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Comment by scrumper | Hacker News Reader

Impressive achievement, looked to me like the vehicle started rotating before the flip was due. I wonder what the tolerance is on the number of engines that can be out? It seemed like nobody was overly concerned that several weren't firing.

(That shot of the engines in flight was pretty amazing though, bright circles like a Spielberg alien ship.)

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I find that part particularly, interesting, how fault tolerant the system is that such a number of engines fail to fire and it still looks like a nominal launch.

Even the Saturn V rockets could handle engine failures, and it had a much smaller number of them.

I'm guessing even with a few of the engines not firing they can still do some math to compensate?

I think it would be fine on a test flight since there is no payload weight.

I recall old interviews stating 3 off is fine for nominal flight of a loaded starship. It was empty (no payload) so probably more failure is ok.

But there are limits on how assymetrical the boosters force can be. With 5 then 6 out I wonder if spin was due to too much assymetry. I hope we get more details.

It looked like there was multiple off on one side which can't be good right?

>(That shot of the engines in flight was pretty amazing though, bright circles like a Spielberg alien ship.)

I had similar thoughts too. When it first cut to the shot exposed for all of the thrusters, I spoke out loud how gorgeous it was and I'm sitting here by myself. This shot plus the recent spirals from fuel dumps, SpaceX has given us some cool imagery lately.

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