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Elon Musk occasionally posts clips of his video game plays to his societal media platform X — but a recent clip includes background signal sound recording of a SpaceX locomotive engineer telling Musk how the most late Starship flight mental test was “ one minute away ” from an abort . The cartridge holder , carry on Friday , was caught by Reuters ’ Joey Roulette on X , but it ’s not clear if the conversation between Musk and Starship engineers occurred that same day .
“ I want to be really upfront about scary shit that happened , ” the unidentified engineer said , seemingly as Musk played Diablo IV . He went on to explain that a misconfigured component did n’t have the correct “ ramp up fourth dimension for bringing up twist insistency ” on the booster .
“ We were one second away from that tripping and telling the rocket to abort and endeavor to crash into the ground next to the tower , ” the applied scientist allege .
“ Wow , ” Musk aver in response . “ Yikes . ”
The same engineer went on to say that right before engine startup on the booster amplifier ’s descent back to Earth , a cover on the hide of the booster rocket ripped off , plainly in a place that had been blot welded . “ We would n’t have predicted the accurate right place , but this cover that ripped off was right on top of a bunch of the unmarried head failure valves that must work during the landing place burn . So gratefully , none of those or the harnessing got damage , but we ripped this chine get over off over some really decisive equipment correctly as landing place burn was begin . We have a plan to address that . ”
Musk was being brief on the 5th Starship integrated test flight , bear on to as IFT-5 , which took place on October 13 . SpaceX set its most challenging missionary work objectives yet for that trial , include returning the Super Heavy booster to the launch situation and catching it with a couple of oversized “ chopstick ” arms that protrude out from the launching pillar .
The company deplume it off , and made history as a result . The full context of the conversation is not light , as the snip posted to X is only about three hour long , but it shows that even apparently flawless rocket launch ( and in this case , booster landings ) can come in hazardously close to disaster . And that after each test , SpaceX is render with a “ fag load , ” as the engineer put it , of post - flight data to inform future testing .
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“ We ’re seek to do a fairish balance of fastness and risk moderation on the booster ” prior to the next flight attempt , the engineer articulate . The engineers note that this will be the first Starship test flight whose agenda is not set by the FAA . While SpaceX has typically outpace the governor in price of launching facility , versus the FAA ’s launching license approving docket , the FAA actually gave commendation for IFT-5 and IFT-6 at the same clock time .
