Documentary — Azorian: The Raising Of The K-129

The documentary movie I found on Amazon Prime is the spectacular engineering and intelligence story of the CIA project in the early 1970’s building and employing the Hughes Glomar Explorer ship to raise parts of the sunken Soviet submarine K-129 16500 feet down in the Nothern Pacific Ocean. Wenching up 7500 tons (15,000,000 lbs.) from that depth was and is remarkable. The project required invention of innovative devices on a massive scale at unimaginable depths all while maintaining secrecy over a 40 month timescale...a true saga. The documentary concentrates on the engineering and engineers in a step by step account of the process, it’s successes & failures.

If you have access to Amazon Prime video and have an interest in great engineering feats (and can stand some overblown music tract), I think you will like the time invested for this one, while you are in sequestration dodging a virus.

Very very interesting---thank you!

I was interested by many of the comments made by the engineers, one of which dealt with the reality of the scale of what they were working on didn't fully internalize until he actually saw the ship. I have had that same experience twice in my career, the first was the assembly building at the Cape and the other was the first maintenance hanger for the C5A in VA. Somehow converting the drawings into reality missed the mark on those cases.