Original subtitles

Explorers Club member and NASA hero, Jim Lovell,

intends to plant the Explorers Club flag on the moon.

Little does he know,

his mission will be remembered for all the wrong reasons.

[loud thuds]

Houston, we've had a problem.

[Josh] Test pilot and icon Chuck Yeager smashes the sound barrier

and paves the way for club member Brian Binnie

to attempt an even loftier feat.

If he succeeds, he'll win $10,000,000.

And in 1969, a future pioneer of space travel

watches in awe as Neil Armstrong

forever alters our relationship with the cosmos.

[Armstrong speaking]

[Josh] Decades later, he too will make history

and could quite possibly change the future of space travel

for all of us.

Here at the Explorers Club, it's time for lift off.

Welcome to the world-famous Explorers Club.

For over 100 years,

this has been a gathering place

for trailblazers.

The people who dare to venture higher,

further, and faster.

As a member of this exclusive club,

I'm bringing one-of-a-kind access to its archives...

This is incredible!

...Artifacts...

Oh, my word.

...And my fellow explorers.

This is actual lunar dust?

Unbelievable.

The expeditions planned here have tested the boundaries of human possibility.

It's flag has flown on death-defying voyages into the unknown

that forever changed our world.

These are the greatest adventures of all time.

These are...

Tales from the Explorers Club.

The extraordinary feats achieved by Explorers Club members

often go hand in hand with profound danger.

The quest for scientific progress can be treacherous

and even fatal.

At NASA though, risk is part of the job.

For Apollo 13's Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise,

a life or death scenario would become all too real

on April 11, 1970 during a mission for which failure was not an option.

To some of the country's more superstitious citizens,

the number 13 is not a reassuring designator

for just the third mission to the surface of the moon,

but following a picture-perfect launch,

most people let out a sigh of relief.

It looks like everything is going according to plan.

The gumdrop-shaped command module,

which the astronauts will call home

for the duration of their journey,

is dubbed, "Odyssey," meaning a long voyage

marked by many changes of fortune.

More than a little prophetic, if you ask me.

The command module sits atop the cylindrical service module,

which houses the main engine.

Attached to the command module's nose is Aquarius,

the lunar module, which ferries the astronauts to and from the moon.

With Lovell is an Explorers Club flag.

While all club members are engaged in some form of field work,

it's a rare honor to be granted the flag for an expedition.

Apollo 13's ultimate destination

is a 50-mile wide crater in the Fra Mauro Highlands.

There, Lovell and Haise will explore and collect moon rocks.

And of course, plant that Explorers Club flag.

[loud thud]

What the hell was that?

It's nothing, Jim.

Just Haise tripping the cabin depressurization valve in the limb.

Very funny, Freddo.

[Josh] Apollo 13's commander, Jim Lovell, is no stranger to space travel.

He's flown to space three times already,

more than any other American.

The last time was as the command module pilot on Apollo 8,

the first mission to successfully orbit the moon.

But this time, the plan is to go a step further

and take a stroll on the lunar surface.

Jack Swigert isn't even supposed to be here.

He was command module pilot Ken Mattingly's understudy,

but just three days before launch,

Maddingly was exposed to the German measles

and Swigert had to take his place.

Even though this was to be just the third moon landing,

the national attitude in 1970 had already become,

"Been there, done that, got the moon rocks."

The TV networks didn't even pre-empt their programming

for a live feed from the spacecraft anymore.

But all that changed on April 13,

the day Apollo 13 grabbed the world's undivided attention

for all the wrong reasons.

As the astronauts close in on the moon,

NASA assigns Swigert a couple of routine housekeeping chores.

Okay, stand by.

-[loud thud] -Fredo, again? Did you--

I didn't do a thing, I promise.

[Josh] That loud bang they just heard is unfortunately not a prank.

Far from it.

To learn more about what Lovell, Haise, and Swigert are up against,

I know just the guy to ask,

my fellow Explorers Club member

and former astronaut, Mike Massimino.

