SpaceX Moves Ship 40 Into Megabay for Heatshield Data

Image: SpaceX

Ship 40, the first Starship ever to come back to its launch site after flying, is now standing upright inside a Megabay at Starbase, Texas, where SpaceX plans to pull data from its flown heatshield, Raptor engines and avionics.

SpaceX shared the update on X Tuesday afternoon along with new photos of the vehicle parked beside three other Starships. “The first Starship to return to its launch site, Ship 40’s journey took it across air, space, and sea. Now that it is vertical alongside three other Starships in a Megabay at Starbase, it will provide first-of-its-kind data on a flown Starship heatshield, Raptor engines, avionics, and more,” the company wrote.

The post answers the question left hanging when the ship arrived. Ship 40 flew on Flight 13 on July 24 and made the program’s first intact ocean splashdown in the Indian Ocean. It was expected to sink, but it kept floating, so recovery crews towed the 171-foot vehicle to Christmas Island after 24 days adrift and engineers pulled heatshield samples there before loading it onto a heavy-lift vessel bound for Texas.

That voyage ended on October 7, when the scorched ship reached Starbase 75 days after splashdown. At the time, SpaceX had not said whether the vehicle would be studied, displayed or scrapped, and photographer Jerry Pike of NASASpaceflight noted that the long trip at sea had left it only “(mostly) intact.”

Getting hands on a flown heatshield matters because it is the piece that has given Starship the most trouble. Earlier test flights shed tiles during launch and reentry, and Elon Musk has repeatedly called a fully and rapidly reusable heatshield one of the hardest problems left to solve before Starship can fly, land and refly without lengthy refurbishment. Offshore samples and telemetry only go so far, while a complete ship in a hangar lets engineers study every tile, seam and engine bay up close.

The timing lines up with SpaceX’s bigger ambitions for Starbase. The FAA said Tuesday it will prepare an environmental review covering up to 456 launches a year from the site, compared with the 25 Starship launches allowed today. A cadence anywhere near that would depend on ships that can turn around quickly, which is exactly what lessons from Ship 40’s hardware could help speed up.

SpaceX has not said how long the teardown will take or when it might share findings. What would you most want to learn from Ship 40’s heatshield?