The Saturn V rocket boosters that sent the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon were incredible machines: immense in scale, mind-bogglingly complex in design, more powerful than any vehicle built before or since. If you don’t believe that particular superlative, here are some stats that might convince you: the F1 engine developed for the Saturns produced 1.5 million pounds of thrust, which amounts to 32 million horsepower. Compare that to my ’03 Mustang, a fairly peppy little ride on a meager 300 horses. And the Saturn V’s first stage, the one that actually lifted the whole stack off the ground and hurled it into the sky, was driven by five F1s. Think of it this way: The Saturns were gigantic, rampaging beasts harnessed and tamed to suit the dreams of we puny humans.

Sadly, there are only three of these Titans remaining, birds intended for the Moon that had their wings clipped when the Nixon administration shut down the Apollo program prematurely. They now stand — or, more accurately, lay, since they’re so huge, they’re more conveniently displayed horizontally — at Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers, and at the Huntsville Space and Rocket Center, all taxidermied examples of an extinct species. And remember, those are rockets that never got the chance to go anywhere. There are no examples of used Saturn V hardware on display anywhere in the world. The Saturns were never meant to return home after their one glorious flight. Their first stages fell into the Pacific Ocean; their second stages burned up when they re-entered Earth’s atmosphere; and the third stages that flung the Apollo capsules moonward were directed to either hit the Moon themselves, or were thrown out into space to get them out of the way. Unlike the Apollo command modules (two of which I’ve seen in person, including Apollo 11’s Columbia capsule, i.e., the one Neil Armstrong was on), you can’t stand in any museum in the world and look upon a Saturn that’s done its job and come back to tell us about it.

Not yet anyway. But maybe in a year or two…

An expedition financed by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com and the spaceflight company Blue Origin — a friendly competitor to SpaceX — has found and recovered two mission-flown Saturn V F1 engines from three miles down in the Atlantic:

Bezos was aboard the salvage ship Seabed Worker during the search and recovery operation, and he describes a underwater graveyard of Saturn components, “an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end.” The two units brought up by the team are rusty, shattered hulks, as you can see in the photo above, but Bezos’ intent is to restore them and get them into museums — the Smithsonian and Seattle’s Museum of Flight have been mentioned — where the hardware can “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.”

Naturally, this being the age of cynical pragmatists with no sense of wonder, I’m seeing snarky online comments from people asking “why?” and “what’s the point?” and “couldn’t he have spent his money on something more useful?” (as if inspiring wonder in our children isn’t something useful). This attitude makes my eyelid twitch.

Look, it’s true… there probably isn’t any practical benefit to raising these things. I kind of doubt, for example, that they can provide any useful new information about how they performed or what stresses they were subjected to, at least not after 40-some years on the bottom of the ocean. I’m pretty sure the designers of the next generation of heavy-lift rockets have complete technical data on those engines already. But does everything we do these days have to carry a practical benefit, or a material return on investment, i.e., make a profit? With that attitude, why not just close the fricking Smithsonian right now? What’s the point of keeping all those dusty old planes, spacecraft, and machines when they could be recycled into toasters or something? (That actually happened to the vast majority of those majestic World War II bombers I love so much after they came home; the reason there’s only one airworthy B-24 Liberator left in the entire world isn’t because they were all shot down.) Isn’t it enough sometimes to simply do a thing because it’s neat, or because we want to? Isn’t it worth saving pieces of history simply because they’re interesting, or because they were part of something big? I don’t know… maybe it’s not. Maybe I’m weird. I’ve been called worse. But I know that I personally derive great value from being face to face with artifacts like this. It helps me establish a connection with the past. It makes events from the past feel real to me. And maybe that’s what kids these days — people in general — really need. To know that once this country reached for the stars and tried to do big things, and we succeeded. It wasn’t a hoax. It wasn’t boring. It was fire and ice and drama and risk and adventure and exploration. And all of that is still there for the taking, if we have the will to try for it again. Don’t tell me we can’t go back to the Moon, or on to Mars. Don’t tell me we can’t find better sources of energy, or figure out how to adapt to climate change (sorry, I don’t believe we can undo that one… it’s coming, and we’d better figure out how to live with it), or even find a way to make universal healthcare work. Once upon a time, we believed as a nation we could do anything we set our minds to. And who knows, maybe some kid might someday see these battered old relics, these formerly burning hearts of a spaceship that went to the frickin’ Moon, and believe that again, and find a way to solve those problems. It’s possible.

In any event, it’s Jeff Bezos’ money. Better he do something like this than stuff it all in some bank in the Caymans, or buy a sixth mansion or another Lambourghini or some damn extravagance like that. At least he’s pouring it into something that excites him and that he believes in. I believe in it, too.

If you’d like to read more about the F1 engines, NASA has an official statement here.

And on a somewhat related topic — okay, it’s not all that related, but it is about space stuff — The Atlantic has posted a pretty interesting interview with Eric Anderson, the co-founder of Planetary Resources. He talks about asteroid mining and settling Mars, and reasons why people might do both, and reasons why he thinks both are inevitable. And going to happen relatively soon, like soon enough that this fortysomething space nerd might actually live to see it. He makes some pretty heady predictions about the human future in space. People have been doing that my whole life, of course, but I really want to believe something might come of it this time. Guys like Anderson, and Bezos, and Elon Musk of SpaceX are pretty convincing. And I enjoy getting excited about this stuff again… not much else really seems to do that trick for me anymore…