The beginning of the mission seems like it's off to a perfect start.

What goes wrong?

They were doing a routine, uh, stirring of the tanks

to get a better pressure reading

and there was a problem with one of their sensors

and it was a short waiting to happen.

-Okay. -And once they initiated that stirring of the tanks,

it created a short, which created a spark,

which then led to an explosion.

[Josh] Even though they don't know what's just happened,

the astronauts have trained for situations like this.

They go into emergency mode,

trying to identify the problem.

Moments later, Mission Control hears

the scariest line ever delivered from space.

Houston, we've had a problem.

Houston, we had a loud bang associated with the caution warning there.

Did we just hit a meteoroid?

No way, a meteoroid would have torn us to pieces.

[bleeping]

We've lost two of three fuel cells.

[Josh] Back in Houston, flight director Gene Kranz

tries to bring order to chaos.

Mission Control's computers are relaying so much conflicting information

that the flight controllers assume the instruments must be malfunctioning.

[man] Roger to restart.

[Josh] Because if what they read is correct,

Apollo 13 is in big trouble.

We've lost two of our three fuel cells.

We're almost out of power.

[Josh] Minutes later, Jim Lovell glances out the window

and sees something that strikes terror into his heart.

[Lovell] Houston, we are venting something out into space.

Looks like a, a gas of some sort.

[Swigert] That must be our oxygen.

The oxygen is not just for breathing in space,

it's also for power.

-Hmm. -[Massimino] Liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen

feeds fuel cells, which are, the chemical reaction to that,

creates power so you can charge your batteries.

So this is like a double whammy for them?

Yes, and that I mean better off than without having breathing oxygen.

-[Josh] Right. -You need both.

[Josh] To recap, Odyssey's power is nearly gone,

its critical oxygen is almost depleted,

and it is tumbling uncontrollably through space.

Some of our thrusters may have been damaged too, uh,

I'm having a real hard time smoothing us out.

[Josh] The word dire doesn't do the situation justice.

Their spacecraft is dying.

As Swigert finally gets Apollo 13 under control,

Lovell is struck by a new reality,

his dream of walking on the moon is over.

He will not be planting his Explorers Club flag there.

But is difficult as that realization is to ingest,

he can't dwell on it for long, there are far bigger issues.

Like, will they be able to get home?

An hour after the explosion, with the command module's systems crashing,

Houston radios the spacecraft, and they come up with a radical plan.

[Josh] The three-man crew will abandon Odyssey and relocate to Aquarius.

They quickly gather up armfuls of food, water, and technical manuals

and make their way into the lunar module,

powering down the command module behind them,

to preserve what little battery power it has left.

"Abandon ship,"

those are two words you probably don't wanna hear when you're in space.

They're doing something they haven't really trained for--

-Yeah. -And they're using this spacecraft

-in a way that it was never intended to be used, right? -Yeah, no.

The lunar module was intended to land on the moon

and get them back to lunar orbit.

Now what they had to use it for

was they were gonna abandon ship of the, of the command module--

-Right. -Power that thing down,

cross their fingers that in a couple days

it's gonna power back up again,

and then live off of the, the lunar module.

[Josh] The three Apollo 13 astronauts

are now in a landing craft designed for just two.

Mission Control calculates the odds of them surviving at less than ten percent.

If that doesn't paint a gloomy enough picture,

Apollo 13 is now more than 200,000 miles from earth,

speeding farther away with every passing second

at over 3,000 miles per hour.

While feverishly searching for solutions,

Mission Control has the crew haul out the lunar module's flight manuals.

Here's a good life lesson,

never leave home without your instruction manual.

You never know when you might need it.

To stretch their power, the ship must operate no more than 400 watts.

That's the equivalent of just four household lightbulbs.

Oh, and that also includes their heat.

Soon, temperatures will plummet,

but now is not the time to worry about creature comforts.

It is the time to figure out how to get their shattered spacecraft home.

These guys are in a crippled spacecraft, they need to get home.

Slight problem, they're headed in the wrong direction.

