A massive spray of concrete chunks into the engine bells didn’t help, but Starship’s Raptor 2s are having reliability issues independent of the launch site failure. They went into the test with multiple engines nonfunctional right from the start and anticipating that more would shut down. I think the launch wouldn’t have achieved its stated trajectory even if the pad had held.
Yeah it was a really strange corner to cut. It probably caused the first launch to go so poorly.
Who knows, they could’ve even gone orbital (I know they weren’t planning on going fully orbital but still)
A massive spray of concrete chunks into the engine bells didn’t help, but Starship’s Raptor 2s are having reliability issues independent of the launch site failure. They went into the test with multiple engines nonfunctional right from the start and anticipating that more would shut down. I think the launch wouldn’t have achieved its stated trajectory even if the pad had held.