Slideshow: Moon rocket engines recovered

Click through scenes from Bezos Expeditions' recovery of historic Saturn 5 rocket engines from the Atlantic Ocean floor.

Launch slideshow

Salvagers backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos have recovered components from the Saturn 5 rocket engines that powered NASA's Apollo moon missions off the launch pad, more than four decades after they hurtled down to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Amazon.com's founder reported on the successful three-week sea salvage operation on his Bezos Expeditions website. "What an incredible adventure," he wrote.

"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 said Wednesday.

Almost a year ago, Bezos announced that deep-sea sonar scans had located the first-stage engines that were used for the historic Apollo 11 launch in 1969 — the launch that sent astronauts on their way to the moon's surface for the first time. The first stage of the three-stage Saturn 5 was jettisoned once its fuel was spent, and fell into the Atlantic.

It took months to plan the recovery expedition — and three weeks ago, Bezos and the salvage team headed out into the Atlantic on the Seabed Worker, a ship that has previously played a role in recovering sunken treasures.

"While I spent a reasonable chunk of time in my cabin emailing and working, it didn't keep me from getting to know the team," Bezos wrote. Much of his posting was given over to thank-yous for the team members. 

The chilly ocean waters preserved the hardware in "gorgeous" condition at a depth of more than 14,000 feet, Bezos said. He noted that it was difficult to make out the serial numbers on the hardware. Confirmation of the Apollo 11 connection will have to wait until the parts are more closely examined.

Remotely operated vehicles recovered enough components to fashion displays of two flown F-1 engines. Bezos said the ship was now on its way back to Cape Canaveral, Fla., to offload the artifacts. Bezos Expeditions said the restoration would take place at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center.

"The upcoming restoration will stabilize the hardware and prevent further corrosion," Bezos said. "We want the hardware to tell its true story, including its 5,000 mile per hour re-entry and subsequent impact with the ocean surface. We’re excited to get this hardware on display where just maybe it will inspire something amazing."

Even before the expedition, Bezos and NASA worked out where the artifacts would be going. The first option would go to the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs told NBC News in an email. The second engine would be offered to the Museum of Flight in Seattle, the hometown for Bezos and Amazon.com.

"While we have no role in the restoration, we are providing assistance to help identify the hardware through our various history offices and field centers," Jacobs said.

Although Bezos made his billions in the dot-com world, he's had a longstanding interest in spaceflight as well: His rocket venture, Blue Origin, has been working on a launch system for suborbital as well as orbital passenger flights with NASA's backing. Last year, Bezos donated a 5-ton Blue Origin lander prototype to the Museum of Flight.

In a statement, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden praised the recovery of the engines as a "historic find."

"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," Bolden said. "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."

More space history:

• Timeline: NASA's Glory Days
• NASA tests engine from Apollo 11 rocket
• Moon looms again as future destination

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Bill Ingalls / NASA

A commemorative wreath adorns a monument to the crew of the shuttle Columbia at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia on Friday, the 10th anniversary of the shuttle's destruction and the astronauts' deaths.

President Barack Obama and NASA's leaders paid a 10th-anniversary tribute to the space shuttle Columbia's fallen astronauts on Friday — and pledged that the lessons learned would be applied to future space odysseys, including eventual trips to Mars.

"As we undertake the next generation of discovery, today we pause to remember those who paid the ultimate sacrifice on the journey of exploration," Obama said in a statement released by NASA. "Right now we are working to fulfill their highest aspirations by pursuing a path in space never seen before, one that will eventually put Americans on Mars."

The shuttle Columbia's catastrophic breakup on Feb. 1, 2003, killed seven astronauts, forced a two-year grounding of the three remaining space shuttles and led to stepped-up safety measures at the space agency. The disaster also led Obama's predecessor, President George W. Bush, to plan for the retirement of the shuttle fleet once construction of the International Space Station was complete. The last shuttle mission flew eight years later, in 2011.

Bush's space vision called for a new generation of vehicles to be built for trips back to the moon by 2020 — but Obama shifted the focus of exploration to a near-Earth asteroid in the mid-2020s, with trips to Mars and its moons starting in the mid-2030s.

'We will never forget'
In his own 10th-anniversary statement, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said the sacrifices made by the crew of Columbia's last mission will inspire future explorers.

"We will never forget these astronauts, nor all those who have lost their lives carrying out our missions of exploration — the STS-51L Challenger crew; the Apollo 1 crew; Mike Adams, the first in-flight fatality of the space program as he piloted the X-15 No. 3 on a research flight," Bolden said in an agency statement. "These explorers, and their families, have our deepest respect. We work every day to honor and build on their legacy and create the best space program in the world — to infuse it with the life and vitality that they worked so hard to achieve."

Bill Ingalls / NASA

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden looks on as Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin gives a salute during a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery on Friday. The ceremony paid tribute to astronauts who died in the Apollo 1 fire of 1967 as well as the 1986 Challenger explosion and the 2003 Columbia tragedy.

Slideshow:

Retrace the final, tragic flight of the space shuttle Columbia, from its launch to its catastrophic end on Feb. 1, 2003.

