WASHINGTON — SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster came within a second of aborting a “catch” landing attempt on the latest Starship test flight, according to audio posted online, apparently inadvertently, by Elon Musk.
Musk posted a three-minute video Oct. 25 on X, the social media network he also owns, showing action from a video game that he is playing. The audio, though, is not from the video game but of several people discussing the Starship Flight 5 test flight Oct. 13. That flight features the first return and successful catch of the Super Heavy booster using marchanical arms attached to the launch tower it lifted off from at Boca Chica, Texas.
In the audio, one person, not identified, described an issue with the Super Heavy landing burn where a “misconfigured” parameter meant that spin pressure, presuming in the Raptor engines in the booster, did not increase as expected.
“We were one second away from that tripping and telling the rocket to abort and try to crash into the ground next to the tower,” that person said. That scenario would “erroneously tell a healthy rocket to not try that catch.”
“We had a whole bunch of new aborts and commit criteria that we tried to doublecheck really well, but, I mean, I think our concern was well-placed, and one of these came very close to biting us,” the person continued.
The people on the audio note that there had been discussions of delaying the Flight 5 launch to provide additional time to check those parameters. “We were scared about the fact that we had 100 aborts that were not super-trivial,” one person said.
In the audio, the SpaceX officials said they had completed a review the day before of data from Flight 5, comparing it to aborts “and what we need to change on them.”
Another issue discussed in the audio while Musk is playing the video game was a cover on a chine, a vertical structure on the booster, that came off as the vehicle went transonic during its descent. A…
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