It doesn't make sense. Even assuming they had some magical technology to recover a dead body, they wouldn't have had a body to use it on. Every little bit of the SSV Normandy SR1 crashed onto Alchera and so did your helmet, so Alchera must be the planet Shepard fell into. But Alchera has an atmospheric pressure of 0.83 and surface gravity of 0.85. Falling into that planet would incinerate you from the friction with its atmosphere, and then splatter whatever's left into a puddle upon hitting the ground.
And we know Shepard did hit the ground. Shepard died first of suffocation due to suit rupture, but was intact at that time. There's no way the commander simply orbited the planet before the body was recovered, though. Jacob's description is "meat and tubes" and you see a very fractured skeleton at the start of the game, so the body must have experienced severe trauma. We also see all the tissues and heart being gray, which would happen if the body froze on an icy world like Alchera. However, these do not make sense given Alchera's atmosphere and gravity. Rather than a body, they should have found drops of goo.
The only thing I can think of to explain this is that your suit had some heat protection (although Onyx armor in Mass Effect did not) and perhaps you fell into ice, which is at least not as dense as rock (but should still have turned you into goo). Anyone have any other ideas that might explain how Shepard's body could have remained relatively intact?
