On Sunday evening, September 22, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk posted a photo showing X-droplets being lifted from the ocean and damaged rocket equipment. According to Musk, the damaged metal is part of the first-stage launch vehicle used in the recent Starship test flight.

“Futuristic, like the remains of a long-dead civilisation,” he wrote in another post hours later.

SpaceX is developing Starship to carry people and cargo to the Moon, Mars and beyond. The vehicle consists of two stainless steel parts: a massive first-stage rocket launcher called the Super Heavy and a 165-foot (50-meter) upper-stage spacecraft called the Starship, or simply the Ship.

Both of these stages are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, and both are powered by SpaceX’s powerful new Raptor engines (33 for the Super Heavy and six for the Vessel).

Standing 400 feet (122 meters) tall when fully assembled, Starship has completed four test flights to date, all from SpaceX’s South Texas base. Those missions launched in April and November 2023 and in March and June of this year.