This one puzzled me for a bit, as when I paused the game after returning from Continue, the StarSparrow object under the player was missing… which means that something must have destroyed it.
So I went through each script, and I could find nothing that would destroy the player’s ship object.
So outside of play, I looked at the child object itself and discovered that there was an Asteroid script on it. This was causing the ship to destroy itself when the player collides with another asteroid. Remove that component, and you’ll be back up and running (flying).
—I had an extra script that was messing things up.