Offshore Recovery
Recovering a spacecraft from the sea is a marine challenge before it is a space challenge — and that is our side of the mission.
What we are equipped to recover
Capsules, stages and payload sections, from the water — with the crews, vessels and written procedure of one of Europe’s most demanding offshore regions.
- Command and standby vessels, fast boats and trained marine crews through our North Sea offshore-operator network
- On-water approach and safing, with a named safing authority who clears the boat before any contact is made
- Lift and deck handling, securing and stabilising for transit
- Payload custody and cold chain — opened on deck
- Hazard-area clearance and live surveillance of shipping and air traffic
- Deployable beyond the North Sea — the crews and procedures travel
The operation
Recovery is a written mission objective for us, not an afterthought.
Every step below exists as procedure before it exists as a promise.
Locate
Predicted impact point refined from live telemetry and passed to the boats; beacon and visual acquisition; position logged before anyone approaches.
Safe
Hazard assessment before contact — residual propellant, hot structure, stored energy, unfired ordnance, parachute entanglement. Contact is authorised, never assumed.
Recover
Flotation collar and lifting strop, parachute secured or cut away, vehicle lifted or towed and craned aboard, drained and stabilised for transit.
Preserve
Payload section opened only on deck, photographed before opening, individual transit cases, temperature control where specified, signed chain of custody ashore.
Track
Downrange telemetry and tracking from a vessel, where a shore station cannot see over the horizon — the same ship that recovers can also listen.
Abandon
Written abandon criteria and a stated limit: recovery is abandoned, not attempted heroically. No section of a rocket is worth a boat crew.
Talk to us
If you have a vehicle that comes back, tell us the constraints — splashdown area, sea-state limits, time from splashdown to secured, sample handling and safing — and we will tell you how we would recover it: vessels, crew and timings. All of it under a full mutual NDA.
Contact us