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Posted on 08/11/2026 8:06:29 AM PDT by House Atreides
SpaceX is trying to bring a Starship upper stage back to shore for post-flight inspection, but it's not going so well.
It’s been more than two weeks since SpaceX’s Starship splashed down in the Indian Ocean following a largely successful thirteenth flight test. As of Friday, the recovery team was still working to bring the upper stage, known as “Ship,” back to shore, but in a post on X, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said it was “not looking good.”
It’s unclear if the team made any headway over the weekend. If SpaceX chooses to abandon Ship (no pun intended), it will forfeit a first-ever post-flight inspection that would help engineers improve the rocket and progress toward rapid reusability. However, Musk noted that teams have been able to “obtain close-up photos of critical regions of the heat shield and engines for future upgrades” while the upper stage remains adrift.
The recovery team is now working to bring Ship to shore in Western Australia so engineers can conduct a thorough post-flight inspection, but according to SpaceX, it has been struggling to overcome “challenging conditions and increasingly rough seas.”
Towing the biggest spacecraft ever built into port is no easy feat even in the best conditions. The Starship V3 upper stage stands 171 feet (52 meters) tall and weighs hundreds of thousands of pounds.
If Ship 40 joins its predecessors in a watery grave, the opportunity to closely examine an intact upper stage after splashdown will slip away, too. But with the spacecraft bobbing in the ocean, SpaceX personnel have had plenty of time to photograph the heat shield and engines, so they’ve already obtained more post-flight data than usual.
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmodo.com ...
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IMHO, if SpaceX decides to not recover it they should certainly contract to have it “blown to smithereens”.
They won’t leave it floating.
$100 fine for littering
Thank God biden isn’t still soiling the WH.
Remember how he made Elon show data on how spacex impacted sharks?
Who knows what crap he’d try to pull with this. SMH
It is a drift because it is so fabulously and solidly built!
However, I’m sure that seawater is finding its way in in someway, and towing it is probably a real challenge. They probably don’t have the equipment to lift the thing out and put it on an ocean going barge of some kind, so they have to tow it.
Pretty amazing though that it is still afloat. The engineering is just remarkable.
The big wigs call it an “artificial reef”, and take a tax deduction for saving Mother Earf.
Musk should buy the Glomar Explorer “research vessel” if it still exists. Seems like it would be perfect for the job.
The Indian Ocean will have a say in that.
SpaceX reported late last week that the weather was deteriorating, and that heavy seas made recovery unlikely.
Sent to a Chinese ship scrapper in 2015.
The reason they’re having trouble towing Ship right now, and looking like they’re zig-zagging all over the Indian Ocean, is that with rough seas and high winds, they can only tow INTO the wind. Not with a crosswind or a trailing wind.
Otherwise Ship gets wrapped around the tow ship
They’re towing it to Australia by the engine part not the nose so it’s slow going
Glomar Explorer was converted to a drilling ship, operated for approx. 18 yrs. Scrapped in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer
For an organization known for planning ahead, how did recovering an intact ship fall through the ceacks?
You learn more from your failures than you do from your successes.
That makes sense! I know from history (particularly WWI naval history) that towing ships on the open seas is a very tricky thing.
Great band, I think the singer guitarist has passed though.
Not to mention some ship running into it.
Sal Mercagliano is a guy I learned about during the Key Bridge fiasco in Baltimordor. He’s a serious shipping and maritime expert. Holds an unlimited captain’s license, is now a maritime history professor at a university, and has a great YouTube channel he does called What’s Going On With Shipping?
Here is his recent X post on SpaceX Ship.
https://x.com/mercoglianos/status/2087209834319925358?s=20
Sal Mercogliano (WGOW Shipping) 🚢⚓🐪🚒🏴☠️
@mercoglianos
🚀STARSHIP40🚀
▶️Over the past 3 days, Normand Ranger and STARSHIP appear to be heading to Christmas Island, just south of Java
▶️Because of the unique arrangement of this tow - basically a string of fenders looped around STARSHIP - progress has been slow and weather dependent.
▶️Go Australis is on location
▶️Not a lot of infrastructure on Christmas Island to handle a marine salvage but they can potentially get it into a sheltered area to facilitate a recovery.
▶️Weather is an issue with winds at 20 knots from the SE, with a swelling of 2 meters and waves of 3.4M.
I believe this was the flight that deliberately expended its fuel in space to go suborbital and crash in the Indian Ocean. It was to likely sink, but didn’t. Valuable data could be (and is being) taken from what remains.
I expect they will try to recover it, and will give up if it costs more than the information is worth. Sort of like the ending of “THX 1138”, who lives only due to cost overruns.
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