NASA is reigniting its mighty moon rocket engine using parts retrieved from museums and displays.

Engineers working this month at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., are completing a series of test firings using recovered components from 40-year-old F-1 engines. The 19-foot-tall (5.8 meter) by 12-foot-wide (3.8 meter) Apollo powerhouses launched the space agency's Saturn V rockets on voyages to Earth orbit and to the moon.

Between 1967 and 1973, a total of 65 F-1 engines were launched, five per flight, on 13 Saturn V boosters.

To develop the Space Launch System (SLS), NASA's next generation heavy-lift rocket, engineers are dissecting, refurbishing and re-firing components from the remaining F-1s to gain a better understanding of how the engine was designed and worked. Even four decades later, the F-1 is still the most powerful single-chamber liquid-fueled rocket engine ever developed. [Graphic: Saturn V Moon Rocket Explained]

For these tests, which included a 20-second hot fire on Jan. 10, the team removed a gas generator from an F-1 engine that was stored at Marshall and another in almost pristine condition from the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

From display stand to test stand

"Being able to hold the parts of this massive engine that once took us to the moon, restoring it, and then seeing it come back to life through hot firings and test data has been an amazing experience," Kate Estes, a NASA liquid propulsion systems engineer, said in an agency release.

The team decided to take apart the gas generator, the part of the engine responsible for supplying power to drive the giant F-1's turbopump, because its component parts were small enough to be tested in Marshall's laboratories. The gas generator is often one of the first pieces designed on a new engine because it is a key part for determining the size of the final engine assembly.

Once they had the artifacts-turned-test-samples in hand, Marshall's team used a novel technique called structured light 3D scanning to produce three-dimensional computer-aided design drawings of the gas generator.

"This activity provided us with information for determining how some parts of the engine might be more affordably manufactured using modern techniques," Estes said. "We decided that using modern instrumentation to measure the generator's performance would provide beneficial [data] for NASA and industry."

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Blast from the Past: NASA Fires Historic Engine Parts for New Rocket