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Several times since SpaceX's Crew Dragon Demo-1 Mission, I have seen allusions to a minor fault.

For example, a recent article about a comparable product mentions that

After its largely successful test flight a month ago, SpaceX has been refurbishing that crewed Dragon for an in-flight abort test later this spring.

With the caveat that English is not my native tongue, I understand largely successful to mean that one or more minor aspects were not successful, but I did not find anything relevant in the linked article. However, one commenter wrote that

SpaceX launches what looked like a near-flawless unmanned mission to the ISS, and will next send a manned mission (…)

Again, near-flawless seems to imply knowledge of at least one small flaw.

However, I've failed to spot a description of something going wrong in the Wikipedia article or in other descriptions of the mission.

What went wrong during SpX-DM1?

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  • $\begingroup$ Largely successful does not mean anything went wrong. It may just mean that not as much useful data was returned, or that tolerances were not as good as expected. $\endgroup$
    – Rory Alsop ♦
    Apr 3, 2019 at 21:16
  • $\begingroup$ I think this is strictly a question for ell.stackexchange.com or english.stackexchange.com however I can see that the context is something that people here can help with. @Adám I think your first interpretation is one correct meaning of the phrase, i.e. that there could be some implicitly acknowledged flaw. However another common usage could arise when the author simply doesn't know either way and does not feel confident to write "perfect" or "flawless". $\endgroup$
    – Puffin
    Apr 3, 2019 at 21:43

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As far as I can tell, SpX-DM1 accomplished all of its primary mission objectives successfully.

  • Fueling, launch (+ operations), nose cone open
  • Rendezvous and autonomous docking procedures (first use of IDA-2, NASA's new IDSS-compliant adapter)
  • Undocking, deorbit, re-entry (drogue & main parachute deploy), and splashdown

The wording you refer to was probably meant to guard against anything that might crop up during review, since work still needs to be done to analyze all of the sensor data gathered from each phase of flight.

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    $\begingroup$ And there are always minor issues during flights, some sensor showed strange values, or something like that. But nothing remotely major that I've heard anything about. $\endgroup$
    – PearsonArtPhoto ♦
    Apr 4, 2019 at 1:27

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