What has come to be known as Starship’s iconic catch this past month almost ended badly, Elon Musk has unintentionally revealed.
What has now become one of the most exciting accomplishments in recent space-related news was almost exciting for an entirely different reason. According to background audio that was featured in a Diablo 4 clip that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shared on X, Starship’s iconic catch earlier this month had every chance to end badly right up until the booster was nestled safely against the arms of its tower.
The audio, which has garnered quite a bit of attention across various outlets, starts with an unnamed engineer telling Musk, “I want to be really upfront about scary s*** that happened.” The engineer further elaborated on the issue, noting that the booster had a misconfigured stem gas support, which didn’t have the “right ramp-up time for bringing up stem pressure…”
Further, the engineer notes that the team was just a second away from the stem gas support tripping and telling the rocket to abort its catch attempt.