Launch slideshow

On Friday morning, Bolden laid a wreath in honor of the agency's fallen astronauts at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where monuments to the Columbia and Challenger crews have been erected. Earlier in the week, he attended a spaceflight conference held in Israel to honor Ilan Ramon, that country's first astronaut, who died in the Columbia tragedy. The other victims included Columbia commander Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla and Laurel Clark.

Memorial ceremonies also were conducted in Texas, where the Columbia wreckage fell to earth, and at Kennedy Space Center's visitor complex in Florida. The focal point of the Florida ceremony was the Space Mirror Memorial, which bears the names of NASA fliers who died in the line of duty.

Roots of the tragedy
At that ceremony, Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations, acknowledged that the roots of the Columbia disaster went "all the way back to the first shuttle launch in 1981." Even then, NASA knew that ice and pieces of foam insulation could fly off the shuttle's external fuel tank and strike the orbiter — but the fact that no severe damage was done "reinforced the idea that all was well," Gerstenmaier said.

That view changed dramatically when Columbia was felled. Investigators determined that the leading edge of Columbia's left wing was fatally damaged by a piece of flying foam during launch, setting the stage for the breakup 16 days later during atmospheric re-entry. NASA was reminded that "even small problems can surface as major failures," Gerstenmaier said.

"Ten years ago, it would have been easy to pull back from the frontier of space, and say it was too risky to pursue," he said. "Instead, we dedicated ourselves to improving how we pushed the boundaries of space exploration, and we vowed to continue with our eyes open. We cannot be afraid of risk, and we cannot be ignorant of it, either. Our lasting tribute to those we have lost is to carry on with the cause that they believed was worth the ultimate sacrifice."

Other speakers at the Florida ceremony included Evelyn Husband-Thompson, the widow of Columbia's commander, who has since remarried. She recalled how she and other family members anticipated the return of their loved ones on that fateful Saturday morning 10 years ago, only to be jolted into a nightmare of "fear, uncertainty and horror."

NASA

Evelyn Husband-Thompson, the widow of Columbia commander Rick Husband, speaks at a memorial ceremony conducted Friday at the Space Mirror Memorial at Kennedy Space Center's visitor complex.

"The grief journey has been difficult, complicated and surprising," she said. Over the past decade, she has drawn comfort from her friends, her family and her faith. She noted that the Columbia crew's legacy includes educational initiatives, scholarships, museum exhibits, and even the name of the airport near her home in Texas: Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport.

"Just as a forest fire reduces beautiful foliage to ashes, those ashes ultimately become nourishment for new, healthy growth," Husband-Thompson said. "There are indeed small, green shoots of hope that are springing up in our lives."

More about Columbia:

• 10 years later, Columbia's loss still stings
• Shuttle tragedies serve as warnings to NASA
• 10 myths surrounding the Columbia tragedy
• NASA celebrates its fallen astronauts
• Film finds uplifting story amid Columbia's loss

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This should be the saddest week of the year for NASA — which is marking the anniversaries of three fatal tragedies, including the 10th anniversary of the shuttle Columbia's catastrophic breakup. But the way NASA Administrator Charles Bolden sees it, this week is not just about mourning 17 dead astronauts.

"I think this is not a memorial. It's a celebration, because of what they made possible," he told NBC News this month during a visit to Seattle. "We're commemorating them, and we're thanking them by continuing to move forward — and not dropping back and dwelling on the pain. They'd be pretty angry, I think, if they saw that."

The week of celebration — and, yes, of commemoration — begins on Sunday with the 46th anniversary of the 1967 Apollo 1 launch-pad fire. The 27th anniversary of the 1986 Challenger explosion follows on Monday. This year, NASA is focusing the most on Friday, the 10th anniversary of the Columbia tragedy, which has been set aside as the agency's "Day of Remembrance" for all of its fallen astronauts.

Ever since the loss of Columbia and its crew of seven, NASA has organized solemn commemorations during the last week of January.

"We honor the memory of all three crews that were lost over the history of human spaceflight," Bolden explained. "We thought it was fitting that it be somewhere around the dates of those three losses. We think about this every day, to be quite honest. But we take these particular times and set them aside, when we can let everyone else around the world join us and help celebrate."

There's that word again.

"I use the term 'celebrate' because we have to remember that, yeah, we lost some valiant people — but what their sacrifice brought is what we should really be thinking about: the fact that they dared to challenge and do things differently," Bolden said. "Because of what they did, we're well on the cusp of going deeper into space than we've ever gone before."

Each tragedy took a terrible toll — and in each case, NASA learned from its mistakes:

Apollo 1's three astronauts were Gus Grissom, one of the Mercury 7 pioneers; Ed White, the first American to do a spacewalk; and rookie spaceflier Roger Chaffee. They died during a pre-launch test at the launch pad when bad wiring sparked a blaze in the pure-oxygen environment inside their sealed capsule. After the fire, engineers overhauled the wiring system, switched over to a less flammable oxygen-nitrogen mix and redesigned the hatch to open outward instead of inward. Years later, Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong observed that the accident provided "the gift of time" — a chance to change a lot of things for the better. "We got that added benefit, but we regret the price we had to pay," Armstrong said.

