SpaceX almost ditched the insane Starship booster catch at the last second

SpaceX almost ditched the catch of the Starship booster during the fifth integrated test flight (IFT-5) at the last second earlier this month. The catch was arguably the biggest accomplishment in the history of the program, which aims to put humans on Mars in the coming years.

On October 13, SpaceX successfully launched its fifth test flight of Starship, followed by a successful splashdown in the Indian Ocean by the upper stage.

However, the main highlight of the launch was SpaceX’s intention to catch the massive first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, just seven minutes after liftoff.

SpaceX aces fifth Starship test flight with successful Super Heavy booster catch

The launch tower, known as Mechazilla, used its “chopstick” arms to complete the catch in what is one of the most marvelous and unbelievable things that you will ever see:

Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster! pic.twitter.com/6R5YatSVJX

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 13, 2024

However, it almost did not even happen. SpaceX nearly aborted the attempt at the last second, engineers told CEO Elon Musk recently, according to Space.com.

Musk, during a stream of his Diablo IV gameplay on X last Friday, was speaking to three engineers who told him the details of the entire thought process:

“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. We had a misconfigured spin gas abort that didn’t have quite the right ramp-up time for bringing up spin pressure, and 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 instead of [landing at] the tower — like, erroneously tell a healthy rocket to not try that catch.”

Musk had a simple response: “Wow.”

The engineer continued on:

“We knew we had a whole bunch of new aborts and commit criteria that we tried to double-check really well. I think our concern was well-placed, and one of these came really close to biting us.”

SpaceX’s next Starship launch will likely take place in early 2025, Elon Musk said. However, the company plans to take things one step further by catching the upper stage as well, Musk said on October 15.

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