'Yikes': While gaming, Musk inadvertently broadcasts 'scary' near-abort of Starship booster landing
Elon Musk occasionally posts clips of his video game plays to his social media platform X — but a recent clip includes background audio of a SpaceX
Elon Musk occasionally posts clips of his video game plays to his social media platform X — but a recent clip includes background audio of a SpaceX engineer telling Musk how the most recent Starship flight test was “one second away” from an abort. The clip, posted 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 unnamed engineer said, seemingly as Musk played Diablo IV. He went on to explain that a misconfigured component didn’t have the right “ramp up time for bringing up spin pressure” on the booster.
“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,” the engineer says.
“Wow,” Musk says in response. “Yikes.”
The same engineer went on to say that right before engine startup on the booster’s descent back to Earth, a cover on the skin of the booster ripped off, apparently in a place that had been spot welded. “We wouldn’t have predicted the exact right place, but this cover that ripped off was right on top of a bunch of the single point failure valves that must work during the landing burn. So thankfully, none of those or the harnessing got damaged, but we ripped this chine cover off over some really critical equipment right as landing burn was starting. We have a plan to address that.”
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