Spoilers: Can you save the Sunbeam?

[Senec]

So, I decided to see if there was a contingency in the game for whether you could beat the game by disabling the alien quarantine enforcement cannon facility after receiving the 40 minute countdown message from Captain Avery Quinn. So I advanced the story to the point where the Sea Emperor gave me the enzyme formula. Then I triggered the message to start the countdown. I returned to the Sea Emperor eggs, hatched them, cured myself of the infection, and then shut down the facility. I sat and waited at the surface of the island for the timer to run down to see if the Sunbeam would be able to land, but the timer just kept going into negative, and Avery never came back over the radio again. So... Inconclusive, but it looks like there's no saving the Sunbeam, or giving it an alternate fate. Now you know what happens if you try to save it. Nothing, it breaks the story lol.

[Steelfleece]

I don't know if anything's changed, but in the past I found that holding off on repairing or building a radio until after the QEP was shut down resulted in a different sequence than normal. I can't remember if there was a countdown first or not, but you'd get a radio transmission that there was too much debris in orbit and the Sunbeam couldn't pass through it safely, so they'd apologized and sent a message to Alterra about the incident.

[Dirak2012]

If you do things in the right order, you should be able to save it, but it won't land.

[chris.ferrantegerard]

I believe if you've cured the infection and shut down the weapon platform before the Sunbeam arrives then the captain tells you there is too much debris to land and flies off to make a report of your status or something instead of trying to land and getting blow up.

[turnerdeedo]

As Chris said, if the gun is shut down when you answer the call from Sunbeam, the captain will send you a message saying that the debris in space from the Aurora makes landing impossible, so they will have to leave you and send a status report to Alterra.

[Sputnik]

It's great they got some paperwork done.