SpaceX has pulled some components of its Starship megarocket out of the ocean.
On Sunday evening (September 22), SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk posted the following on X: picture Water droplets and damaged rocket hardware lifted from the ocean. The damaged metal is part of the first-stage booster that flew on the most recent Starship test flight, Musk said.
He wrote that it was “like the ruins of a long-vanished civilization in the future.” Other posts A few hours later.
SpaceX is developing Starship to send people and payloads to the moon, Mars, and beyond. The vehicle consists of two stainless steel components: a massive first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 165-foot (50m) tall upper stage spacecraft called Starship or Ship.
Both stages are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, and both are powered by SpaceX’s powerful new Raptor engines (33 for the Super Heavy, six for Ship).
relevant: SpaceX’s Starship 4th flight test looks spectacular in these stunning images.
Starship, which stands 400 feet (122 m) tall when fully deployed, has had four test flights so far, all from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas. Those missions took off in April and November 2023, and in March and June of this year.
The Super Heavy, shown in the newly published photos, is from a June launch that SpaceX declared a complete success. The spacecraft reached orbital speed, and both the spacecraft and the Super Heavy survived their descent through Earth’s atmosphere and crashed into the waves. The spacecraft is in the Indian Ocean, and the Super Heavy is in the Gulf of Mexico.
But as the newly posted photos show, the landing took its toll. The Super Heavy chunk pictured here boasts 14 Raptor engines. It’s unclear whether SpaceX recovered the other 19, or if their engines are still lying on the ocean floor.
It’s also unclear why SpaceX would want to salvage the hardware from the ocean; Musk didn’t say why in his X post.
“Some SpaceX experts have speculated that SpaceX may be targeting the booster engines as part of a study to gain additional knowledge, or simply to keep them from falling into the hands of a rival company or another country,” Brandon Lingle of the San Antonio Express-News wrote in the article. Article published on Sunday.
The piece followed a group of independent filmmakers who heard about the massive heavyweight ship salvage operation taking place in the Gulf and chartered a boat to observe the operation.
SpaceX is gearing up for the fifth test flight of Starship. The company says it has been ready to fly since early August, but it likely won’t receive approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) until late November. The FAA says it needs more time to assess the potential environmental impact of the launch and review any changes SpaceX has made to the Starship vehicle and flight plan since Flight 4.
