Elon Musk leaks SpaceX staff call while gaming, revealing just how close Starship came to disaster

AI-assisted TLDR: SpaceX successfully launched and captured Starship, the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, marking a major achievement in its goal to create a reusable transportation method for Mars. The event, dubbed Flight 5, saw the booster Super Heavy caught by the Mechazilla launch tower.*Generated from the content below by Jak Connor.

One of, if not the, greatest achievement SpaceX has made to date is the success of launching and capturing Starship, the world’s largest and most powerful rocket.

Starship was launched and the booster, Super Heavy, was captured by the launch tower known as Mechazilla. SpaceX officially named the event Flight 5, and it represented the company’s highest-stakes launch yet in its search for a reliable, reusable transportation method that can get humans to the surface of Mars. SpaceX has been somewhat quiet about the details of Flight 5, but SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk has seemingly inadvertently given the world a behind-the-scenes look at what SpaceX is thinking about Flight 5.

Musk posted a video to his personal X account showing off some Diablo IV gameplay, and in the background you can hear Musk talking to SpaceX employees. The staffers start by saying that they want to be “candid about the scary things that happened” because focusing on them will help SpaceX achieve its Flight 6 goal. The staffers then tell Musk that they were just a second away from aborting the flight. the landing of Super Heavy as the team had done”incorrectly configured throttle support“that was just a second away from the flight controllers aborting the landing on the tower.

SpaceX employees said they were “one second away from telling the rocket to abort and try to crash into the ground next to the tower.“

Musk replied: “Wow!

The team then lists all identified areas of improvement that Starship can make before its next flight, which currently has no date or public target.