-Yes. -So, how do you do a U-turn in space?

What they decided to do, instead of turning around and firing an engine,

was to keep going to the moon and use a free return trajectory,

which means using the gravity of the moon

to pull you in a little bit, slingshot you around,

using physics to head back home.

[Josh] The astronauts need to fire the LEM's engine,

known as a burn, to accelerate the ship to 16 feet per second

and prepare them for their free return course.

Their previous speed was calculated for an easy orbital insertion,

but that's the last thing they want now.

If they're going too slow when they get to the moon,

they'll fall into orbit and never break free.

If they don't get this just right,

the end of the mission will be inexorably linked with the end of their lives.

Three, two, one,

burn.

[Josh] The Astronauts of Apollo 13

must fire the lunar module's engine

in a maneuver known as a burn.

They have little margin for error.

If they're going too slow when they get to the moon,

they'll fall into orbit and never break free.

As Lovell prepares for the burn,

he realizes his shipmates are distracted.

Boys, we don't make this next maneuver correctly,

and you'll never have a chance to get those photos developed.

Just a moment, boss.

You've been here before, Jim, we haven't.

If we're gonna die, I wanna at least capture this one more second.

Roger that.

Three, two, one,

burn.

[Josh] Apollo 13 swings behind the moon,

further from Earth than any crewed spacecraft before or since.

For 20 minutes, they are out of contact with Mission Control,

racing around the far side of the moon.

Houston breathes a collective sigh of relief

when communications are re-established.

Two hours later, Houston orders a second burn

to speed up Apollo 13's trip home.

They don't have enough power to take things slow.

They need to cut at least 12 hours from their trip,

or Apollo 13's tale of survival

won't have a happy ending.

But first, Lovell must make sure they're heading

in precisely the right direction.

There's no Google Maps in space.

Lovell suddenly realizes he has a big problem.

Ordinally, the astronauts would navigate using

the alignment optical telescope,

the modern version of an old sailor's sextant.

You lock in a known star, verify its position in space with the guidance computer,

and presto, you're ready to go.

But Lovell can't see any stars.

Damn it.

This debris cloud is so thick I can't get a lock on anything.

All I can see is a bunch of metallic junk glinting in the sunlight.

The sun.

That's when everyone realizes

there is one star no debris field can ever obscure, our Sun.

Apollo 13 is ready to burn.

Unlike the previous burn, which lasted only seconds,

this burn will take four and a half minutes, a relative eternity.

The maneuver is an initial success,

but for the crew, time is not on their side.

At that point, all they could do was wait.

The return trip was a test of human endurance.

Apollo 13 had almost no food or water.

The temperature was now 38 degrees Fahrenheit,

just six degrees above freezing.

Oh, and the condensation from the astronauts' breathing

was running down the interior walls.

Their breathing, it turns out, is slowly killing them.

Every exhalation releases carbon dioxide.

The LEM is outfitted with CO2 scrubbers.

They're only designed to accommodate two people for two days.

While there are some CO2 scrubbers back in the command module,

they're the wrong size and shape.

After just a day and half inside the LEM, warning lights begin to pulse.

-The air inside the space craft is turning toxic. -[alarms blaring]

Something has to be done.

[alarms blaring]

This is where, uh, the creativity

and the passion and the dedication of the entire team comes in.

It's not just the astronauts on board

it's the control team down on the ground.

And, and being done

very manually, like...

Yeah and not much else.

It's not, like, "Oh, we'll just fire up the old computer here"

-Right. -It's, like, guys with pencils, right?

Yes, absolutely.

[Josh] Luckily, mission control has been

working the problem back on Earth.

The develop a solution using only items the crew has at their disposal

to connect the command module scrubbers to the LEM's environmental system.

Things like socks, cardboard binder covers, and, of course, duct tape.

The MVP of all perilous situations.

In the end, it's ugly, but it works.

The CO2 levels normalize,

which, puns aside, is a breath of fresh air for Apollo 13.

