( CNN ) -- Just days after `` Titanic '' director James Cameron traveled to the bottom of the sea , another wealthy adventurer has announced a spectacular deep ocean discovery . Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has unveiled plans to recover the F-1 engines that powered the Saturn V rocket carrying Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 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 , '' the billionaire investor and entrepreneur wrote . `` We do n't know yet what condition these engines might be in ; they hit the ocean at high velocity and have been in saltwater for more than 40 years , '' said Bezos . `` On the other hand , they 're made of tough stuff , so we 'll see . '' Bezos said that watching that original mission as a 5-year-old in 1969 inspired him to dream big , and now he wants to undertake the huge challenge of pulling the engines up . Each of the engines weighs nearly 9 tons , and they came in a cluster of five . They provided 32 million horsepower by burning 6,000 pounds of fuel every second , and the five together put the largest rocket in history 38 miles up in under three minutes . After doing their work , the rockets plummeted into the ocean , where they have been undiscovered for four decades . NASA had some clues as to where they landed , and a piece of the debris landed on a German merchant ship , providing more clues . Robert Pearlman , a space memorabilia expert who runs CollectSpace.com , said there were a total of 65 of these engines launched . He said if the engines are able to be brought to the surface and a serial number can be found , it would be easy to authenticate the find . But bringing them up will be a challenge . `` If all five are still clumped together , it will be like trying to bring up the big part of the Titanic , '' Pearlman said . Still , it 's not the first time a lost piece of the space race era has been found . NASA 's Mercury 7 space capsule piloted by Gus Grissom was found and recovered in 1999 . It 's just the latest instance of a well-financed businessman making a big splash discovery or extreme feat . Just this week James Cameron took a solo dive to the deepest part of the ocean , while Sir Richard Branson used millions to fund his attempts to travel around the globe in a balloon . Pearlman said Bezos ' announcement came as a complete surprise to the space memorabilia world . `` But that fits into the way he does business , '' Pearlman said , noting Bezos ' other venture into space flight , Blue Origins , which aims to make human space flight cheaper and easier . `` Bezos and that Blue Origins have always played their cards very close to their chest and often do n't share their milestones until after they have succeeded . '' But profits do n't seem to be behind Bezos ' quest to find the F-1 engines . The rocket engines remain property of NASA and the U.S. government , and Bezos wrote that he would like to pull the engines to the surface and then have NASA put them on display at a museum in Seattle . The Saturn V engines could be priceless historically , but hard to put a cash value on . Pearlman noted that the highest price paid for a piece of space memorabilia was $ 2 million , paid by a Russian investor for a Soviet-era Vostok rocket . `` It 's hard to imagine getting two investors to get in a bidding war at auction over them , '' said Pearlman . `` Components have sold for thousands of dollars , but they were all spare parts . But you have to have pretty deep pockets and a very big space to put something like this on display and maintain it . ''
Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos wants to recover engines that propelled Apollo 11 . Each Saturn V engine weighs nearly 9 tons , and they came in a cluster of five . Rockets have been underwater since Apollo 11 went to the moon in 1969 .