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It’s a poor design. When you have 33 engines, the failure rate is 33 times higher. Although I’m not sure what’s the absolute minimum number of engines for a suc
by namirez 2y ago
It’s a poor design. When you have 33 engines, the failure rate is 33 times higher. Although I’m not sure what’s the absolute minimum number of engines for a successful mission.
Regardless, it will go down in history as another unreliable design like the space shuttle.
- yakz 2y agoThe booster did the job and was recovered.
- namirez 2y agoTrue but on the way down, two out of 15 Raptors didn't fire. And of course the Raptor on the Starship failed too.
- decimalenough 2y agoThey could still recover and catch the booster precisely because they had that redundancy. For Starship, the spinning out of control was caused by four (!) out of 6 engines shutting off prematurely, from which they clearly could not recover.
- fastball 2y agoI think you have it backwards, given that the stage which failed has 6 engines, and the stage that did its job and landed back on its own launch tower (inconceivable less than a decade ago) has 33 engines.