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SpaceX Spotted Scooping Pieces of Starship Out of Ocean After Impact

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Footage shows SpaceX crews retrieving debris belonging to the upper stage of SpaceX's enormous Starship rocket.

Breaking Things

There's always something you can learn from failure. Sometimes failure looks like your rocket blowing up after crashing into the ocean — but it's a learning opportunity nonetheless.

In the case of SpaceX, that means retrieving the watery remains of said rocket, Starship, to determine what went wrong during the less-than-perfect performance of its latest suborbital test flight. And so SpaceX employees traveled to the waters off the western coast of Australia, where the rocket's upper stage splashed down, to collect the debris.

These were the findings of SpaceX-focused content creator Interstellar Gateway, which gathered footage of the crews dredging up some of the spacecraft's hardware, including heat shield tiles and various tanks.

But there could be more than meets the eye. Based on Interstellar Gateway's sleuthing, the next retrieval mission could bring back the entire spacecraft in one piece.

"This was the first flight we've seen a vessel rigged specifically for towing... leading us to the realization that they may be attempting to return Starship back to port," Interstellar Gateway told Gizmodo. "Upon our investigation during their port operations, we noticed all of the needed lines and rigging materials needed to pull Starship back, as well as a staging area prepped with a crane, ready to remove Starship from the water."

Explosive Progress

SpaceX stunned the world with its fifth orbital flight test of Starship in October. After reaching space, the rocket's lower stage, the Super Heavy booster, made a controlled descent down to the Earth's surface, guiding itself back to its launch tower where it was caught midair by a pair of mechanical arms — an astonishingly precise feat of engineering.

The rocket couldn't repeat the feat, however, during its latest test in November. Just four minutes into the flight, SpaceX had to call off the booster catch, forcing the rocket to make a rough splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, where it immediately exploded into flames.

By contrast, the upper stage, the Starship spacecraft itself, demonstrated it could relight one of its engines in space and made a much softer, controlled splashdown in the ocean. Still, it did catch fire and fall apart after the landing, though nowhere near as dramatically as with the booster.

Safe and Sound

Besides the reusability factor, there's a huge incentive for SpaceX to recover the Starship spacecraft in one piece.

"There is only so much data SpaceX can get from Starship via StarLink transmissions as it has always sank shortly after splashdown," Interstellar Gateway told Giz. "Similar to the valuable data being used from the first caught and intact booster, there are tons of structural and out of view faults that can be found from an intact Starship returning to land."

With any luck, that'll soon be the case. The next Starship launch is reportedly slated for no earlier than January 11 next year — so keep an eye out.

More on Starship: Video Shows Robot Welding SpaceX Starship

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SpaceX Spotted Scooping Pieces of Starship Out of Ocean After Impact

Gold Nuggets Can Be Formed With Electricity, Scientists Claim

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Electric discharges underground cause gold atoms to accumulate, which eventually forms gold nuggets, the researchers suggest.

Spark of Gold

Electric currents in the Earth may be responsible for the formation of gold nuggets, new research suggests.

As detailed in a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the theory could explain why large chunks of gold — sometimes weighing more than a hundred pounds — appear in quartz veins when there's seemingly little traces of the metal in the surrounding earth.

"The standard explanation is that gold precipitates from hot, water-rich fluids as they flow through cracks in the earth's crust. As these fluids cool or undergo chemical changes, gold separates out and becomes trapped in quartz veins," study lead author Chris Voisey, a geologist at Monash University in Australia, told Forbes. "While this theory is widely accepted, it doesn't fully explain the formation of large gold nuggets, especially considering that the concentration of gold in these fluids is extremely low."

Main Squeeze

The answer lies in the unremarkable but ubiquitous mineral that gold nuggets are found in: quartz.

Quartz crystals are piezoelectric, which means they can generate an electric charge when put under mechanical stress, like getting squeezed. Being underground, they're potentially subjected to these forces from every direction.

The most formidable stress inducers, though, would be earthquakes, of which hundreds occur each day.