Later, with Earth growing ever larger,

it's time to prepare the ship for reentry.

The first step is jettisoning the crippled service module.

As it floats away, the crew gets their first look at the damage.

They realize, not for the first time,

that they're lucky to be alive.

Next up, it's time to head back to the command module,

but NASA has never powered up the command module from a full shut down before.

Will it even restart, given how little juice is in the batteries?

And to make matters worse, the condensation is so bad

that it is literally raining inside the capsule.

If any of that water gets anywhere near the internal electrical components,

it will be the Apollo 1 fire all over again.

If that command module doesn't power back on...

-They're done. -It's over.

That's right.

They need the command module, the power back on,

so they can use it to get through the Earth's atmosphere and come back home.

[Josh] The astronauts execute the sequence

to power up Odyssey and cross their fingers.

Amazingly, it comes back to life without a hitch.

A strategy collectively developed

under the most urgent of circumstances has paid off.

An hour before landing, it's time to say goodbye to Aquarius.

They cut the lunar module loose,

silently bidding farewell to the ship that saved their lives.

Apollo 13 is soon enveloped in ionized plasma.

Mission control loses comms.

This is normal, it happens for about four minutes on every mission,

but four minutes pass and there is still no contact from Apollo 13.

None of Houston's instruments are reading the ship.

Four and a half minutes, five, five and a half,

still nothing.

Questions swirled, "Was anything else damaged in the accident?

Did the heat shield fail? Were the parachutes damaged?"

At this point, there are more questions than answers

and the crew's lives hang in the balance.

Following a near catastrophic accident

that forced the astronauts of Apollo 13

to immediately head back home in a dying spacecraft,

Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert

plunge into Earth's atmosphere like a blazing meteor.

Flames lashed their windows.

If they didn't compute their reentry just right, they'll burn up.

And now, several minutes after they should have already appeared on NASA's scopes,

there's no sign of them.

But the heat shield holds.

To their indescribable relief the crew of Apollo 13 hear a comforting "Pop."

The main chutes deploy.

[all cheering]

Given all of their recalculations,

the Odyssey's flight path was at a much shallower angle than normal,

taking them more time to exist the atmosphere

and re-establish comms with mission control.

Minutes later, they splash down gently

in the warm waters of the South Pacific.

Behind me, still wrapped in its original protective plastic

is the flag that Jim Lovell intended to plant on the moon during the Apollo 13 mission.

Lovell returned it to The Explorers Club with a letter.

He wrote, quote, "Since we were unable to land, the plans were disrupted,

and the flag has remained as is since it was taken from the spacecraft." End quote.

Plans were disrupted, talk about an understatement for the ages

and a testament to Lovell's bravery.

Long before the Apollo 13 mission,

NASA was teeming with swashbuckling young pilots

who, despite the inherent danger,

were fighting to be the first ones to test brand new technology.

That's were many Explorers Club members have stepped up.

Putting their lives on the line to advance science.

And when it comes to test pilots,

no one had the right stuff quite like our own Chuck Yeager.

Chuck Yeager is an aeronautical legend.

Look in the dictionary under fearless

and you'll likely see his picture.

After becoming an ace pilot in World War II

he turned his attention to pushing the envelope of speed.

His mission, to be the first person to break the sound barrier.

Breaking the sound barrier is what happens when an aircraft begins to move

faster than the speed at which sound travels,

roughly 767 miles per hour.

When the aircraft reaches this point,

it creates a series of loud acoustic shock waves

called a sonic boom.

Travelling at such speeds puts tremendous stress

on both the plane and the pilot.

This stress is measured in Gs.

1 G is what you and I experience everyday.

It is the gravimetric pull of the Earth on a human body.

Pretty standard stuff.

But as the Gs go up, the effects are anything, but standard.

Piloting a fighter jet causes the blood to rush out of your head

depriving the brain of oxygen.

This is why pilots wear pressurized G-suits.

To keep the pilots' blood stable during periods of high acceleration.

Without it, they succumb to gray out,

in which they lose their color vision.

