Comment by SilverElfin
2 days ago
Lots of engine failures. Doesn't exactly bode well for a company looking to go public immediately. One of the engine failures was not on the booster but Starship as you noted, and that is a bit unexpected. I don't think they have spoken about it being equal in capability with one engine out, right? Those engines don't move around to compensate IIRC.
Not sure how you come to that conclusion. The capabilities can overcome loss of engines. The fact it was successful with loss of engines shows it is working as designed.
No, it just means the mission happened to be salvageable because of its parameters. The booster is designed to have engines out and can compensate because it has so many engines and many of them are on gimbals. On starship, the vacuum engines aren’t on a gimbal. I’m not sure how it could compensate for one of three engines being out.
Some are on a gimbal and they specifically talked how others gimbaled out a bit to compensate. This is specifically something they designed in and not an accidental lucky save. In this flight they didn’t intend to test “one engine out” feature but it worked out that way.
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They explicitly said that they have engine out capability on the ship in the stream.
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