The researchers hypothesized that the regular application of such tectonic forces could generate electricity in quartz veins strong enough to pull gold out of the fluids in the earth's crust. Over time, this accumulates to form full-blown nuggets.

"Quartz is the only abundant piezoelectric mineral on Earth, and the cyclical nature of earthquake activity that drives orogenic gold deposit formation means that quartz crystals in veins will experience thousands of episodes of deviatoric stress," the researchers wrote in the study.

Pay Dirt

To test the theory, the researchers placed quartz crystals in a water solution containing dissolved gold, which they subjected to earthquake-like stresses. As they predicted, the quartz generated enough voltage that gold nanoparticles accumulated on top of the crystals.

"In essence, the quartz acts like a natural battery, with gold as the electrode, slowly accumulating more gold with each seismic event," Voisey told Forbes. "Our discovery provides a plausible explanation for the formation of large gold nuggets in quartz veins."

Other scientists in the field have been intrigued by these findings.

"The piezoelectric theory is interesting because it would help to further concentrate any nanoparticles, but also explain why early quartz veins in fault zones are typically barren: you need the quartz veins to be there before you can induce the piezoelectrical effect," Taija Torvela, a geologist at the Univeristy of Leeds, UK, who wasn't involved in the study, told The Guardian.

Taija suggests that understanding this effect could be used to target gold deposits — though to be practical, "we would need to know if there are any markers, detectable on Earth’s surface, that this process would leave behind."

More on current events: Scientists Say They've Detected a Strange Source of Electricity at the Bottom of the Ocean

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Gold Nuggets Can Be Formed With Electricity, Scientists Claim

The Earth Just Can’t Stop Setting Heat Records

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A record 15 national heat records have been shattered since January, as this year looks on track to surpass the last as the hottest ever.

Coming In Hot

It's too early to say if 2024 will top last year as the hottest on record — but it will already go down in history for blowing past another damning heat metric.

As The Guardian reports, an unprecedented 15 national temperature records from countries around the globe have been broken since January. Monthly national temperature records, meanwhile, have been broken a whopping 130 times, with tens of thousands of monitoring stations worldwide observing all-time local highs.

This is according to data gathered by climatologist Maximiliano Herrera, who maintains an online database of extreme temperatures.

"This amount of extreme heat events is beyond anything ever seen or even thought possible before," Herrera told The Guardian. "The months from February 2024 to July 2024 have been the most record-breaking for every statistic."

Hell on Earth

The hottest temperatures have descended on the tropics, where heat records were broken every day for 15 months in a row, Herrera said. Egypt recorded a national high of 123.6 degrees Fahrenheit in June, while just two days before, Chad tied its record of 118.4 degrees.

Just north of the Tropic of Cancer, Mexico also matched its record of 125.6 degrees later that month. Other countries that either tied or broke heat ceilings include Costa Rica, Laos, Ghana, and Cambodia. Extraordinarily, the Cocos Islands in the eastern Indian Ocean near Australia equaled its all-time high of 91 degrees twice this year: once in February, and again in April.

It's no wonder, then, that this July was also the hottest in history — and so has every month since June of last year, making it 14 record months in a row.

And in yet another hot streak: many scientists, including those at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, say we're on track for 2024 to be the hottest year ever recorded, which would make an ominous double-header with last year.

Summer Is Coming

Summer heat waves that scourged cities around the globe are believed to have killed hundreds of people this year, Reuters reported — if not thousands.

Scientists fear that if temperatures continue to climb, the extreme climate will render vast amounts of land uninhabitable, which could displace billions of people.

This recent spate of record-setting heat has heightened attention on the issue. But, even if the streak ends, "we are bound to see new records being broken as the climate continues to warm," Carlo Buontempo, director of the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, told The Guardian. "This is inevitable unless we stop adding greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the oceans."

Until that happens, Herrera said that extreme weather alerts could save lives amidst our ever-hotter climate.

More on extreme heat: Dozens of Americans Die in Brutal Heat Wave

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The Earth Just Can't Stop Setting Heat Records