Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent
Engineers have upgraded the software for the catching manoeuvre after the founder and CEO of SpaceX,
Elon Musk, revealed in a post on X, external that the flight control
team was one second away from aborting the attempt.
In audio from that social media post, one of the
engineers speaking to Musk said “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,” to which Musk can be heard saying
“wow”.
The conversation is heard over video of Musk’s progress
in the online game Diablo IV, where he is talking to three unnamed SpaceX engineers
about Starship’s fifth test flight.
The issue seems to have been over the
software that monitors the progress of the super heavy booster while in flight.
It seemed to have detected non-ideal parameters.
That near miss has guided flight teams for this test
flight according to one of the engineers in the conversation.
“I wanted to be really up-front about scary shit that happened and
what we’re doing about it, because I think that’s our focus on getting to
Flight 6”.
