The fascination with really powerful engines seems to be universal. No engine made by man has been more powerful than the F-1, and only about 70 were ever made. Only 2 or 3 survive, none in running condition. Those are the conditions that drive enthusiasts nuts when they have the opportunity to get their hands on one. The company I work for, like Rocketdyne, got rid of their design notes from the days when they built those engines. The designers are all dead. As a result, now-days, we have to reverse-engineer the engines from back then, and it's often an eye-opener to the "young" engineers what was accomplished back then. This article describes the test firing of the Gas Generator (in my industry simply called a "GG"):
<snip>...The most notable aspect of these firings is the sheer power when the gas generator creates roughly 31,000 pounds (14,000 kilograms) of force. When the original F-1 lit up, the gas generator powered the enormous turbomachinery that pumped almost three tons of propellant each second into the thrust chamber and accelerated through the nozzle, creating an incredible 1.5 million pounds (680,000 kg) of thrust.
Modern instruments, testing and analysis improvements learned over [the past] 40 years, and digital scanning and imagery techniques are allowing us to obtain baseline data on performance and combustion stability," said Nick Case, an engineer from Marshall's propulsion systems department. "We are even gathering data not collected when the engine was tested originally in the 1960s." <end snip>
source:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/23/nasa-engine-test-parts-saturn-v-rocket-moon_n_2534361.htmlThe engines designed and built by the company I work for are still amazing to me, although that feeling isn't shared by the current management. I feel honored to have been mentored by the Engineers who built them. The current version of the company doesn't have the talent or ability to recreate those engine designs, so the skill is dying off and may never reappear. Recovering an example of a lost art from the seafloor seems like an important thing to me. Restoring it to original condition is also important when there are few original examples to be found.
It's part of our technical heritage. I would think that the value of preserving historical heritage would be obvious to TIGHAR members. It's a passion very similar to TIGHAR's interest in finding what happened to Amelia.