Our discovery
On 16 January I was at home watching Flight 7, just as I have watched all the launches to date. I could see the Starship burning brightly against the sunset skies. Suddenly I heard a loud bang, and it exploded into thousands of fragments. All burning brightly, they looked like a cluster of shooting stars. I grabbed my phone and ran outside, and started filming.
I rang my husband who was in a business meeting and told him to go look outside. I think at this stage everybody on Providenciales was outside looking up to the heavens. As the rocket fragments passed overhead they left a trail of smoke which was lit up by the setting sun. I watched this spectacular disaster arc overhead our house, not really understanding what I was witnessing. Then, as the pieces fell to earth, the rumbling started - and grew louder and louder. It sounded like thunder and lasted for a couple of minutes. Quite eerie, almost like the world was ending.
The next morning my husband found a piece of insulation in the driveway. He is an enthusiast and really wanted to find more debris. He owns a kite surfing school here, and some of his students had found a couple of full tiles on the beach. We scoured our local neighbourhood, but didn’t find any more.
The following day, Sunday 18 January, we drove to a few different places around the island we live on (Providenciales) but did not find anything. We kept seeing our friends’ Instagram stories showing debris - lots of insulation scraps, only a couple of complete heat tiles here and there - we knew there had to be more out there - but where?
My husband looked at the Starship trajectory and the weather patterns to determine where the debris was most likely to wash up.
On Wednesday 22 January, he told me he wanted to take our boat to a remote island and search the beach for debris. The trip takes an hour from our island. He left at 6 AM and since there is no cell coverage out there, I didn’t hear from him for hours. Then, a message: “The search has gone very well.” And a video of what looked like a lot of rubbish in our boat.
On this island, West Caicos, there are almost no inhabitants. The beach on the eastern side (highlighted in red) is about 4 miles long. My husband walked every foot of that beach. He parked the boat, got out, walked, collected, and returned whatever he found to the boat before moving further along the beach, parking and repeating the process. Not an easy task, but as it turned out, very much worth it. He used old packing crates and buckets that had washed up on shore to carry everything back. Each piece totally unique, with its own story to tell.
As he was leaving to come home, he noticed a piece of metal floating in the water near the boat. The best find of all: a piece of the spacecraft fuselage.
He went back 2 days later to recover more. His footprints were still the only footprints on the beach.
Out of the approximate 18,500 tiles that were on this Starship, we found 141 intact, and approximately 200 fragments.
The heat shield is designed to protect the spacecraft from temperatures exceeding 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. You can only imagine how hot they must have been to melt, as you can see in some of the samples.
Thanks for sharing in our excitement of this historical event. Other tiles you’ll see for sale on eBay from other flights have detached during launch. These tiles have been to space, survived an explosion and re-entry, been carried by currents and tides, to end up in your hands. Certainly a once in a lifetime event. Enjoy.
