Comment by dylan604
2 days ago
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.
2 days ago
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.
See my other comment. The vacuum engines are NOT on a gimbal. None of them. The sea level engines on starship and several of the engines on the booster are on a gimbal. But not the vacuum engines for space.
EDIT: I cannot reply further in this thread, but my understanding is that the non vacuum engines are not intended to stay lit throughout the orbital flight in a typical mission. If they are, they can gimbal and compensate.
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They explicitly said that they have engine out capability on the ship in the stream.
That’s for the booster (the big lower part) not for starship (the upper part that continues to space). They were surprised to have a vacuum engine out. In space there’s no atmosphere so you can’t use fins or wings to change direction. And if the engines can’t move around, you only have thrust and gravity and the tiny attitude adjusters to direct your ship.
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