Hacker News Reader

Comment by t1234s | Hacker News Reader

Do they recover whats left of the ship from the Indian Ocean?

They can probably go fishing, but anything that sunk is gonna stay sunk. That ocean is not shallow, and deep submarine operations are expensive…

They did pull the bottom of the previous booster out. On the webcast they mentioned adjusting the landing maneuver for the ship to be a bit softer in case they decide to recover it too.

The previous booster landed in the golf of Mexico.

This starship landed in the Indian ocean a bit west of Australia, it's like 3x deeper.

↑ That.

For extra context: that "3× deeper" makes costs seriously explode. People do know how to engineer for that depth, but it's a lot of effort and there's pretty much no commercial market. For shallower stuff there's oil rigs, deep-sea cables, seafloor mining, even just tourism… but at some point it just peters out and only research vessels tackle the depth.

(source: friend of mine works at a UK university doing deep-sea vehicles)

>(source: friend of mine works at a UK university doing deep-sea vehicles)

As in he works on their development? That sounds exciting, do you have something like the name of one of the vehicles?

> As in he works on their development?

Yes, she works on their development.

> That sounds exciting, do you have something like the name of one of the vehicles?

No vehicle name, but this is the university department/lab: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/research/facilities/maritime-r...

(Their vehicles don't even go that deep, but again that was the point I was trying to make… even in research, the very deep stuff is rare and a "big project" that ends up fanned out ⇒ MRIL made only the cameras for a 4km vessel…)

Do they worry about any issues of the debris winding up in the hands of China or Russia? I would imagine the raptor engines are mostly intact.

You think there are Russian submarines in the gulf of mexico?

They splashed down in the Indian Ocean, not the Gulf of Mexico.

Also noone mentioned submarines, debris can just float and drift around (sometimes even at some depth below the surface).

Starship landed in the Indian Ocean, not the Gulf of Mexico.

I mean, yes [0]. It's probably the main reason SpaceX went to effort to recover [1] all the engines of the previous booster (IFT-4), which landed in accessible, shallow water in the Gulf of Mexico. The Raptor engines hold valuable secrets, particularly to China who are trying to clone a lot of SpaceX things.

The CIA did something very similar to this in the Cold War [2], though they used a boat instead of a submarine.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akula-class_submarine#Operatio... ("In August 2012, the news media reported that another Akula-class submarine operated in the Gulf of Mexico purportedly undetected for over a month, sparking controversy within U.S. military and political circles...")

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1fvdekt/more_... ("More images from B11 recovery + new info "26 of the Raptors have been recovered but they are trying to get all 33")

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian

Was the explosion intentional? I thought they were hoping it would float for recovery but if not I makes sense to sink it.

Do they have the ability? Russia couldn’t get Kursk back. Not clear they could even do it if we left it there.

It's more of a financial question, do you want to shell out for some chance at it. And Russia and China can build their own engines, SpaceX is very good but not like a century ahead good.

(If anything, I'd be more worried about North Korea or Pakistan getting their hands on stuff…)

Either way the risk is the shit that's left floating, if they don't fish it out it'll randomly wash up in Madagascar or so…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com