Challenger's crew of seven was led by commander Dick Scobee, but the best-known flier was Christa McAuliffe, who was tapped to be the first teacher in space. The other astronauts were Michael Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Ron McNair and Greg Jarvis. Their space shuttle blew up 73 seconds after launch, due to a bad seal on one of the solid rocket boosters. The investigation led to a redesign of the boosters, which worked without fail ever since. It also pointed up the problem of "go fever," which led NASA to give the go-ahead for launch amid dangerously low temperatures. Reforms in management procedures gave astronauts, engineers and contractors more of a role in ensuring launch safety. 

Columbia's crew included Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, as well as commander Rick Husband, David Brown, Laurel Clark, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla and William McCool. The shuttle broke up over Texas during its descent at the end of a 16-day science mission. Investigators concluded that flying foam insulation from the external fuel tank damaged the left wing during launch, setting the stage for the Feb. 1 tragedy. The fuel tank was redesigned, emergency rescue plans were updated, and an array of cameras was added to the shuttle to watch for damage. The investigators also pointed to lapses in NASA's "safety culture." The George W. Bush administration followed up on the investigative panel's recommendations and decided to close down the space shuttle program once construction of the International Space Station was complete. That day finally came on July 21, 2011, with the landing of the space shuttle Atlantis.

Bolden said the successful operation of the space station and the rise of a new generation of commercial space vehicles would not have been possible if it weren't for the sacrifices made by the fallen astronauts. Rather than shutting down America's space program, political leaders gave the go-ahead for more ambitious plans to go beyond Earth orbit, and ultimately to Mars.

"If we didn't have that coming along, then what would have been the point of losing them?" Bolden said. 

To recognize those sacrifices, Bolden will attend a space conference being conducted in Ramon's honor this week in Israel, and then will return to Washington in time for Friday's wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. NASA's space centers are planning commemorations as well: Officials at Johnson Space Center will participate in memorial events in Texas on Thursday and Friday. Kennedy Space Center's ceremony is scheduled for 10 a.m. ET Friday at the visitor center's Space Mirror Memorial. That Florida observance is open to the public and will be broadcast on NASA TV.

Stay tuned for more about NASA's week of sad celebration in the days ahead — and feel free to add your own reminiscences and tributes as comments below.

More about NASA's space tragedies:

• Apollo 1's tale retold: 'Fire in the cockpit!'
• The chilling saga of the shuttle Challenger
• Columbia remembered, 10 years after launch
• Flash interactive: NASA's Day of Remembrance

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Carla Cioffi / NASA

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden pays a visit to the full-fuselage shuttle trainer, a mockup that found its way from Johnson Space Center to Seattle's Museum of Flight.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden took a crawl through Memory Lane in Seattle on Tuesday during a tour of the Museum of Flight's shuttle training mockup, which he and hundreds of other astronauts used to practice their moves in preparation for their missions.

"This thing saw astronauts every single day, multiple times a day," Bolden told a small knot of journalists after he climbed in and out of the mockup's plywood cockpit.

It was Bolden's first visit to the full-fuselage trainer since it was flown in pieces from NASA's Johnson Space Center to Seattle aboard a Super Guppy cargo plane last year, and then reassembled for display at the museum's Charles Simonyi Space Gallery. The museum's backers funded the gallery's construction in hopes that NASA would donate one of its three flown shuttles to the museum — but those spacecraft went instead to museums in California, Florida and at the Smithsonian near Washington, D.C.

Seattle's wingless shuttle is one of several mockups that was used to familiarize astronauts with the layout of the actual orbiter. None of the controls actually work, but they're all in the right places, and there's a full-size payload bay that visitors can walk through. For an extra fee, museumgoers can take a "training session" that concludes with a visit to the tight quarters of the crew compartment.

"It's been sold out every weekend," said Doug King, the museum's president and CEO.

Some Seattleites might wish they had a "real" space shuttle in their aerospace-centric city, but Bolden argued that the mockup was a perfect match for the museum.

"I hope I don't get in trouble with any of the other sites, but I think the Museum of Flight won the prize when it comes to education," Bolden said, "because no other place can have somebody essentially walk in the same footsteps that John Glenn, John Young and other people walked when they go through the payload bay, or go up on the flight deck, or go on the middeck. That's actually where we trained. Nobody else is going to be able to do that, even in a flown orbiter."

Bolden is a former shuttle commander who flew on four space missions from 1986 to 1994. He and another retired astronaut, John Creighton, climbed through the mockup's hatch and up the ladder on Tuesday to revisit the cockpit where they spent so many hours preparing for flight — and to reminisce.

Carla Cioffi / NASA

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden reminisces with former astronaut John Creighton on the flight deck of the full-fuselage trainer at Seattle's Museum of Flight. The quarters are so tight that the camera lens shows Creighton in distorted perspective.

Carla Cioffi / NASA

Charles Bolden flashes a smile as he prepares to climb through the hatch of the Museum of Flight's shuttle mockup.

