---
title: 'How SpaceX Recovered Starship V3 Just Surprised NASA Scientists...'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=2Y8Epb2QD7Q'
video_id: '2Y8Epb2QD7Q'
date: 2026-08-03
duration_sec: 696
---

# How SpaceX Recovered Starship V3 Just Surprised NASA Scientists...

> Source: [How SpaceX Recovered Starship V3 Just Surprised NASA Scientists...](https://youtube.com/watch?v=2Y8Epb2QD7Q)

## Summary

The video discusses SpaceX's recovery of Starship Ship 40 after its ocean splashdown, contrasting it with NASA's practice of discarding RS-25 engines. It explores the technical and logistical challenges of recovering the vehicle, the value of the heat shield data, and the historical irony of NASA's past ocean recovery expertise.

### Key Points

- **NASA vs SpaceX Recovery Philosophy** [00:06] — NASA discards RS-25 engines worth half a billion dollars with the SLS core stage, while SpaceX attempts to recover a cheaper experimental spacecraft, highlighting differing approaches to reusability.
- **Ship 40's Condition** [00:32] — Ship 40 is intact, floating in the Indian Ocean with all six engines attached, and is being monitored by the vessel Go Australis.
- **Recovery Challenges** [01:25] — The vehicle is thousands of miles from Starbase, and towing a 50-meter, 100-ton stainless steel structure with trapped seawater is complex and risky.
- **Potential Recovery Location** [02:47] — The likely plan is to tow Ship 40 to an Australian port, with precedent from 2023 talks about recovering Starship on Australian soil, though legal hurdles exist.
- **Primary Recovery Goal: Heat Shield** [04:08] — The most valuable data is the heat shield's performance, as Ship 40 endured higher dynamic pressure than any previous Starship, with instrumented tiles and cameras.
- **Why Physical Recovery Matters** [05:18] — Cameras can show where tiles failed but not why; physical inspection is needed to understand failure causes and determine turnaround time for reusability.
- **Time Pressure** [06:31] — Batteries and corrosion limit the window for recovery; seawater damages engines and electronics, while the heat shield remains intact.
- **Alternative: Partial Recovery** [07:12] — If full towing is impossible, divers could cut away representative heat shield sections for analysis, which may be more valuable than the whole hull.
- **Comparison to Deadliest Catch and Apollo 13** [07:39] — Kiko Donchev likens the effort to a mix of Deadliest Catch (offshore team) and Apollo 13 (ground team improvising solutions), highlighting the improvisational nature.
- **NASA's Historical Ocean Recovery Expertise** [08:48] — During the shuttle era, NASA routinely recovered solid rocket boosters from the Atlantic using purpose-built ships and trained crews, engineering the surprise out of recovery.
- **NASA's Current Disposable Approach** [09:43] — SLS uses four RS-25 engines that are discarded after one flight, despite their proven reusability from shuttle missions, representing a stark contrast to SpaceX's recovery effort.

### Conclusion

The video underscores the irony that NASA, once a master of ocean recovery, now discards reusable engines, while SpaceX, which didn't plan to recover Ship 40, is going to great lengths to retrieve it for valuable heat shield data.

