What has now become one of the most exciting accomplishments in recent space-related news was almost exciting for an entirely different reason. According to background audio that was featured in a Diablo 4 clip that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shared on X, Starship’s iconic catch earlier this month had every chance to end badly right up until the booster was nestled safely against the arms of its tower.
The audio, which has garnered quite a bit of attention across various outlets, starts with an unnamed engineer telling Musk, “I want to be really upfront about scary s*** that happened.” The engineer further elaborated on the issue, noting that the booster had a misconfigured stem gas support, which didn’t have the “right ramp-up time for bringing up stem pressure…”
Further, the engineer notes that the team was just a second away from the stem gas support tripping and telling the rocket to abort its catch attempt. If that had happened, Starship’s iconic catch would have instead ended with the rocket booster crashing into the ground next to the tower.
Obviously that outcome would have been extremely unfortunate, as both SpaceX and NASA have a lot riding on the future of Starship. But the engineers don’t stop there. They also mention some other issues that popped up during Starship’s fifth test flight, including the fact that a cover ripped off the Super Heavy during its descent. This cover, it turns out, was located on top of several single-point failure valves that are required for the landing burn to work correctly.
Ultimately, while Starship’s iconic catch was a huge success, the design flaws within the Super Heavy booster almost ended that success. Hopefully, whatever Musk and SpaceX have planned for the sixth test flight—which I’m sure they plan to pull off as soon as possible—will help them address these issues.
However, based on the audio shared in this video, it seems that the company isn’t studying everything that could go wrong. Instead, it seems like they’re taking a “fly by our seat” approach and trying to balance the risk mitigation with reaching new heights during the test flights, which could come back to bite them. Hopefully, that isn’t the case, as SpaceX has a lot riding on Starship as far as future missions go. NASA and Musk’s own dreams of one day putting humans on Mars will require a rocket like this to make that possible.
