Recovered by remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) from the multi-purpose offshore vessel Seabed Worker, they were brought up from a depth of over 14,000 feet (4,267 m) over a three week period. Bezos has been working on the project for over a year in hopes of recovering the engines used to launch Apollo 11 on July 16, 1969. However, the serial numbers for the recovered engines are missing or partly missing, so identifying which mission the rockets are from will be difficult.

The problem with preserving artifacts from the early days of the Space Age is that voyages into space tend to be a bit hard on the equipment.