Remnants from SpaceX Starship rocket test flight retrieved from off the Exmouth coast

Remnants from a SpaceX rocket launched in Texas last month have been salvaged more than 16,000km away, off the Gascoyne coast.

The test flight of the 122-metre tall Starship rocket from Elon Musk’s company on November 19 — which was witnessed by the world’s richest person alongside US president-elect Donald Trump — had plans to catch the booster with giant mechanical arms of the launch tower, but that was abandoned just minutes after the launch.

The booster was directed to splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, while the unmanned spacecraft launched atop Starship made its way to the WA coast, re-entering the atmosphere and landing 500km off Exmouth.

Employees and contractors from SpaceX travelled to the Gascoyne to retrieve debris from the splashdown site, with researchers set to pull data from the recovered material to use for future missions.

The rocket’s main section could not be salvaged, proving too difficult with crews leaving it to sink 6km to the ocean floor. However, heat-resistant panelling, big bags of metal pieces and miscellaneous tanks were retrieved from the water and loaded onto a vessel.

“Starship is the next generation of spacecraft from SpaceX, so this is a rocket the size of the Saturn 5 (NASA-developed rocket used in Apollo program),” Matt Woods from the Perth Observatory told 7News Regional WA.

Starship is designed with the aim of one day carrying astronauts to the moon and even Mars.

“This one was really to try and show that they could restart the engine in space, so you only need to get them up and back down,” Mr Woods said.

“It was actually quite successful, there was some loss of tiles in the vertical manoeuvre so that it would land softly on the ocean.

“They’re still in the rapid prototyping phase, so they’re trying to see what they need to build better for the next Starship.”

The only item on board the test flight was a sole banana, which was used as a zero-gravity indicator as well as a scale to show the size of the Starship’s cargo area.

WA has found itself in the middle of the space race, with the Murchison home to the under construction Square Kilometre Array project, which when finished will be the world’s largest radio telescope.

The Indian Ocean is one of the most favourable locations in the world for splashdowns and disposal of spacecraft and satellites because of its remoteness.

In July 2023 a piece of space debris from an Indian rocket washed up on a beach in Green Head.