Starship lives! SpaceX craft arrives at Christmas Island after 24-day ocean ordeal

The seas have been kind, or at least kinder than expected, to SpaceX's Starship spacecraft, as it's been tugged through the Indian Ocean to friendlier tides.

Ship 40, the upper stage that flew on Starship's Flight 13 test launch , performed the vehicle's first successful intact ocean splashdown at the end of its mission on July 24, after lifting off from SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas.

The spacecraft landed in the Indian Ocean as planned and has since become the focus of the SpaceX Recovery team, tasked with hauling it to port.

Over the past 24 days, that team faced "challenging conditions and increasingly rough seas," SpaceX said in an Aug.

7 post on X , and at one point was not expected to be successful in its efforts to haul Ship 40 safely to shore.

Despite the odds, however, they have now reached calmer waters.

The massive, 171-foot-tall (52 meters) spacecraft now floats just offshore of Christmas Island, awaiting inspection.

"A team of SpaceX engineers is on their way to conduct additional analysis on the vehicle in calmer waters before attempting to return it to Starbase," the company said in an Aug.

18 update .

SpaceX Ship 40 from Starship's 13th test flight to calm waters off the shore of Christmas Island. (Image credit: SpaceX) SpaceX SpaceX Christmas Island is an Australian territory about 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers) northwest of Broome.

Most of the island is a national park, and it's famous for its 40 million or so red land crabs , which migrate en masse to the sea to spawn in one of the world's great wildlife spectacles.

Flight 13 was the second launch for the Version 3 (V3) design of SpaceX's towering Starship rocket.

V3's debut on Flight 12 in May didn't quite go as planned — engine issues after stage separation caused the vehicle's Super Heavy booster to crash into the Gulf of Mexico instead of splashing down softly as intended.

Ship 39 executed its landing burn above the Indian Ocean just like Ship 40 did, but Ship 39 exploded after toppling into the water — the expected outcome for Ship during Starship test flights.