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Comment by eco | Hacker News Reader

No doubt it would be very useful to recover. SpaceX isn't the only one who could pluck it out of the Indian ocean though. You don't want to leave a prototype for the most advanced Spacecraft ever made just sitting around for competitors to grab (most notably China which is currently speed running SpaceX-like designs).

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Yep this will be the reason. And lets not forget that Bezos was able to find and recover the Apollo 11 Saturn V engines from point nemo. If that was relatively simple you can bet plucking a freshly dropped entire starship from the indian ocean would be a doddle, especially when sat views likely show exactly where it landed.

I'm fairly certain the Apollo first stage engines were recovered from a location relatively close to Florida/Bahamas, just east of the launch site. Not point nemo.

That is correct, off FL. The recovered engines were from the first stage they would never have made it half way around the world. Point Nemo is used to stash spacecraft that were in orbit.

It landed right next to their own camera-bearing buoy. You can bet their own recovery ship was right nearby. And with access to radio control too. Likely with a couple US military ships on hand too.

I certainly hope so. Ocean are polluted enough and although such a ship is just a, well, drop in the ocean, the ideq of accepting to pollute more is unbearable to me, especially for a world class company like SpaceX...

Other than some electronics it's actually pretty clean vehicle - methane will gas off, steel will quickly disintegrate in water, there isn't tons of plastic or paint.

Looking at the composition of the ship, it won't be polluting the ocean much. No people on board to produce trash etc., mostly just plain stainless steel and a bit of ceramics that will make great hiding spot for the abyssal fish for a few years.

It might not be that simple - I've read an article how they recovered one of the solid rocket boosters from the first successful Ariane 5 flight to check all was fine. IIRC it was a slog, they had to tow it back very very slowly, avoid it sinking, fighting all kinds of weather and tow line issues, etc. Have not found the article, but there is a picture how it looked like[0].

With Starship it could have been similar & possibly worse given the size and more complex shape (various voids that might fill/drain & the thing is not really built for floating). Also you are in the middle of an ocean (Indian in this case) with potential for all kinds of weather on the way. Towing might again be very slow, so you might need to stage a massive submersible transport ship or something similar to make a recovery successful. And then the thing might still tip over and explode anyway - meaning all this was in vain.

I think is most likely they won't bother and instead just stream as much data as possible over Starlink in real time (or heck, even via WiFi once the buoy is in range) for analysis. They want to catch the shop eventually anyway, so manual post flight analysis will wait.

They can now check all over the first recovered booster anyway. :)

[0] https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/3700131835

But, couldn't they wait for like, 6 hours? Take a good look when it's cooled down a bit. Send some drones over to film it, and then sink it?

I get that towing is probably too expensive for what it's worth. But I'm surprised they don't even go pick up some tiles before kablooing it.

Attach a tether to one of the fin pods, then blow up the rest to sink it cleanly and bring back the important part.

Possible yes but still, this is a prototype with new fin configuration, materials and lots of detail to be understood from inspecting it in detail. An inspection would be very useful.

At the same time, this is SpaceX and they have a few others ready to launch already. Perhaps they indeed can keep it somewhat coarse and wait for detailed inspection until one of them makes it right back to solid ground?

You wouldn't need to tow it; if you really wanted to you could use one of those deep see platform recovery ships that sink themselves. The rocket is big but it's tiny compared to ocean-going vessels.

The previous ship did not come down where it was supposed to. I don't think they wanted humans anywhere near where it was coming down, at least until they can reliably do pinpoint landings. Even the Falcon 9, as accurate as it is, doesn't have humans anywhere near the landing location.

Also a yacht of a fishing boat could run into it in the night and sink - eq it could become an unmarked floating hazard.

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