22.01.2024
San Marcos collector's hunt has have taken him from Boca Chica to the Gulf and deep into Mexico. He may have largest collection outside SpaceX itself.
SAN MARCOS — Ron Parker keeps the small pieces on his coffee table.
The mishmash of stainless-steel shards, frayed wires, washers and heat tiles recovered after explosions and crashes of SpaceX Starships and prototypes fill the low wooden table, giving his living room the feel of a museum exhibit.
On his porch, jagged hunks of shiny steel with razor-sharp edges catch the sun like an outdoor sculpture display. The 4-millimeter thick metal looks as if it was torn as simply as a piece of paper.
He calls one section about the size of a car door “Texas” because of its shape. Another rectangular piece that’s 10 feet long he calls the “question mark.” There’s a length of silver pipe with flanges sheared off by an explosion. It was buried so deep the private space company’s workers tried to cut it to retrieve it and gave up. Parker didn’t. Now the relic sits on his porch rail.
Equal parts treasure hunter, space fan, mechanic and adventurer, Parker may have the largest collection of Starship relics outside SpaceX. His expeditions have taken him across the tidal flats and dunes around Boca Chica Beach and more than 200 miles into Mexico.
“It turned into obsession,” he says. “Treasure hunting is a lot of fun, especially when you’re finding treasures.”
His finds have led to deals with fishermen in cartel territory, troubles with customs at the Southern border and cooperation with SpaceX. He’s made money selling Starship wreckage on Ebay and the side hustle is gaining the semi-retired backhoe operator notoriety among space fans and influencers.
The Starship relic market is another business SpaceX’s presence in South Texas has launched, and Ron “Hardrock” Parker is at the forefront.
‘Blown away’
He first heard about SpaceX’s Starship project in December 2020 from his sister, Carol Starewich of Canyon Lake. She told him he could watch the launch of SN8, an early prototype, online.
“I was just blown away,” he said. “It was so, so cool and, you know, it’s not that far, so like okay, we gotta go see Starship 9.”
After delays and scrubs, Parker and his sister saw SN9 fly Feb. 2, 2021. While at Isla Blanca park on South Padre Island, he met a man who had a box of debris from early launch attempts.
“I was just ‘Wow, look at this,’ ” Parker recalled. “So, I tried to buy a piece from the guy, and he goes ‘Nah, here, I’ll give you this piece.’ ”
The fragment captured his imagination.
“It was my most valuable possession,” he said. “I was so jacked by that thing to have a little piece of something that flew, you know.”
The next time Parker visited Starbase, he walked around to find fragments of past Starships and decided to return with a metal detector.
Parker calls himself a collector and the truth of that is obvious across the land where he resides in the Hill Country outside San Marcos. Old cars and boats line his unpaved road. Several bicycles and fire hydrants rust on his lawn. “Yard art,” he calls them. Fossils line his porch rail and arrowheads fill his countertop.
“Whenever I’m out in the Hill Country working on these houses, I look for arrowheads,” he said of his work on the backhoe. “Get off the machine, take a break, you know? I hardly ever find one, but I spend hours and hours looking.”
Starship parts are easier to find than ancient arrowheads. After years of tests — and explosions — in South Texas and now higher-altitude disassemblies of rockets as prototypes continue aiming for orbit, an ever-wide swath of the world is littered with SpaceX debris.
“The Starship debris game is much more rewarding because you’re out there and suddenly you find something really good,” he said. “So, it just progressed from there.”
Texas and beyond
In heavy fog on March 30, 2021, Starship SN11 blasted off. The craft disappeared into the murk, flew to more than 6 miles and began its descent to attempt a landing near its launch pad. Something went wrong and the craft exploded thousands of feet over the wetlands.
Tons of stainless steel, carbon fiber, wiring, Teflon, insulation and other debris pelted the area around the launch pad. Slabs of Starship propelled by the explosive forces and gravity speared their way deep into the mud and sand. Some shards that appeared on the surface to be the size of a soda can were actually 5- or 10-foot-wide pieces with their mass buried.
When Parker found his first big chunk of a Starship hull, it took him and a friend an hour-and-a-half to drag it out. Another piece buried in the mud and water took him and several others three hours to unearth.
Parker also found small pieces of heat tiles — the foam-like material to shield the craft from extreme heat — in the flotsam line.
Since those days, the hunt territory has gotten larger.
During the maiden launch of Starship and its Super Heavy booster in April, the craft’s engines obliterated the launch pad and flung concrete chunks and debris across the wetlands as it lumbered skyward.
Parker said he began to think about how to find the thousands of heat tiles that surely fluttered into the Gulf of Mexico when the spacecraft exploded minutes into its flight.
He knew the tiles floated and that they could wash up somewhere along the coast. Two weeks after the launch, he drove the beach from Port Aransas to Starbase and didn’t find any. So he went to Mexico.
In Mexico
He found his first intact tile near La Pesca, more than 155 miles from Starbase as the crow flies.
“Since then, I’ve made 11 trips to Mexico and drove thousands of miles on the beaches,” he said. “Number 12 is coming up.”
Each Starship has about 18,000 heat tiles and he’s found about 120 whole tiles and hundreds of pieces. He figures only a fraction of the tiles have been found.
“Where’s the rest of them? That’s my question,” he said. “I don’t think they went down with the ship because they’re really poorly attached … It could be that somewhere out in the Gulf of Mexico, there’s a big wad of these things just going around a circle.”
Beside heat tiles, he also found a 12-foot-long Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessel, or COPV, that was part of Starship.
When word got out that some treasure hunter from Texas would pay for the carbon fiber tanks floating in the Gulf, the local fishermen became interested. They found five more.
Parker bought the tanks from the fishermen and prepared to bring them back into the U.S. The deals involved handshakes, cash and several trips. On the fourth trip back, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officials seized one of the tanks. At the time, the Discovery Channel was filming a show about contraband seized at the border.
The seizure and notoriety led to communications between Parker and SpaceX about potentially returning the six tanks. After weeks of correspondence, he returned them to the private space company on Jan. 11, the day before Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO, conducted a company town hall at Starbase.
Ups and downs
Parker has sold his Starship wares on eBay for two and a half years. On Thursday, the online auction house showed 27 entries for Starship heat tiles from several sellers. They ranged in price from less than a dollar for a triangle shaped fragment to $650 for one of Parker’s intact tiles.
He also has a piece of Starship SN 11 stainless steel — with wiring and a still legible “suborbital” tag— listed for $500.
He’s sold to astronauts and space fans and estimates he’s made several thousand dollars so far.
“The market is soft right now. It depends, the market goes up and goes down, you know, like anything else,” Parker said. “But if it completely falls flat, that’s okay because I think in the long term people are going to look back on the early days of Starship like they look back on the Wright brothers.”
He figures the market is set to spike when a future Starship lands on the moon or Mars.
Starship debris hunting is more than a business for Parker, it’s also a way to stay connected with his sister who introduced him to futuristic spacecraft. She died Dec. 14, 2022, and never got to see the fully-stacked Starship and Super Heavy booster on its orbital attempts.
“She was with me when I got some of these pieces,” he said. “She would’ve loved to see the fully-stacked Starship fly.”
Parker said he’s thankful for the bond they shared over Starship, and he appreciates each relic he’s found.
Standing over his living room table, he held a pennant shaped Starship piece and reflected on its beauty. “To me, that thing is artistic because it’s so perfectly formed, you know? Explosions made all these in a millisecond. The explosions made all these forms, and no two are the same.”
Quelle: San Antonio Express News