Joe McNally / National Geographic for NASA

Senator-astronaut John Glenn talks with crew trainer Sharon Jones prior to simulating the procedures for escaping from a troubled space shuttle, during a training session at the full-fuselage trainer at Johnson Space Center in 1998.

Bolden pointed to a set of numbered bags hanging by a hatch at the top of the cockpit, and said those bags contained ropes that were thrown through the hatch so that astronauts could practice shimmying down the side of the shuttle. Today, that sounds like an outdated emergency measure — but at the time, it was an essential part of the training.

"The only thing on your mind was, 'Just don't let me fall,'" Bolden said.

The museum also features displays about the commercial successors to the shuttle — as well as a 5-ton rocket prototype donated by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos' space venture, Blue Origin, which has its headquarters in the Seattle area. During this week's visit to Seattle, Bolden is due to speak to a leadership conference at the Boeing Co., which is working on its own commercial spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Bolden said Boeing, Blue Origin and other companies might well create new monuments to spaceflight in the years to come.

"As they begin to fly," Bolden said, "and as many of them meet with success, they'll trade out a display board with an artifact."

Extra credit: Bolden climbed down the ladder from the mockup's flight deck just before I did, and he was kind enough to take hold of my shoe to guide my foot to the first rung of the ladder. This means I'm probably one of the few people in space history to be helped out of a shuttle cockpit by the top guy at NASA. Here's a fuzzy picture I posted to Twitpic, documenting the dubious achievement.

More about space artifacts:

• Shuttle-carrying jet lands in Houston for good
• Shuttle Enterprise's museum reopens after Sandy
• Cosmic Log archive on space history

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The brother of first moonwalker Neil Armstrong says in a new BBC documentary that the phrase accompanying humanity's first footprint on the moon — "that's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind" — was not a spur-of-the-moment improvisation but a speech that was written out and practiced in advance.

In a rare interview, Dean Armstrong recalled that his brother slipped him the words — including the long-disputed reference to "a man" — on a piece of paper as they played a game of Risk, weeks before the Apollo 11 launch in July 1969.

"He says, 'What do you think about that?' I said 'fabulous.' He said 'I thought you might like that, but I wanted you to read it,'" Dean Armstrong is quoted as saying in a Telegraph report on the documentary, titled "Neil Armstrong: First Man on the Moon." The show premiered tonight on BBC Two.

The genesis of one of history's most famous phrases has long been shrouded in mystery: In his definitive history of the Apollo moon effort, "A Man on the Moon," Andrew Chaikin noted that as the mission neared, Neil Armstrong was inundated with suggestions for his speech, including passages from the Bible and from Shakespeare.

Chaikin implied that Armstrong was undecided about what he'd say until after Apollo 11's Eagle lunar lander had set down on Tranquility Base: "Now, on the moon, Armstrong knew he could delay no longer. As he thought about the first step he would take from Eagle's footpad he pondered the inherent paradox — a small step, yet a significant one — and he knew what he would say."

Slideshow: Neil Armstrong: 1930-2012

NASA / EPA

See images from the career of astronaut and American hero Neil Armstrong.

Launch slideshow

Dean Armstrong's recollection suggests that his astronaut brother, who died in August at the age of 82, scripted the words early on but held them close to the vest. The BBC documentary's director, Christopher Riley, speculated that Armstrong let people think the words came to him spontaneously to head off any outside tinkering in advance, or any second-guessing in retrospect.

The interview also confirms that Neil Armstrong meant to say "one small step for a man" — even though the "a" wasn't audible in the transmission from the moon. That's an important stylistic point, because the "a" draws a contrast between the physical length of a human's footstep and Apollo 11's "giant leap" for human exploration.

After the flight, Armstrong insisted that he intended to say "a man." Some experts say that the "a" was dropped because of a glitch in the radio signal, but most assume that Armstrong just left out the word. As the years went on, Armstrong's comments on the mystery took on an air of ambiguity. "We'll never know," Neil Armstrong told an interviewer in 1971.

If he did leave out the word, it's a natural slip to make: Dean Armstrong omitted the "a" himself the first time he quoted the phrase, and had to correct himself a moment later. "It was 'that is one small step for A man,'" he said.

Update for 5:30 p.m. ET Dec. 30: A commenter points out that Dean's recollection runs counter to what his brother Neil told James Hansen about the speech for his authorized biography, "First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong," published in 2005:

"Once on the surface and realizing that the moment was at hand, fortunately I had some hours to think about it after getting there. My own view was that it was a very simplistic statement: what can you say when you step off of something? Well, something about a step. It just sort of evolved during the period that I was doing the procedures of the practice takeoff and the EVA prep and all the other activities that were on our flight schedule at the time. I didn't think it was particularly important, but other people obviously did. Even so, I have never thought that I picked a particularly enlightening statement. It was a very simple statement."

So maybe the controversy over those first words from the lunar surface will continue after all. ...

