I’m 100 percent certain that this is a spacecraft or launcher fuel tank. I’ve worked on reentry analyses of spacecraft fuel tanks before, and I can tell you that these very commonly survive re-entry for several reasons.
Firstly, they are by far the largest components housed inside the vehicle’s outer structure. The structure usually takes the brunt of the aerodynamic and thermal forces, protecting the tank from the largest destruction.
Secondly, the tank itself has to handle the huge fuel pressures involved (easily going towards many hundreds of atmosphere pressures!). This obviously means that incredibly tough materials have to be used.
Thirdly and finally, as can be seen in the pictures, their shape is symmetric, making the shape aerodynamically very unstable. This means the fuel tank has the tendency to tumble in the airstream. The tumbling continuously causes different parts of the tank to be exposed to the heat and other parts to cool down.
Fuel tanks are the major risk during reentry to people and other stuff on the ground, perhaps together with the massive engine blocks. To minimise the chances of hitting someone or something, re-entries are nearly always aimed at the Pacific Ocean, hence them being more likely to wash ashore in Australia.
Australia baffled as unidentified mystery object washes up on beach (www.bbc.com)
Creating a password in 2023 be like (programming.dev)
Ruffle: Open source Flash Player emulator written in Rust (ruffle.rs)