## Transcript

40 half a world away. NASA does not even attempt to recover roughly half a billion dollars worth of RS25 engines after discarding them with the SLS core stage. Yet Elon Musk is going all the
way for a far cheaper experimental spacecraft. So, what does ship 40 contain that makes it worth the chase? How exactly are they going to recover it? Will they really bring it all the way back to Starbase? Let's break it
down. Wow, would you look at that? These are the latest close-up footage of ship 40. It's still intact and it still looks absolutely stunning out there in the middle of the Indian Ocean. SpaceX calls the upper stage a ship. Nobody expected
that to become a technical description. But for most of the past week, that is exactly what ship 40 has been. Floating in the Indian Ocean and doing the one thing a real ship is supposed to do. It even still has all six engines attached.
Otherwise, I assume SpaceX would have just lit them and flown it home. I'm kidding, mostly. The serious part is that SpaceX genuinely wants this vehicle
back. As long as ship 40 remains afloat and continues reporting its location, the recovery team knows where to find it. The problem is that it is sitting thousands of miles from Starbase. That led to a darker prediction. SpaceX could
approach the vehicle, attach an explosive charge, and send the entire into a shipping lane or fell into someone else's hands. A Viking funeral for a rocket that refused to sink on schedule. But Elon Musk quickly killed
We're sending a ship out to recover Starship. And SpaceX already had a vessel nearby. Go Australis has been following ship 40 for days with photos showing at least eight people aboard. But being close to the vehicle and being
ready to bring it home are two very different things. So far the vessel appears to be monitoring Ship 40, collecting information, and waiting for a workable recovery plan. Because this is nothing like towing a disabled
fishing boat. Imagine trying to reel in a 50-m stainless steel whale weighing roughly 100 tons dry before adding whatever seawater may now be trapped inside it. Go Australis can support divers, remain close to the vehicle, and
does not appear to carry the kind of intact Starship on its deck. A full recovery could require crews to work beside the vehicle, secure towing lines to a scorched rocket with six engines
still hanging from the back, and trust that its structure remains strong enough to survive the journey. But, getting a line around Ship 40 only solves the first problem. The much bigger question is where they tow it. Back to Starbase?
is where they tow it. Back to Starbase? No. No. No. The vehicle is sitting about 800 mi off Australia's nearest coast. So, the likely move is to lean on Australian authorities to help bring it ashore. And there's precedent. Two years
ago, on July 30th, Reuters reported that SpaceX was in talks with US and Australian officials to launch Starship from Texas, land it in the sea off Australia, and recover it on Australian soil. The biggest obstacle wasn't
technical, it was legal. Getting the US to loosen export controls on sensitive space technology before an American rocket could be brought ashore in a foreign country. The ideal plan was to tow Starship to a nearby port on
Australia's western or northern coast, with the exact location still under discussion. Where those talks stand today isn't clear, but the odds strongly favor Ship 40 ending up on an Australian beach. More than likely, SpaceX will
also send out a larger, purpose-built vessel to grab it and drag it home. And luck is on their side here. Late July and early August off northwest Australia sits outside cyclone season. Had this happened in February, a multi-day tow
through that water might not have been on the table at all. And that matters because a Starship isn't a piece of driftwood. It's controlled American rocket technology. And even sitting in the Indian Ocean, it's still SpaceX
property. But here's the thing, the most important data already went up to Starlink and got saved. So, what is SpaceX actually trying to recover? Not the software, the hardware, but which part exactly? Do you already know? Drop
your answer in the comments before I reveal it. It's the physical hardware, right after it tore through the atmosphere at over Mach 20. That's right, the heat shield on Ship 40's belly. Starship is covered in roughly
18,000 hexagonal ceramic tiles, forming the heat shield that protects the steel skin during re-entry. This isn't just a heat-resistant coating. It may be the biggest obstacle left between today's Starship and a ship that can truly land,
refuel, and fly again on a short turnaround. And on flight 13, SpaceX didn't go easy on it. Ship 40 took higher dynamic pressure during ascent than any Starship before it. Some tiles carried load sensors. Six Starlink V3
satellites carried cameras to scan the heat shield from outside, while some tiles were painted white to simulate missing tile spots and act as visual targets. Simply put, SpaceX turned the whole flight into one massive endurance
test. They watched almost all of it happen. But seeing a tile fail and understanding why it failed are two completely different things. A camera can tell SpaceX where a tile came off. It can't tell them on its own whether
the cause was the tile, the retention pin, the material underneath, or the hole's curvature at that exact spot. It's like the check engine light coming problem, but to find out if it's a loose bolt, a cracked line, or an overheated