Update for 4:50 p.m. ET Jan. 4: Over the past few days, there's been a lot of back and forth over Neil and Dean Armstrong's intentions. Was Neil lying when he said that the words "just sort of evolved" after the moon landing? Was Dean lying when he said Neil had the words in mind before liftoff? In a Space.com commentary, Andrew Chaikin suggests that both men could be right. He says Neil Armstrong wasn't the kind of guy to let the matter of his moon speech go unconsidered until the last minute:

"... Nothing in Neil’s post-flight statements rules out the possibility that he thought up the 'one small step' line before leaving Earth. He didn’t say 'I thought up the quote after we landed'; he said, 'I decided what I would say after we landed.'

"Dean Armstrong's story just adds a little ambiguity. Maybe Neil had more than one quote in mind at that point, and only shared one of them with his brother. Or maybe the quote he showed his brother was an early draft, but after all these years, Dean remembers seeing the final version.

"We'll probably never know the answer.

"What it does not mean is that somehow Armstrong 'fibbed' or 'lied' to the public for 40 years. Everyone who knew Neil well has described him as extraordinarily principled. That was certainly the man I saw when I interviewed him, and in the years that followed, as we became friends. ..."

More about the first moonwalker:

• The Year in Space: Hello, Mars ... Farewell, Neil
• The lighter side of Neil Armstrong
• Why Neil Armstrong was camera-shy
• Cosmic Log archive on Neil Armstrong

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Fifty years ago today, the Space Age gave birth to the age of satellite communication as we know it — though it wasn't clear at the time just how world-changing that outer-space angle would turn out to be. In retrospect, you could argue that the launch of AT&T's Telstar 1 satellite on July 10, 1962, made as much of a mark on the space frontier as Sputnik.

At the time, Americans worried that outer space was turning into a Cold War battleground, thanks to the Soviet Union's launch of the first-ever satellite (Sputnik in 1957) and the first human in space (Yuri Gagarin in 1961). "Only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new, terrifying theater of war," President John F. Kennedy declared in 1962.

Telstar, the world's first commercial satellite, marked the shift from outer space's potential military applications to its peaceful uses — which is the way most people think of space ventures today. Within hours of Telstar's launch on a Thor-Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., the satellite beamed a non-public test transmission from Andover Earth Station in Maine to the Pleumeur-Bodou ground station in France. Two weeks later, on July 23, it relayed the first-ever public, live trans-Atlantic TV signal, linking Europe and North America.

That was the start of something big.

"With Telstar and its successors, the world was made a smaller place, as billions of people around the world had instant access to news, sports and entertainment," Jeong Kim, president of Bell Labs, said in a statement marking the anniversary. "The phrase 'live via satellite' became part of the common vernacular. At the time, few people would have believed that 50 years later you could actually talk to your house or car, or predicted that children would play video games with other children 10,000 miles away."

Telstar 1 was capable of carrying just one black-and-white TV channel, plus 600 simultaneous voice calls. It was in operation for less than a year, but it blazed a trail for generations of satellites, including Telstar 18 in 2004.

"Today, as we celebrate the enormous achievement that Telstar represented, Bell Labs researchers are laying the foundation for communications and collaboration for the next 50 years," Kim said.

That vision includes satellite-connected digital personal assistants ... devices that can bring 21st-century medicine to anyplace on Earth or in orbit ... and avatars that can let Earthlings explore Mars from millions of miles away, through virtual reality.

Perhaps the biggest legacy of Telstar 1 lies in how it brought nations together 50 years ago, reassuring us that outer space really could be the "sea of peace" that Kennedy was aiming for. Will it always be that way? Please feel free to weigh in with your reflections on the anniversary in the comment space below.

More about satellite history:

• Sputnik started a satellite revolution
• America's space age turns 50
• How satellites saved the world
• Satellite still in orbit, 54 years after launch

The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum is presenting a "Telstar 50th Anniversary" symposium at the facility on Washington's National Mall at 1:30 p.m. ET Thursday. It will begin with a satellite TV connection to the Pleumeur-Bodou Telecommunications Museum in France, commemorating the first global transmission of a TV signal in 1962. Speakers include Wayne Clough, secretary of the Smithsonian; Francois Delattre, France's ambassador to the United States; and Robert Tate, U.S. consul for western France. Historians and experts from industry and government will discuss Telstar's impact. The symposium will be webcast via the Smithsonian's website. For more information, check Telstar50.org.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA file

The five giant F-1 engines on Apollo 11's Saturn 5 rocket loom large during preparations for the 1969 launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos says his team has located the engines, which fell into the sea just minutes after liftoff.

Amazon.com's billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, says he's funded a successful effort to locate the mammoth rocket engines that sent the Apollo 11 mission on the first leg of its mission to the moon — and now he's planning to bring them up from the Atlantic Ocean floor.

It's shaping up as the latest high-rolling undersea adventure, alongside film director James Cameron's dive to the deepest spot in the Pacific, British billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Oceanic expedition and the Deepsearch submersible project backed by Google's Eric Schmidt.

Bezos' effort plays off his longtime fascination with outer space — a passion that is also driving his decade-old Blue Origin rocket venture. Like Blue Origin, the undersea recovery project is being funded from the dot-com billionaire's personal fortune.

