Starship S31's debris have returned to Australia!

All sorts of items, ranging from tiles, COPV tanks, and other components from the Starship upper stage have been brought back to shore for further analysis 🧵 A quick disclaimer. All activity and observation here took place under all proper permits and licenses, along with discussions with involved parties. Do NOT attempt operations such as this without these authorizations. All it takes is one person to ruin operations for everyone.

B11 is finally coming home 🥹 We know this has been quite awaited, despite many complications and possible conflicted interests. So here's the FULL story;

On September 17th, we noticed the marine vessel HOS Ridgewind out in the relative vicinity of the booster landing site. Following the knowledge of previous operations of this vessel off the coast, we started looking into exactly what it could be doing. We concluded that it was likely that Ridgewind was out salvaging or recovering portions of Booster 11. We know B11 suffered a catastrophic breakup following touchdown on June 6th. So the vehicle is in probably tens of thousands of fragments under the water, which, at that location(we measured with instruments, on-location) is near exactly 180ft deep (~55m).

Numerous points of evidence lead us to believe that HOS Ridgewind was directly related to the recovery effort. And we ended up being correct. Similarly, HOS Briarwood, the sister ship of Ridgewind, assisted Falcon 9 salvage efforts many years back following landing failures. The company that operates these vessels, Hornbeck Offshore, have had employees move from Hornbeck directly into SpaceX offshore recovery teams, upon shallow investigation of a few LinkedIn profiles. So we were pretty confident, with that, and other factors outlined in a previous thread by @mcrs987, that HOS Ridgewind might have something interesting onboard.

So, we kind of joked at first, between a few members of our team, "wouldn't it be funny if we went out to go see what they're actually doing?"

So we did.

In a kind of last-minute scramble everything was arranged a mere half an hour before we departed Port Isabel on the 18th. This is when we first began posting about the event, which, unintentionally caused some major derailment in some communities, due to people immediately jumping to conclusions. This could have been handled better on both sides, and will be taken into account for the future. We must make it clear that there was no intent on engagement bait, building hype, or anything. An unexpected situation, which will be discussed in the following parts of this statement, caused us to be unable to provide a further update following vaguely mentioning what our plan was.

The reasoning behind going now, rather than waiting for the vessel to come back to port, is due to one simple reason. They could return under nightfall. That would not be ideal for viewing what could be on the deck. Additionally, if they are actively pulling components out of the water, we would be able to observe that, before components are placed under a tarp or other means of protection.

It took around 2 hours and 20 minutes, each way, to get from Port Isabel to the HOS Ridgewind vessel. This is, unbeknownst at the time to the rest of the team still on land, is where interesting developments began. Immediately upon entering the vicinity of HOS Ridgewind, A drone approached our vessel and told us to not proceed any closer than a 1-mile (1.6km) radius exclusion zone (Ridgewind had a dive flag up.) Said drone watched our craft for a short period of time. It is interesting to note that the international guideline for diving clearance is a 300 foot (91m) exclusion zone, which is significantly smaller than the radioed 1-mile zone. This was the first major sign that something was up.

That drone kind of sold the deal further. For what purpose would a survey ship need a security drone? We (obviously) complied to their request. One interesting thing is that not even the USCG, even after consulting them after this first situation, had no idea that this salvage operation was occurring.