A salvage expedition funded by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos on Wednesday reported that it had successfully recovered a pair of Apollo Program rocket engines from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

Warped from their flights and rusty from decades spent under the sea, the first-stage (S-IC) F1 engines (pictured) used for the Saturn V rocket launches which sent astronauts to the Moon will be "restored and put on public display," according to Reuters.

Located several hundred miles off the east coast of the United States (see this cool GeoHack map identifying the location of S-IC wreckage from the Apollo missions), the engines remain the property of NASA. Bezos said when he announced the salvage mission last March that if one engine was recovered, the space agency would likely want it displayed at the Smithsonian but that he'd asked NASA to allow a subsequent recovery by his privately funded team to be housed at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Wash., where Amazon is headquartered.

Bezos, currently aboard the recovery ship Seabed Worker, wrote about the "incredible adventure" of salvaging a long-lost piece of the past on his Bezos Expeditions site. The recovery team has been at sea for three weeks and is steaming back to Cape Canaveral, Fla., where it should arrive Thursday.

"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," Bezos wrote.

The Amazon founder had originally stated that his team had been able to locate the engines used for the Apollo 11 mission crewed by Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins in 1969, the first to carry humans to the surface of the Moon.

But it may not be possible to identify the specific Apollo missions for which the recovered engine parts were used after all. Bezos said "[m]any of the original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, which is going to make mission identification difficult."

The Seabed Worker crew used Remotely Operated Vehicles at depths of more than 14,000 feet to locate and salvage "enough major components to fashion displays of two flown F-1 engines," Bezos reported.

The F-1 engines were designed by Boeing subsidiary Rocketdyne to power the 138-foot-tall, Boeing-built first stage of the Saturn V rockets used for the Apollo and Skylab missions from 1967 to 1973. The Saturn V's S-IC engines originally had four F-1 engines that could be hydraulically gimballed to control the rocket, but a fifth, fixed F-1 was added on later Apollo missions to add more thrust to compensate for heavier payloads.

From the Apollo 9 mission on, they burned for roughly 165 seconds after launch to take the Saturn V to a height of about 40 miles above sea level, producing 1,525,000 pound-force (lbf) of thrust apiece, or about 7,500,000 lbf altogether when all five were firing.

"I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration," Bezos wrote last March, explaining his interest in recovering the mission's powerful rocket engines. "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."

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