Destined for museums
The five F-1 rocket engines were on the first stage of Apollo 11's Saturn 5 rocket, which dropped into the Atlantic just minutes after liftoff in 1969. In an online statement, Bezos acknowledges that the undersea artifacts, like other hardware associated with the space effort, still belongs to NASA — and he imagines that one of the engines would go on display at the Smithsonian. But in today's announcement, he says he's asked NASA to consider having another engine sent to the Museum of Flight — which happens to be in Seattle, Amazon.com's hometown.

Rocketdyne built more of the 18-foot-tall F-1 engines than were needed for the Apollo missions, and some of those surplus engines have been placed on display, either attached to Saturn stages or as standalone exhibits. One can be seen at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, for example, and there's another at the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia.

The idea of recovering Apollo 11's engines has been debated for more than 10 years, ever since Project Mercury's Liberty Bell 7 space capsule was raised from the Atlantic seafloor in 1999, said Robert Pearlman, editor of the CollectSpace website and an expert on space history and collectibles. NASA and the U.S. Navy had a good idea where the Saturn 5's first stage splashed down, which probably served as a clue for Bezos' search, he said.

In his statement, Bezos said the engines were located using "state-of-the-art deep-sea sonar," but it's not yet fully clear whether the sonar operation was done using deep-diving underwater robots — as was the case with the recent Titanic mapping project — or strictly with surface equipment. A spokesman for Amazon.com told me that no further details about the project would be shared today.

Pearlman was particularly intrigued to learn that Bezos was already in discussions with NASA about the potential disposition of the rocket engines. "If I were a betting fellow, I would say that Bezos is closer to mounting an expedition than the statement seems to imply," he said. "Which is really cool." 

Lessons from Liberty Bell
Curt Newport, the underwater salvage expert who orchestrated the raising of Liberty Bell 7, said bringing up the engines would pose significant challenges. He assumes that the engines are among other pieces of debris from the Saturn 5's first stage that are spread across the sea floor. "The information I found suggested that [the stage] broke up due to aerodynamic forces before it hit the water," he told me.

Verifying that the engines are from Apollo 11 rather than a different Apollo mission would require checking parts numbers against NASA's database, he said. And bringing up the engines would not be a trivial task.

"If they're intact, they're like nine tons each," Newport told me. "That is not going to be easy to bring to the surface."

Bezos said in his statement that the condition of the engines was not yet known.

Here's the full statement from Bezos, via his Bezos Expeditions website.

"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.

"Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was 5 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. A year or so ago, I started to wonder, with the right team of undersea pros, could we find and potentially recover the F-1 engines that started mankind's mission to the moon?

"I'm excited to report that, using state-of-the-art deep sea sonar, the team has found the Apollo 11 engines lying 14,000 feet below the surface, and we're making plans to attempt 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. On the other hand, they're made of tough stuff, so we'll see.

"Though they've been on the ocean floor for a long time, the engines remain the property of NASA. If we are able to recover one of these F-1 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. If we're able to raise more than one engine, I've asked NASA if they would consider making it available to the excellent Museum of Flight here in Seattle. (For clarity, I'll point out that no public funding will be used to attempt to raise the engines, as it's being undertaken privately.)

"NASA is one of the few institutions I know that can inspire 5-year-olds. It sure inspired me, and with this endeavor, maybe we can inspire a few more youth to invent and explore.

"We'll keep you posted."

Update for 2:15 p.m. ET March 29: In comments distributed to journalists on Wednesday, NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs had some nice things to say about Bezos' project but noted that the space agency has not yet been involved in formal talks about recovery of the engines.

"We read Mr. Bezos's blog post with the same excitement as I am sure others have today," CollectSpace's Robert Pearlman quoted Jacobs as saying. "We have not had any formal contact with Mr. Bezos about the Apollo engines but we look forward to hearing more from his team and the recovery expedition."

Jacobs said "the rules regarding NASA property in the ocean are the same as those that govern sunken ships and other government property, including our hardware on the moon and other celestial bodies. ... As Mr. Bezos points out in his blog, the federal government retains ownership until the property is properly disposed."

"However, we do not see that as any impediment to the recovery efforts of the Apollo engines," Jacobs wrote. 

He drew a parallel to the Liberty Bell 7 case: "Gus Grissom's Liberty Bell 7 spacecraft was recovered from the bottom of the Atlantic in 1999 through a private venture. Ownership of the spacecraft was eventually turned over to the Kansas Cosmosphere, where it remains on public display." (I originally wrote that Liberty Bell 7 was raised in 1997, but I was two years off.)

Jacobs sees Bezos' venture as a positive step for space history: "There has always been great interest in artifacts from the early days of space exploration and his announcement only adds to the enthusiasm of those interested in NASA's history," The Associated Press' Alicia Chang quoted him as saying.

Update for 10:30 p.m. ET April 1: In a statement released on Friday, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden indicated that he's totally on board with Bezos' plan:

"I would like to thank Jeff Bezos for his communication with NASA informing us of his historic find. I salute him and his entire team on this bold venture and wish them all the luck in the world.