And if they accelerate further, they'll blackout all together.

On October 14th, 1947,

just two years after the end of World War II

and roughly 22 years before Apollo 11 touches down on the moon,

Yeager flies his rocket powered Bell X-1 into the history books.

Two nights before the flight, Yeager falls from a horse breaking two ribs.

A military flight surgeon would never have cleared him to fly,

so Yeager keeps his injury a secret, taping his ribs.

There's no way he is gonna let a few broken bones stop him from making history.

The experimental prototype, nicknamed Glamorous Glennis for Yeager's wife,

doesn't take off on a runway like a normal plane.

But rather is carried in the belly of a B-29 bomber.

The X-1 is released into the bright sun 20,000 ft above the California Desert.

To reach the speed of sound, X-1 requires four rocket engines,

which Yeager ignites one at a time.

The first rocket slams him back into his seat.

He passes the chase plane flying beside him as if it's sitting still.

All around him the X-1 shutters and shakes.

Engine two kicks in.

He never even realized speed like this was possible.

Thankfully, the deafening rattle seems to be dissipated.

Engine three.

There are some in the program that think the Bell X-1

will shatter into pieces when it hits the sound barrier.

There's only one way to prove them wrong.

Yeager fires off the last rocket engine.

His machmeter, which calculates the ratio

of the true air speed to the speed of sound,

fluctuates erratically before tipping right off the scale.

According to his instruments,

Yeager is now flying supersonic

and unexpectedly finds himself on the steadiest and smoothest flight he's ever experienced.

He assumes something is wrong with his instruments,

when the tracking station on the ground radios up to him

that they just heard a distant rumble of thunder,

his sonic boom.

[sonic boom]

Yeager has done it.

He's the first human to break the sound barrier,

paving the way for a new era of supersonic flight.

Nearly 60 years later,

another test pilot and Explorer's Club member,

Brian Binnie, would fly a ground-breaking craft to its destiny

after being dropped from the belly of a larger plane.

Its name, SpaceShipOne.

In 2004, the company Scaled Composites

designed and built a totally new type of spacecraft

unlike anything ever seen before.

That's the thing about prototypes,

they require someone brave enough to prove they work.

Admit it, SpaceShipOne looks weird,

like something out ofStar Wars.

It's fashioned from advanced carbon fiber composites,

making it far lighter than a traditional craft.

Those enormous awkward looking wings

are designed to keep it stable at 2100 miles per hour,

nearly three times the speed of sound.

SpaceShipOne is built to touch space

and uses a powerful hybrid rocket engine

that burns liquid nitrous oxide along with solid rubber fuel.

Just like Chuck Yeager's Bell X-1,

it's carried part of the way on the belly of a mothership named White Knight,

and it will fly above the same California Desert.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The plan is for SpaceShipOne to be released at 50,000 ft

and fire it's rocket engine to take it past the threshold of space.

After three minutes it will tilt it's wings 70 degrees,

to create resistance called feathering and land back on Earth.

The goal was to win the coveted Ansari X Prize,

a 10 million dollar award offered to anyone who builds a private spacecraft

that flew into space twice within 14 days

and safely returned to the Earth.

Like me, Explorer's Club member and Virgin Galactic Experience architect

Joe Rohde has a fascination with SpaceShipOne,

mostly because it's science fantasy made real.

SpaceShipOne legitimately looks like a spaceship.

This is one of the best things about it,

I mean, you have, it looks like you imagine them to be.

-It's like a whole different approach. -Yeah.

Because up to this point, pretty much, if you wanna get to space,

you need to shoot a big heavy rocket

filled with a lot of fuel straight up in the air.

That's right.

[Josh] Test pilot Mike Melvill is the first one up,

on September 29th, 2004.

I was in attendance that day, excited by the possibilities,

but vary of the inextricable dangers that come along

with pushing the envelope of scientific progress.

Earlier that summer, Melvill successfully piloted SpaceShipOne

on its maiden flight,

making him the world's first commercial space pilot.

