Historic Starship booster capture was a second from a fiery end

As the world watched slack-jawed while SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster made the world’s first tower capture landing after boosting the Starship 5 mission into orbit, few knew that the event came within one second of disaster.

The capture of the Super Heavy first stage of the giant Starship rocket was one of those space events that I’m likely to remember exactly where I was for the rest of my life. Whatever good or bad could be said about the Starship program or its future, this was a moment that was firmly grounded in history as the gigantic booster, larger than that of the Saturn V rocket’s first stage, made a controlled, powered approach to the Mechzilla tower that launched it and now cradled it in equally gigantic steel arms.

However, we now know that the capture came within a heartbeat of being aborted and would the Super Heavy came incredibly close to crashing on the desert floor.

In one of the most remarkably casual disclosures in space history, SpaceX founder Elon Musk posted a message on X (formerly Twitter) with an insert video capture of him playing a computer game. What’s incredible is that while playing Musk was talking shop with an unnamed member of his staff.

The topic of discussion? Starship 5.

During the conversation, a man said, “I want to be really upfront about the scary sh** that happened and what we’re doing about it because I think that’s our focus – getting to Flight Six.”

He then went on to say that, “We were one second away from [a misconfigured spin gas abort] tripping, which would have told the rocket to abort and try to crash into the ground next to the tower instead of attempting to land on the tundra.”

According to the post, there was a go/no go abort error that, had it been implemented, would have told the flight control system that something was wrong with the perfectly healthy rocket and initiated an abort protocol. Ideally, this would have caused the Super Heavy to fly out to sea or land in the desert, but in this case, it would have resulted in a fiery crash at the SpaceX spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas.

Such aborts are common in the complex exercise of a space mission and the speaker admitted that they had encountered “100 aborts that were not exactly trivial” that almost caused a delay of Starship Flight 5. He went on to say that a thorough review would be needed before Flight 6, which already has FAA approval. This frees up the company to handle preparations its own way instead of in coordination with the US government.

Source: SpaceX