"NASA does retain ownership of any artifacts recovered and would likely offer one of the Saturn V F-1 engines to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington under longstanding arrangements with the institution as the holder of the national collection of aerospace artifacts.

"If the Smithsonian declines or if a second engine is recovered, we will work to ensure an engine or other artifacts are available for display at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, as Jeff requested in his correspondence with my office. I have directed our staff to begin work to exercise all appropriate authorities to provide a smooth and expeditious disposition of any flight hardware recovered.

"I sincerely hope all continues to go well for Jeff and Blue Origin, and that his team enjoys success and prosperity in every endeavor. All of us at NASA have our fingers crossed for success in his upcoming expedition of exploration and discovery."

More about space history:

• Restored Apollo test capsule ready for next mission
• Bill would defend astronauts' right to sell artifacts
• New frontiers for shuttle souvenirs
• Flash timeline: Glory Days on the Final Frontier

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

The mastermind behind the first privately funded spaceship says he's disappointed by the pace of progress since SpaceShipOne took its historic trip, seven years ago today. But there's hope on the horizon, in the form of SpaceShipTwo.

Aerospace designer Burt Rutan has retired from his top post at the company he created, Scaled Composites, and is now living in North Idaho with his wife, Tonya. His new digs are hundreds of miles from California's Mojave Air and Space Port, where SpaceShipOne took flight and where SpaceShipTwo is now undergoing unpowered glide tests.

"I feel good about the decision to retire and leave Mojave, mainly due to my health uncertaintites and to the wonderful place we now live," Rutan, 68, told me in an email. When he refers to his health, he's talking about heart troubles that forced him to undergo surgery in early 2008. And when he refers to the appeal of his current locale, he's talking about Idaho's political environment as well as its mountains and lakes.

Bebeto Matthews / AP file

Burt Rutan presides over a 2008 news conference about SpaceShipTwo.

"Conservatives just take better care of each other and govern better," he said. "Oh, I also love the weather and the views."

When SpaceShipOne broke the space barrier on June 21, 2004, Rutan was hoping he'd be one of the first passengers on a commercial flight to the edge of space, more than 62 miles (100 kilometers) up. He even said he wanted to "go to the moon in my lifetime" and "see my grandchildren go to the more interesting moons of Jupiter and Saturn."

Today, folks are still talking about the possibility of sending passengers around the moon — perhaps by 2015, although today Russia's space chief voiced doubts about that prospect. It doesn't look as if anyone will be going to the moons of Jupiter or Saturn anytime in the next few decades, though, and even that first private-sector passenger flight to space has not yet taken place.

"Yes, disappointed that progress has been slow," Rutan wrote.

Rutan has always shied away from laying down firm schedules for the future. Even in his retirement, he declined to talk about how soon SpaceShipTwo would be taking on customers — or, for that matter, about any other ventures he might be taking on. "I cannot talk about future things, never did. Just stay tuned," he said.

But if Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic stick with the schedule they've laid out, rocket-powered test flights could begin within the next year, with the aim of sending test pilots once again across the outer-space boundary.

The year 2012 appears to be the very earliest target for the first commercial suborbital spaceflights. Such journeys would give Virgin Galactic's customers a taste of zero-G and a view of the curving Earth beneath the black sky of space, at a cost of $200,000 a seat. There are other companies in the suborbital space race, including XCOR Aerospace (aiming for flights from Curacao in 2014) and Armadillo Aerospace (which has partnered with Space Adventures). For now, however, Virgin Galactic still appears to be closest to entering the market, with New Mexico's Spaceport America taking shape as its base of commercial operations.

Zenith Press

"Burt Rutan's Race to Space" traces the aerospace designer's decades-long career.

Until the next-gen spacecraft actually fire up their rockets, space dreamers will have to content themselves with lower-flying adventures such as zero-gravity flights and astronaut training sessions. Or you could read the book: "Burt Rutan's Race to Space," a new volume from Dan Linehan, author of the "SpaceShipOne" coffee-table book, has just been published.

While "SpaceShipOne" focused on the run-up to the rocket plane's history-making flights, "Burt Rutan's Race to Space: The Magician of Mojave and His Flying Innovations" takes a wider look at the aerospace guru's career, from his days as a designer of homebuilt airplanes to his work on SpaceShipTwo. Rutan's work on record-setting long-distance aircraft such as the Voyager and the GlobalFlyer is well-known, but I was surprised to see some of the other not-so-ready-for-prime-time projects in which Scaled Composites played a role, including the DC-X rocket prototype, the Roton test vehicle and NASA's X-38 crew return vehicle.

Now the Voyager and SpaceShipOne are hanging in the Smithsonian, and a new generation of aerospace designers are following in Rutan's footsteps. Here's what Mike Melvill, the first pilot to become an astronaut in SpaceShipOne, wrote in the foreword to "Burt Rutan's Race to Space":

"It will be interesting to watch the continuing progress of Scaled Composites, where Burt has left an unbelievable legacy of truly astonishing aircraft designs and ensured that there is a cadre of exceptional designers, engineers and test pilots with an unmatched shop full of the best composite fabricators in the world."

