by Recovered ceramic heat shield tiles, designed to keep SpaceX’s giant Starship cool during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, are selling for tens of thousands of dollars on eBay – a lucrative secondary market for unique memorabilia once attached to some of the human stuff. The most. never take a flight.
The Elon Musk-led company has attempted three fully-stacked Starship prototypes into orbit so far. The first two attempts, in April and November of last year, ended in massive explosions, sending what was left of about 18,000 hexagonal ceramic tiles across nearby beaches in South Texas each time.
In the third and most recent orbital launch attempt last week the latest prototype entered space, blasted over the African continent, and crashed into the Indian Ocean.
However, heat shields may have come off during shipping.
“I found it,” one lucky redditor wrote in a post last week after stumbling upon a perfectly preserved slab of heat shield on a beach six miles north of SpaceX’s test facilities in Boca Chica, Texas. “I’m the latest happy owner of a fully intact Starship heatsink. Apparently mine is ‘OK.'”
“I was giddy as a child when I realized what it was,” wrote the user.
“The timing of him showing up on the beach is almost right for him to have fallen just offshore from the beach,” the redditor suggested in a separate comment. “When the road opens at the launch site and people go down to Boca Chica beach, I imagine they’ll find a lot more.”
That seems to have been the case, with at least one other user discovering their own tile.
Tiles were also discovered after the company’s dramatic first orbital launch attempt.
Some owners are choosing to make a buck out of their rare finds, selling them on eBay for anywhere from $30 for a broken tile to well over $2,000 for a mostly intact one. Etsy also has listings of purported pieces of heat shield trash, packaged in small glass bottles.
The sellers are optimistic about the amount of money they could make. One tile is listed for a whopping $7,500 on eBay, but it’s unclear if it will sell anywhere near that price. A search of previously sold items shows that one tile sold for $3,395 on Monday.
Said one eBay seller Futurism that they found a tile left over from the company’s most recent launch attempt “floating in the water near the end of the jetties on South Padre Island.”
SpaceX “thanked me for the information and said I could send the pieces to them or keep them,” the user said Futurismafter notifying the company’s “debris reporting hotline and email.”
“I chose to keep them,” they said.
“I counted five pieces that three of us won,” they wrote. “There were some small pieces, but I couldn’t get them out. We weren’t really looking for the pieces, just trying to catch fish when they were floating.”
“I mean who doesn’t want to fly a tile of the biggest rocket ever,” another eBay seller told us.
More charitable individuals are giving away pieces of the giant rocket for free.
One Reddit user claimed that a nearby group of SpaceX enthusiasts who call themselves “Base Camp Zero” “heat tiles for the kids there and have a school book for the kids to study some of the basics of Starship. “
The surrounding area is a great spot for local relic hunters.
In an interview in January with the San Antonio Express-News, treasure hunter Ron Parker recalled finding small pieces of heat shield tiles on the beaches near the SpaceX test grounds. But he hit the motherlode when he traveled to La Pesca, Mexico, about 155 miles from Starbase.
“Since then, I’ve made 11 trips to Mexico and driven thousands of miles on the beaches,” he told the newspaper. According to the report, he has found 120 complete tiles and hundreds of pieces.
“Where are the rest of them?” he said. “That’s my question.”
SpaceX chose to cover one side of its behemoth Starship with charcoal-black, hexagonal tiles to help it survive the blistering journey through Earth’s atmosphere as it travels 25 times the speed of sound.
Early launch efforts resulted in heat shield tiles on the prototypes.
“The tank vent hit a couple of slabs,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk write after ventilation test in September 2021.
Last week, we saw the tiles in action. Clips uploaded by the space company to X-Twitter show the underside of the spacecraft known as Ship 28 being engulfed in an orange-red glow, a “hot plasma field” that grew as it entered the atmosphere again, according to Musk.
The individual hexagonal tiles seem to have become a well-loved artifact of the space agency’s staff. An image that went viral in 2022 shows SpaceX CEO Elon Musk apparently using a tile as a snack tray.
Employees who worked on the Starship program were also given a collectible bronze Starship tile – which, of course, is also selling on eBay for over $1,000.
More about Starship: Elon Musk Says Future Version of Starship Will Travel Between Star Systems