But now he needs to go higher and faster,

completing the first of the two flights necessary to win the X Prize.

White Knight rises from the Mojave Desert.

SpaceShipOne with Melvill at the stick is released

and it's engines fire.

The spacecraft goes supersonic in just 11 seconds,

pinning Melvill to his seat.

SpaceShipOne is in an almost vertical climb.

4.5 Gs press down on Melvill,

that's more Gs than astronauts experience aboard the space shuttle.

At these supersonic speeds, it's not just Melvill's body that feels the stress,

the pressure locks his joystick,

he's unable to steer at 2000 miles per hour.

SpaceShipOne suddenly goes into a spiral.

It corkscrews through the atmosphere a terrifying 29 times.

In addition to me, two other observers that day are Explorer's Club members.

One is pilot Brian Binnie, who is slated to fly

the same craft in just five days.

The second is Burt Rutan, he is one who designed and built SpaceShipOne.

I remember feeling my heart in my throat

as the spacecraft began tumbling through the air.

Luckily, SpaceShipOne has entered a section of the atmosphere

where the air is significantly thinner,

meaning its wings are nearly useless anyway.

Melvill takes advantage this and use his reaction jets,

designed to move the craft in space to get it back under control.

SpaceShipOne arcs through space for three minutes,

reaching a height of 62.5 miles just above the Karman line,

the internationally recognized threshold of space,

then it rapidly descends.

As SpaceShipOne hits the atmosphere, a roar fills Melvill's ears.

[screams]

[breath trembling]

The feather mechanism angles the wings into position

slowing the spacecraft and reorienting it for reentry.

But Melvill is decelerating so fast

that he is hit with a crushing 5.5 Gs.

His vision begins to tunnel, he is about to blackout and crash to the Earth.

All the three Club members in attendance can do,

along with the everyone else, is watch.

On September 29th, 2004,

SpaceShipOne attempts the first of two flights necessary

to win the 10 million dollar Ansari X Prize.

Onlookers, both in person and worldwide, hold their collective breath.

They are witnesses to history.

And if things go horribly wrong,

potential tragedy.

On his ascent, pilot Mike Melvill nearly loses control of the craft,

and on the descent, the G-forces are so great that he nearly blacks out.

Thankfully, at about 60,000 ft,

Melvill is able to shift the tail feather into its glider position.

Despite beginning its descent more than 20 miles off target,

he brings the space plane in for a perfect landing.

[crowd cheering]

The guy gets out and waves again and you're, like,

"That guy just went to space."

That's right, right in front of you.

Like, "He left a minute ago, he went to space and he's back."

That's right.

It blew my mind, I couldn't believe it.

This was, like, a whole different reality.

For pilot Brian Binnie, who just watched

the pioneering yet perilous flight unfold,

taking the controls of SpaceShipOne again in five days

is more than a little scary.

After it returns to the hanger,

engineers worked 12-hour shifts

trying to figure out what caused the vessel

to go into a series of uncontrolled corkscrews.

It turns out, they'd seen this behavior

on one of the very first test flights.

SpaceShipOne tends to roll when encountering

abrupt changes in wind speed and direction,

especially when buffeted by side winds.

The wind simply behaves differently across it's massive feathered wings.

There was no fix that could be made.

This was the spacecraft Explorer's Club member

and pilot Brian Binnie would have to fly to claim the X Prize.

Take it or leave it.

But according to Chuck Yeager,

describing how he felt just minutes before he broke the sound barrier,

quote, "This is the kind of moment that a test pilot lives for."

On October 4th, 2004,

the 47th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik,

SpaceShipOne will attempt another flight through the stratosphere.

This time with Binnie at the helm.

The same wind shear that affected the first flight is at play once again.

In another twist, Melvill suggests he might have caused the roll

by inadvertently stepping on a rudder pedal.

Binnie has been living in the simulator,

ensuring that when he is controlling the real thing, he'll be prepared.

It all comes down to this moment.

To win 10 million dollars, Binnie has to be perfect.

