Salvaged ceramic heat shield pieces designed to keep SpaceX’s giant Starship cool during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere are selling for thousands of dollars on eBay, a lucrative secondary market for unique souvenirs once attached to some of the largest man-made objects. never fly.
The company led by Elon Musk has so far attempted to launch three fully equipped Starship prototypes into orbit. The first two attempts, in April and November of last year, resulted in massive explosions, each time sending the remains of about 18,000 hexagonal ceramic tiles onto nearby South Texas beaches.
Last week’s third and final orbital launch attempt saw the latest prototype ascend into space, pass the African continent and crash into the Indian Ocean.
However, it is still possible that the heat shields were blown off during the launch.
“I got mine,” one lucky redditor wrote in a post last week after stumbling across a perfectly preserved heat shield slab on a beach six miles north of SpaceX’s testing facilities in Boca Chica, Texas. “I am the last happy owner of a completely intact Starship heat plate. Looks like mine is ‘good’.”
“As a kid, my head was spinning when I realized what this was,” the user wrote.
“The timing of its appearance on the beach is almost right as it was left just off the beach,” the Reddit user said in a separate comment. “I predict that once the road opens at the launch site and people get down to the Boca Chica beach, they will find a lot more.”
That appears to be the case, with at least one user discovering their own tile.
Tiles were also discovered after the company’s first dramatic orbital launch attempt.
Some owners choose to cash in on their rare finds, selling them on eBay for anywhere from $30 for a broken tile to well over $2,000 for a mostly intact tile. Etsy is also flooded with pieces of alleged heat shield remnants packaged in small glass bottles.
Sellers are optimistic about how much money they can make. One piece is listed on eBay for as high as $7,500, but it is not yet known whether it will sell for anywhere near that price. A search of currently sold items shows one piece sold for $3,395 on Monday.
One eBay seller said: Futurism He said he found a stone “floating in the water near the end of the piers on South Padre Island” from the company’s last launch attempt.
The user said SpaceX “thanked me for the information and said I could send them the parts or keep them.” Futurismafter reporting to the company’s “debris reporting hotline and email.”
“I chose to keep them,” they added.
“I counted five pieces that the three of us saved,” they wrote. “There were some small pieces but I couldn’t get to them. We weren’t actively looking for the pieces, we were just trying to catch swimming fish.”
“I mean, who wouldn’t want a shot of the largest rocket ever flown,” another eBay seller told us.
Other philanthropists are distributing parts of the huge rocket for free.
One Reddit user claimed that a nearby group of SpaceX enthusiasts calling themselves “Base Camp Zero” “handed out heat parts to kids there and had a school-style book for kids to learn some of the basics of Starship.”
The surrounding area has become a focus of interest for local relic hunters.
In an interview in January San Antonio Express-NewsTreasure hunter Ron Parker recalled finding small pieces of heat shields on beaches near SpaceX’s test sites. But he hit the main point when he went to La Pesca, Mexico, about 255 kilometers from Starbase.
“Since then, I have made 11 trips to Mexico and traveled thousands of kilometers along the beaches,” he told the newspaper. According to the report, 120 whole tiles and hundreds of fragments were found.
“Where are the rest?” added. “That’s my question.”
SpaceX chose to cover one side of the giant Starship with charcoal-black, hexagonal tiles to help it survive its violent journey through Earth’s atmosphere while traveling at 25 times the speed of sound.
In the first launch attempts, pieces of the heat shield were seen flying off the prototypes.
“Headed tank vent broke a few rocks,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said Wrote Following ventilation testing in September 2021.
Last week we actually saw the tiles in action. Clips uploaded to Twitter by the space company, formerly known as X-, show the underside of the spacecraft, called Ship 28, being engulfed in an orange-red glow, a “field of hot plasma” that grows as it re-enters the atmosphere. According to Musk.
Individual hexagon tiles have apparently become a much-loved artifact for staff at the space company. An image that went viral in 2022 shows SpaceX CEO Elon Musk using what appears to be a tile as a snack tray.
Employees working on the Starship program also received a bronze Starship collectible piece that sold on eBay for more than $1,000.
More about Starship: Elon Musk Says Future Version of Starship Will Travel Between Star Systems