Even though he's retired, and even though he doesn't like to talk about future things, Rutan himself couldn't resist taking a forward-looking perspective as he looked back on what happened seven years ago today.

"The thing that sticks out," he wrote, "is that hundreds of children were there to watch."

Will June 21, 2004, go down in history as the true start of the commercial space age? Or will it turn out to have been a false start? What do you think? Feel free to weigh in with your comments, and let's see what happens by June 21, 2012.

Stay tuned for a Q&A with Dan Linehan in a future posting. Linehan's earlier book, "SpaceShipOne: An Illustrated History," has just become available in paperback.

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The whole world is gearing up for the 50th anniversary of humanity's first flight in space, made by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961.

For Russians, the date is observed as Cosmonautics Day, an annual holiday going back to Soviet times. And for the past 10 years, the rest of the world has been celebrating the occasion as "Yuri's Night," which has replaced the Communist Party theme with a dance-party theme.

As of today, the Yuri's Night website has registered 321 parties in 61 countries, from Afghanistan to Vietnam. (And I still have hope for Zimbabwe.) The event's associate director and director of media relations, Brice Russ, emphasized that the event doesn't focus on Mother Russia or the Cold War.

"We call it Yuri's Night and celebrate Yuri Gagarin's flight, but it's not just a celebration of a single person doing a single thing," he told me. "It's celebrating what Yuri's flight stood for: exploration, adventure, scientific discovery. It's nice to see how far we've come in 50 years, and with Yuri's Night we'll be doing our best to go as far as we can in the next 50 years."

Russ pointed out that there's a strong U.S. angle to the April 12 festivities. "It's not just the 50th anniversary of Gagarin's flight, but it's also the 30th anniversary of the shuttle program," he said. 

10 years of Yuri's night
The first Yuri's Night festivities were organized in 2001 by two space enthusiasts named George Whitesides Jr. and Loretta Hidalgo. From the beginning, Whitesides and Hidalgo (who are now married) tailored the event for the next space generation rather than the Apollo era. Rock music, dancing, glamour and glitter are an accepted part of the Yuri's Night scene, but the pocket-protector crowd is welcome as well.

"It's pretty funny seeing space geeks mixing it up with the young and the beautiful," Hidalgo Whitesides said in a news release. "In Los Angeles, we see our share of space-inspired fashion. There are a lot of silver bikinis."

The highlights include:

• Two contests to get the space-exploration juices flowing. One calls for contestants to create a print ad (poster, magazine advertisement, postcard, etc.) that would inspire readeres to "think about space and support humanity's future among the stars." Grand prize is a four-day trip to Russia for a zero-gravity flight aboard an Ilyushin-76 airplane, valued at $9,000. The other contest offers $500 for the best Yuri's Night tribute video. Deadline for both contests is April 15.
• A sweepstakes that offers an expense-paid trip to Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, to see a Soyuz liftoff like the one that took place today. Value: $9,000. Entry deadline: April 15. Cost of entry: $0.
• The relaunch of the Yuri's Night app for the iPhone, which gives you the full rundown on hundreds of events, as well as a countdown clock so you don't miss the liftoff. (You can also follow @YurisNight on Twitter or check out the Yuri's Night Facebook page.)
• The world premiere of an experimental documentary film titled "First Orbit," produced by British filmmaker Christopher Riley with music by Philip Sheppard. The 105-minute film will be shown for the first time on YouTube on April 12, and at hundreds of Yuri's Night venues around the globe.

First night for 'First Orbit'
"First Orbit" deserves special notice: The movie re-creates 1961's one-orbit flight, using exclusive imagery from the International Space Station. Riley worked things out with the European Space Agency to have Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli shoot footage from the station's Cupola observation deck as the station flew along the same orbital path that Gagarin followed 50 years earlier.

Riley told me that the station follows Gagarin's route every couple of days. "The tricky part was that I needed to film at exactly the same time of day that Gagarin flew," he said. That happens only every six weeks or so. Fortunately, Nespoli was able to get most of the imagery during an orbital pass in early January.

The soundtrack blends the original audio from Gagarin's mission with Sheppard's score, plus reports about the flight that aired on Radio Moscow, TASS and the BBC 50 years ago.

Riley said the "First Orbit" project served as a "sort of overture" for a film he's planning to make about the decades-long international drive to explore outer space. "I'd really like to do a film in 30 languages, where everybody talks about their own experience in Earth orbit," he told me.

So what will happen to "First Orbit" when Yuri's Night is over? "It's a bit like a dead lottery ticket," Riley joked. "I suspect no one's going to be interested in the film for a few months after April 12. But I think this film will be like a good Christmas movie. It'll come back every year, around April 12."

What will you be doing for Yuri's Night? Do you remember what it was like 50 years ago, when Gagarin flew? Or 30 years ago, when a space shuttle blasted off for the first time? Or even 10 years ago, when Yuri's Night got its start? Take this opportunity to share your spaceflight memories in a comment below.

More about space history:

• Why the world remembers its first spaceman
• Where were you when Apollo flew?
• Audio slideshow: Voyage of the millennium
• Timeline: Glory days on the final frontier
• Timeline: Trace the space shuttle era