part, eventually you have to open the hood. Ship 40 is the chance to open that hood. Engineers can measure how much material was lost along each tile's edge. They can lift a scorched section to see how deep the hot gas got. They
can compare two tiles side by side, one intact, one damaged, and find the difference a camera could never see. Was it the adhesive, the retention mechanism, the ablative liner underneath, or did the plasma
hole's shape? And every one of those answers feeds the question that actually matters. After a flight, does SpaceX just swap a few tiles and fly again? Or and pull thousands of tiles off over weeks? That's the line between a rocket
that's reusable and a rocket that's reusable fast enough to matter, which is why time is the enemy here, and not just the obvious clock. How long Ship 40's batteries keep transmitting? There's a second one. The ceramic tiles can shrug
off seawater, but the engines, the electronics, the connectors are corroding a little more with every hour they soak. Each passing day, the heat shield keeps its answers, and the rest of the ship quietly loses its own. So,
if towing the whole vehicle back proves too dangerous or too complex, there's another option. The recovery team could survey Ship 40 offshore, divers and cameras documenting its condition, then cut away a few critical pieces,
representative tile sections, the liner underneath, some connectors. It wouldn't make for an impressive artifact in the rocket garden back at Starbase, but in engineering terms, a few well-chosen square meters of heat shield can be
worth more than dragging an entire scorched hull home. And this is where a line from inside SpaceX makes the whole thing more interesting. Kiko Donchev, who runs SpaceX's launch operations, called the recovery effort a cross
between Deadliest Catch and Apollo 13. It sounds dramatic, but the comparison is sharper than it looks. Deadliest Catch is the team offshore. Sailors and engineers working through waves, wind, and shifting weather next to a vehicle
far bigger than their own ship. The Apollo 13 part isn't ship 40. It's the team on land. When an oxygen tank exploded aboard Apollo 13, NASA had no procedure for bringing the crew home. Mission Control had to invent and test
solutions in real time using only the hardware already aboard while power, water, and oxygen ran down. That's what SpaceX is doing now, minus the human lives. A small crew is dealing with ship 40 at sea. Behind them, teams for
weather, structures, materials, and logistics are analyzing the situation and deciding the next move. There was no rehearsed plan for pulling an intact Starship out of the Indian Ocean because ship 40 was supposed to splash down and
disappear. Instead, it floated. So, SpaceX is writing the recovery plan And here's where that comparison gets uncomfortable for NASA because NASA once
understood ocean recovery better than almost anyone alive. Through the entire shuttle era, two solid rocket boosters fell into the Atlantic after every single launch. NASA sent purpose-built ships to retrieve them. Divers went into
the water, plugged the nozzles, forced the seawater out, tipped the boosters horizontal, and towed them home to Cape Canaveral. Hundreds of times, the boosters were designed to float. The ships were designed to catch them. The
crews trained the same operation over and over. NASA didn't improvise recovery. It engineered the surprise out of it. Next to that, SpaceX's operation of it. Next to that, SpaceX's operation around ship 40 looks almost crude. No
dedicated recovery vessel, no rehearsed procedure, no equipment built for this exact job, just a vehicle that outlived expectations and a team scrambling to exploit it before the seawater eats the evidence. So, on recovery experience
alone, shuttle era NASA wins in a landslide, which is exactly what makes NASA's position today so humiliating. The space shuttle carried three RS-25 engines. They came home with the orbiter, got inspected, serviced, and
flew again. SLS uses four engines from that same family, but now they don't come home. They burn for a little over eight minutes, fall into the ocean with the core stage, and are gone after a single flight. Here's the part that
should make your jaw drop. The four engines on Artemis Y had already flown 25 shuttle missions between them. 25 round trips. Engines that had proven, again and again, that they could survive re-entry, come home, and fly again.
Bolted onto SLS and deliberately dropped into the Atlantic. And this isn't NASA just burning through old inventory. New RS-25s are being built for future flights. Redesigned to be simpler and cheaper because they're now meant to be
thrown away. Think about what that means. NASA took one of the most flight-proven reusable engines in history and re-engineered it to be disposable for one of the most expensive rockets ever flown. That's the real
humiliation, not that NASA's engineers forgot how to recover rockets. History proves they were the best in the world at it. It's that NASA once had the ships, the procedures, the hardware, and the experience to reuse the crown jewels
of rocket propulsion, and its flagship rocket today is designed to sink them. Meanwhile, SpaceX never planned to recover Ship 40 at all. The prototype out there would mean abandoning priceless engineering evidence. So, they
sent a ship, and that's the whole story in one image. NASA loses four irreplaceable engines because SLS worked exactly as designed. SpaceX is chasing a rocket across an ocean because ship 40 worked better than it had to.