The recovery

On 16 January I was at home watching Flight 7, as I have watched every launch to date. I could see Starship burning against the sunset. Then a bang, and it came apart into thousands of fragments. It sounded like thunder and lasted a couple of minutes. Quite eerie — almost as if the world were ending. I ran outside and filmed it, and messaged everyone I knew to look up.

The next morning I found this in the driveway. My husband is an enthusiast. He wanted more. He owns a kite school here; some of his students had already picked full tiles off the beach. We scoured the neighbourhood. Nothing else.

Sunday 18 January we drove Providenciales. Friends’ stories showed scraps of insulation, a couple of complete tiles. We knew there had to be more. The question was where.

He looked at the trajectory and the weather and decided the debris would most likely wash on West Caicos — a nearly empty island, an hour by boat, an eastern beach four miles long.

He left at 6 a.m. There is no cell coverage out there. I heard nothing for hours. Then a message: the search had gone very well. And a video of what looked like a lot of rubbish in our boat.

He walked the whole beach. Crates and buckets he found on the strand. The best find of all was a piece of the spacecraft fuselage, spotted in the water as he was leaving. He went back two days later. His footprints were still the only footprints on the beach.

Out of the approximately 18,500 tiles on this Starship we found 141 intact, and about 200 fragments. The heat shield is designed for temperatures exceeding 5,000 °F. Some of the samples are melted. You can see that.

Other tiles you will see for sale from other flights detached during launch. These tiles have been to space, survived an explosion and re-entry, been carried by currents and tides, and ended in our hands. A once-in-a-lifetime event. We are selling them as recovered memorabilia, with a serial and a certificate, because that is the only honest way to send them on.