Starship flight 5: "We did have some issues"
The last Starship test flight in October appeared to go off without a hitch. The Super Heavy booster made a stunning return to the launch site where it was captured mid-air by a pair of giant metal pincers attached to SpaceX’s launch tower structure, called Mechazilla.
“My team said it wasn’t going to work. So they were sandbaggers, obviously,” SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell said of the October flight test on Friday during the Baron Investment Conference conference in New York.
Still, Shotwell added, “We did have some issues.”
“Obviously, you can understand (Starship is) a very complex system, and the things that we’re trying to do are very difficult.”
Issues with the last test flight were also alluded to in a bizarre post on SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s account on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that Musk purchased in 2022.
In the post, Musk is apparently playing a video game as he is being debriefed about problems with the October test flight.“I want to be really upfront about scary sh*t that happened (during Flight 5),” a voice addressing Musk can be heard saying on the clip. “We were one second away from (a rocket booster issue) tripping and telling the rocket to abort and try to crash into the ground next to the tower.”
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