If I understood correctly, the way to land when even minimum thrust is too much is both simple and clever. The goal is to reach zero velocity at zero altitude.

If I understood correctly, the way to land when even minimum thrust is too much is both simple and clever. The goal is to reach zero velocity at zero altitude. But there's always some uncertainty in how rapidly an engine will fire up and come up to power, so you can't just precisely time the engine startup. So what you do is to time the startup so that the predicted zero velocity point is underground. Then once the engine has started and spooled up, you continuously measure altitude and velocity, update the predicted zero velocity altitude, and progressively increase thrust until the zero velocity altitude is at zero altitude.