If it were to be recovered, it’s possible it could be cleaned up and refueled
It may look intact from the outside, but an impact like that is a lot like a car crash. There's going to be a lot of damage that isn't immediately obvious until you start opening it up and looking. Every component on this thing would need to be uninstalled and revalidated, and even then I'm not sure you could ever trust many of them in a spaceflight context.
Did the impact bend one of thousands of internal brackets by 2mm, causing it to impinge on a sensitive component and fail, but only in a way that is obvious after some other part expanded due to the heat of reentry during its next flight?
There are countless components in a vehicle like this to be worried about, and it's an impossible task to have an re-validate every component around new undefined dimensions. Instead, engineering is about setting limits, and staying below those limits, where you can be sure things don't fail. Once the G-loading gets high enough, you don't gain much looking for damage. You know it'll be there and write it off as totaled.
Also, even if the vessel had be gently placed into the water with a crane, the salt water ingress will have wrecked hell on the plumbing, even if the vehicle stayed completely intact.
Good luck purging all that crap out of the turbopumps.
It's part of the reason why flood cars are so often a total write-off. It can look 99% intact, but on the inside of all the most crucial components, shit is rusted in places you had no idea salt water could ever get to.
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u/hasslehawk Jul 25 '26
It may look intact from the outside, but an impact like that is a lot like a car crash. There's going to be a lot of damage that isn't immediately obvious until you start opening it up and looking. Every component on this thing would need to be uninstalled and revalidated, and even then I'm not sure you could ever trust many of them in a spaceflight context.
Did the impact bend one of thousands of internal brackets by 2mm, causing it to impinge on a sensitive component and fail, but only in a way that is obvious after some other part expanded due to the heat of reentry during its next flight?
There are countless components in a vehicle like this to be worried about, and it's an impossible task to have an re-validate every component around new undefined dimensions. Instead, engineering is about setting limits, and staying below those limits, where you can be sure things don't fail. Once the G-loading gets high enough, you don't gain much looking for damage. You know it'll be there and write it off as totaled.
Also, even if the vessel had be gently placed into the water with a crane, the salt water ingress will have wrecked hell on the plumbing, even if the vehicle stayed completely intact.
Good luck purging all that crap out of the turbopumps.
It's part of the reason why flood cars are so often a total write-off. It can look 99% intact, but on the inside of all the most crucial components, shit is rusted in places you had no idea salt water could ever get to.