More: It has seats for 7 people and the controls seem to have taken lessons from the Tesla cars: Large touchscreens, with fallback buttons for critical functions.
* corrected from impressions of the animation
But I guess pretty much the only thing astronauts are potentially required to do during launch is abort, and they have the physical buttons for that. So maybe it's not actually an issue.
You'd want to make sure you could field-service the backlight on those things.
I'd be incredibly surprised if they had a suit with the level of fine motor control in the fingers that touch would require, but I'd also be incredibly surprised to see crew at launch not in suits.
This is how touch screen capable gloves were first made, using bits of silver on the finger tips.
* Things tend to get loose in microgravity. You don't really want things floating into a touchscreen and performing unintended actions.
* During ascent and descent, it's incredibly hard (potentially impossible) to hold your hands out in front of you to operate something like that. The Orion has hand controllers next to each seat, which are notably lacking here.
I doubt that SpaceX has not considered the implications of touch screens in space ships.
I assume the touchscreens are for less urgent tasks, like plotting orbital changes and rendezvous.
Looks like 8 to me, 4 groups of 2.
It seems like it must be two engines that aren't in the same pair. If two engines in the same pair went, you'd have to cut off the opposite two to maintain symmetry, and then you're down four. If it could handle losing four engines, you'd think he would have said that....
On the other hand, maybe they can lose four engines as long as their opposite each other, and he didn't say that because it's not any four. It's not completely implausible. If each engine runs at 50% normally, then increasing the remaining four to 100% would give you the same thrust. Attitude control would be the big challenge, but perhaps smaller thrusters are able to handle it.
Edit: I just realized that the landing thrusters double as the launch escape system. The LES needs really high thrust to get the fragile meaty cargo as far away from the exploding rocket as quickly as possible. The Soyuz LES produces accelerations of well over 10 gees, for example. If these engines are capable of that, then they must have huge margins, as far as thrust goes, for landing. Looking over reports, I must have missed it in the stream, but Musk said that each one generates 16,000lbs of thrust. While the capsule as a whole weighs well under that... and it has eight engines. It also looks like the engine pairs are angled apart somewhat, which should allow for some control even on only two opposite pairs. I'm going to go ahead and guess that it can tolerate losing any two engines, and up to four if it's lucky about which ones it loses.
http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ast...
And it seems plausible. The layout of the SuperDraco clusters is not equidistant; it's more of an "X". If you lose one cluster, the other nearby one can provide the makeup thrust without being too unbalanced, and there's still X and Y control authority from the other pair.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendulum_rocket_fallacy
But don't feel bad, as you're in good company: Robert Goddard made the same mistake.