For a tiny community more used to spotting red crabs than spacecraft, or the occasional piece of space junk on the tideline, this week has been anything but ordinary. A hulking piece of space hardware has been sitting just off the coast, and locals can’t stop talking about it.
It’s actually Ship 40, a 52-metre Star ship upper-stage launched at SpaceX’s Star base site in Texas last July 24th. But rather than burn up or sink after the flight, the rocket landed in the Indian Ocean under control, and went bobbing for more than three weeks on the swell while the recovery crew made their way to retrieve it.
How a Routine Test Flight Ended Up Near Christmas Island
Ship 40’s mission was never meant to end anywhere near Australian waters. It flew as the upper stage on Starship’s thirteenth full test flight, deploying a batch of next-generation Starlink satellites before attempting a landing burn over the ocean. What made this flight different is that the vehicle stayed in one piece and kept floating instead of disappearing beneath the waves, as earlier test vehicles had done.
That buoyancy handed the company an unusual opportunity. Rather than writing the vehicle off, the company sent recovery ships out to try towing it back to shore, something it had never attempted with a Starship before. The tow was slow going. Rough seas and stubborn currents in the open Indian Ocean repeatedly slowed progress, and at one point Elon Musk himself admitted on social media that the recovery wasn’t looking promising. Engineers, he said, had at least managed to photograph the heat shield and engines up close for future design tweaks.
Roughly 24 days after launch, the tow finally paid off, with the SpaceX recovery fleet guiding the spacecraft into the sheltered waters near Christmas Island.
Locals Flock to the Coastline for a Glimpse
The sight was quite different altogether, Christmas Island Tourism Association chair David Watchorn said, saying it was an “almost surreal experience” to see a real spaceship in an area he has known for years sitting right off the shoreline. Though most boats stayed at a distance from the recovery effort in the exclusion zone, the local people scrambled onto the dock as soon as they could, waiting just a few minutes for the boats to launch, even the relatively intact space junk could be a menace close to home.
Cafe owner Rachel Kucera said her customers had not been able to talk about anything else, joking that no one on the island had anticipated to see a rocket fly past their morning coffee. Local wildlife photographer Chris Bray, normally more interested in the island’s famous crabs than orbital hardware, said the SpaceX vessel had genuinely become the talk of the town, with people driving to every vantage point they could find just to snap a photo.
The Australian Space Agency Steps In
Recovery has been planned in close consultation with Canberra, behind the scenes. Once the vehicle had passed into international waters near the territory, the Australian Space Agency confirmed the federal government was also working with SpaceX and that any questions regarding what happens to it next – such as plans to eventually send the vehicle back to the United States – would have to come from SpaceX.
Getting a 52-metre spacecraft from a remote Indian Ocean outpost back to a Texas launch site is no small logistical puzzle, and the Australian Space Agency has said there’s no confirmed timeline yet for the next stage of the journey.
Why Space Junk Keeps Washing Up in Australia
This isn’t the first time debris from orbit has turned up on Australian shores, and experts say it won’t be the last. Flinders University space archaeologist Alice Gorman has pointed out that as the pace of global launches accelerates; the Southern Hemisphere is increasingly likely to catch more falling space junk than the north, largely thanks to Australia’s vast coastline and sparse population.
With global launch numbers climbing into the thousands annually, up from just a few hundred less than a decade ago, incidents like the one unfolding off Christmas Island may soon feel a lot less unusual, and Christmas Island itself may not be the last remote outpost to host a stray piece of falling hardware. For now, though, the tiny territory is enjoying its moment as the unlikely backdrop to one of SpaceX’s most ambitious recovery efforts yet.