SpaceX Goes Fishing and Finds Booster 11

The business end of Booster 11, courtesy of Elon Musk on X

Over the last few days, SpaceX has had a recovery vessel positioned exactly over the debris of Booster 11, the Super Heavy that flew on Flight 4 and executed the first successful landing burn of a Super Heavy booster. This was the cause of great intrigue from the spaceflight community on X, with @mcrs987 on X (The Space Engineer) and some of his friends hiring a boat to try and investigate. 

However, on early Monday morning (September 23rd) Elon Musk posted a photo of the outer ring of Raptor engines from the booster, as you can see above. This put an end to speculation and has given us views inside of the engine section of a modern Super Heavy booster for the first time. Unsurprisingly it is pretty damaged by the explosion that occurred after splashdown, but in a better condition than most of us, myself included, expected. 

It remains to be seen what SpaceX will do with this large section of booster, I personally hope they will display it - but given their previous lack of sentimentality over hardware this is unlikely. More probable is that they will spend time cutting it to pieces and gaining whatever information they can about Super Heavy from it. This will undoubtedly help inform future design decisions for the programme. 

Thank you for reading this article by Luke Madgett