And perfect he is.

Binnie's hands, feet, and SpaceShipOne are steady.

It doesn't roll a single time.

Binnie guides SpaceShipOne just shy of 70 miles above the surface of our planet.

The highest any private craft has ever gone.

Now an astronaut,

Binnie brings SpaceShipOne back to the ground without a hitch.

He's cinched the X Prize.

[crowd cheering]

The success of SpaceShipOne was only the beginning.

Scaled Composites partnered with Sir Richard Branson to create Virgin Galactic.

And eventually, a fleet of ships,

which will carry citizen astronauts into space.

But Virgin Galactic isn't the only company

rewriting the rules of space exploration.

Another Explorer's Club member has a dream that was born

in a Houston suburb when he was just five years old.

A dream that started with one small step.

On that momentous night in the summer of 1969,

pretty much the entire world is sitting around their television.

Watching Explorer's Club member Neil Armstrong

take his first giant leap for mankind.

[astronaut] The EVA is progressing beautifully.

[Josh] This moment is a landmark in history.

The world is locked in a cold war between the US and the Soviet Union.

The space race is serving as a proxy for the conflict

between communism and democracy.

Both countries have spent vast resources,

recruited top talent, accelerated technology,

and produced new generations of giant rockets.

Everything has all led to this moment.

[woman] Okay, Jeffrey, time for bed.

That young boy grew up to become

one of the most powerful entrepreneurs in the world.

Explorer's Club member and honorary club chair, Jeff Bezos.

Like so many kids of his era, Bezos became obsessed with space travel.

But before the cowboy hats and his own suborbital launch,

Bezos undertook a mission to find and recover

historic artifacts from the Apollo program.

The Saturn V F-1 engines that launched Apollo 11 to the moon.

Just one problem, they were lost in an oceanic abyss.

The Saturn V's five F-1 engines

remain the most powerful liquid fueled rocket engines ever created.

At an altitude of about 42 miles,

explosive bolts separate the first stage from the rest of the rocket,

propelling them upward before falling into the Atlantic Ocean,

roughly 350 miles down range of Cape Canaveral.

The humongous engines are now long lost to the deep sea.

But the scale and scope of this search and recovery mission

doesn't deter Jeff Bezos, he wants to find them.

Bezos really wanted those Saturn V engines.

-Apparently so. -Why? What, what makes them so special?

Uh, I think a couple of things.

-One is that they were really powerful engines. -Yeah.

Especially for back then, they were gigantic.

-Right. They're huge, right? -They're huge, like, 20 ft.

20 ft tall, they had amazing amount of power, one of those engines,

they had five of them on the Saturn V, but just one of 'em,

more thrust than we got out

-of all three shuttle main engines. -Wow.

And only used once, which I think is the other thing that

attracted his attention to this.

It's that they were thrown away.

[Josh] Bezos employs theOcean Stalwart,

an exploratory ship equipped for ultra-deep sea search operations.

Finding the engines is like looking

for a bell shaped needle in an underwater haystack.

Bezos knows his quest is a long shot,

which is why he sunk years of research and cutting edge tech into the hunt.

Ocean Stalwart scans the Atlantic for a full month.

Using state of the art deep sea sonar

to locate potential anomalies in the rough area

where NASA predicted Apollo 11's first stage went down.

If the sonar identifies anything that warrants a closer look,

another ship, theSeabed Worker,

will return to launch an ROV,

a remotely operated vehicle tethered to the ship like a marionette

with power cables and fiber-optic data lines.

In March of 2013,

at a depth of nearly three miles,

a half-mile deeper than where theTitanic rests,

they find what they're looking for,

not one, but several mangled F1 engines.

The ROV's cameras capture what Bezos later describes as "An underwater wonderland,"

an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F1 engines

that serves as a testament to the Apollo program.

What followed next was a nail-biting deepwater ballet.

Hard as it was, locating the engines was actually the easy part.

The most difficult part remained,

getting them off the seafloor and back into the light of day

for the first time in nearly half a century.

