Bezos Expeditions recovers pieces of Apollo 11 rockets

The thrust chamber from the Apollo 11 mission, found on the Atlantic Ocean floor by Bezos Expeditions.

A year after discovering rockets from the Apollo 11 moon mission on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, Bezos Expeditions has recovered "many prime pieces" of the engines, Jeff Bezos blogged today.

Amazon's billionaire founder and chief executive wrote that the crew of the ship Seabed Worker spent three weeks at sea, working almost three miles below the surface to pull up the various piece of the engines.

"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. "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."

Last March, Bezos reported that, using deep sea sonar, his crew had discovered the Apollo 11 engines lying 14,000 feet below the surface. At the time, he said he hoped recovering the rockets would inspire kids to invent and explore just as the NASA missions inspired him. The Apollo 11 mission was the one that put the first humans on the moon -- Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin -- on July 20, 1969.

Bezos is one of a handful of wealthy and geeky patrons of sea exploration. A year ago, film director James Cameron made the first solo dive to the ocean's deepest point, the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench. Richard Branson, who runs the Virgin business empire, has similar plans to explore the Mariana Trench with his Virgin Oceanic.