SpaceX's Starship booster was '1 second away' from aborting epic launch-tower catchSpace.com by Mike Wall 10/28/2024
'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.'SpaceX's historic rocket catch earlier this month was even more dramatic than it looked.
That catch occurred on Oct. 13, during the fifth test flight of SpaceX's Starship megarocket. Starship's huge first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, came back to Earth about seven minutes after liftoff, nestling next to its launch tower, which secured the rocket with its "chopstick" arms.
But that epic moment almost didn't happen: Super Heavy was just one second away from aborting the launch-tower landing and crashing into a patch of nearby ground, SpaceX engineers told company founder and CEO Elon Musk recently.
Musk revealed part of that conversation on X on Friday (Oct. 25), in a post that showed the billionaire's progress in the online game Diablo IV. That post depicted three minutes of Musk's Diablo IV gameplay, which occurred while he was talking to three unnamed SpaceX engineers about the Starship test flight.
"I wanted to be really up-front about scary sh*t that happened and what we're doing about it, because I think that's our focus on getting to Flight 6," one of those engineers tells Musk at the beginning of the posted conversation. That focus, the engineer adds, is "on booster risk reduction, rather than Ship envelope expansion." (Ship is the 165-foot-tall, or 50-meter, Starship upper stage.)
The engineer then goes into detail about the "scary sh*t."
"We had a misconfigured spin gas abort that didn't have quite the right ramp-up time for bringing up spin pressure," he explains. "And 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 instead of [landing at] the tower — like, erroneously tell a healthy rocket to not try that catch."
"Wow," Musk says as he hears the news.
More:
https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-super-heavy-chopsticks-catch-near-abort