Junkyard owner Harry Broderick assembles a team to pull off the ultimate salvage operation. With former astronaut Skip Carmichael and fuel expert Melanie Slozar, Harry builds the spacecraft Vulture in order to bring back the equipment left on the moon during the Apollo moon expeditions.

On their first authorized salvage job...an aerial survey of Antarctic icebergs...Harry, Melanie and Skip make an unauthorized stop on a supposedly uninhabited island to pick up valuable spider monkeys for a zoo. What they find instead is a lone scientist and a giant man-ape.

Harry takes his teammates on a sentimental journey to the Burmese jungle to recover the well-preserved B-25 bomber he flew in Doolittle's 1942 raid on Tokyo. They find that the plane is being guarded by an old Japanese soldier who doesn't know the war has ended. He takes the Salvage team as war prisoners.

While salvaging an abandoned government fallout shelter, an earthquake traps Melanie, Skip, a little girl and her dog. Harry puts together a rescue operation as he races against time to save them.

After Harry purchases a famous haunted mansion with plans to salvage it, strange things begin to happen. The Salvage team discovers it is actually inhabited by a strange alien waiting to be transported home.

At an auction, Harry outbids an antiquarian for a classic 1934 automobile he has always dreamed of owning. Harry and his crew discover a treasure map hidden in the car. The antiquarian, who is known to traffic in precious objects, doesn't give up quite so easily as the Salvage crew goes treasure hunting.

A plan to retrieve a gold-plated satellite before it falls from orbit hits two snags: the Government impounds the Vulture, and NASA offers Skip a long-awaited mission aboard a space station. A dangerous liquid nitrogen leak traps Skip and his fellow NASA crewmembers aboard the ship.

Conclusion. Harry convinces NASA that he is the only one who can rescue the crew-including Skip-that is freezing to death in an orbiting space station. Harry and Melanie launch in the Vulture to save them.

An African dictator kidnaps FBI agent Jack Klinger to exchange for a U.S. missile. The U.S. won't respond, but Harry does. The Salvage 1 team comes to the rescue while pretending to offer the dictator the Vulture as a weapons platform.

Skip and Melanie patch up an almost-human robot with damaged memory circuits, not knowing it came from a secret army project and is programmed to kill.

The air-freight delivery of a miniature locomotive involves the Salvage trio with the devious pilot of an undependable aircraft, a terrified fourth passenger and additional cargo of enormous interest to the FBI. The plane crashes in an isolated area and the Salvage team assembles a make-shift balloon in order to reach civilization.

Melanie develops a possible-and dangerous-solution to the energy crisis: using monohydrazine to blast new oil out of old dried-out wells. The experiment results in a catastophic underground explosion and fire that must be extinguished.

The salvagers hunt for legendary buried treasure at a Confederate paymaster's last stand. But they soon find that everyone wants them out of town and the real ""Confederate Gold"" is supplied by moonshiners.