithsonian for all to see.”

He also noted that if they were able to retrieve more than one engine, he would ask NASA to consider making it available to the Museum of Flight in Seattle, where Amazon is based.

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