To advance our understanding of the world through science and technology,

Discovery is funding more than 20 Explorers Club expeditions,

and this one could be a lifesaver.

An estimated 25,000 asteroids roam our solar system

that are big enough to obliterate a city.

But 70% of them remain undetected.

Using a grant from Discovery,

former astronaut Dr. Ed Lu is tackling that problem

by mapping every single space rock he can find.

His map sounds like the stuff of science fiction,

but it could help predict impending impacts early enough to take action,

allowing ample time to deflect the asteroid away from Earth.

NASA will test its latest planet-sparing technology in October of 2022

by crashing a half-ton spacecraft called "DART"

into an asteroid 7,000,000 miles from Earth

at nearly 15,000 miles per hour.

If humanity doesn't wanna go the way of the dinosaur,

Dr. Lu's map might just show us the way.

Jeff Bezos and the crew of the Seabird Worker had done the impossible.

After scouring the ocean floor on two expeditions,

they'd finally located several of Apollo 11's lost F1 rocket engines.

But retrieving them would prove to be the hardest part.

While Bezos watches on a screen aboard ship,

the ROV uses a robotic arm equipped with a blower

to carefully clear the area around the engines of sediment,

before attaching hooks and lifting the mangled metal out of the mud.

The whole mission depends on this working.

It's like trying to knit with boxing gloves.

It takes several tries,

but they're finally successful.

That's beautiful.

[Josh] Bezos compares the ROV's buoyancy

while manipulating the massive engine

-to working in microgravity. -[crew cheering]

[Josh] It all leads back to space.

The powerful ROV carefully deposits pieces of the 18,500-pound engines

into a large wading basket,

careful not to entangle its critical tethers with the container's lines,

before theSeabed Worker raises it up

and into the light of day.

[crew cheering]

[Josh] But are these engines actually from Apollo 11?

Bezos and his team can't be sure.

Decades on the ocean floor have obscured the serial numbers.

They may be from any of a baker's dozen of Saturn V launches.

That's where Rory Golden comes in.

He's the explorer who discovered the brass ship's wheel on theTitanic.

Bezos asks him to give the engines a look over.

Armed with a black light and a magnifying glass,

Golden is able to make out the faintest remnants of an ID number.

They have a side engine of Apollo 11's first stage.

Their mission is accomplished.

Bezos wanted the engines to be preserved for all to see,

and both are now on permanent display

at the Seattle Museum of Flight.

Bezos really wanted those Saturn V engines.

Yeah, to go and get those pieces that were missing,

-that belong in museums, really. -Yeah.

It's a lot of history and a lot of nostalgia.

I think it's a great way to pay tribute

to the hard work of the men and women who made that possible.

Bezos has his sights and his considerable resources

set on inspiring the next generation of explorers.

In 2000, he founds Blue Origin,

a privately-held space flight manufacturing and services company.

Blue Origin continues to turn civilians into astronauts

and hopes to eventually return us to the surface of the Moon.

But like all entrepreneurs, Bezos has competition.

Fellow Club member Elon Musk has his own vision for the future,

one that leads all the way to the Red Planet.

In 2014, at an Explorers Club black-tie event,

SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk

accepts the President's Award for exploration and technology.

[crowd applauding and cheering]

[Josh] Musk's SpaceX is undeniably the commercial space flight leader.

Their Falcon 9 rockets shuttle both supplies and astronauts

to and from the International Space Station,

a capability that at this time,

even NASA doesn't possess.

But Musk is dreaming bigger.

While the SpaceX human landing system

will help ferry astronauts to and from the Moon,

Mars is where Musk wants to take humanity.

SpaceX's founding ethos is to make humans multiplanetary.

Space, according to Captain Kirk, is the final frontier,

which makes you wonder,

how far can Explorers Club members Bezos and Musk push that frontier's limits?

But that's the thing about space,

it's right there in the name.

It's limitless,

filled with unimaginable mysteries and adventure.

And for members of the Explorers Club,

there's infinitely more out there left to discover.