SpaceX's Starship Rocket Ends in Explosion After Launch

[NullTuples]

51. The more engines, the greater the chance some will fail...?

This is the sort of operational statistics gathering + calculations that are used to find an optimal number of say, redundant drives in a server array. Each one adds a substantial additional chance of failure until at some point you have to start planning for two simultaneous failures, then three. And each addition requires even more drives to be added to fail-safe the data. Diminishing returns kicks in. But this is done when the amount of space needed exceeds that of available drives and many drives therefore must be aggregated. But as you can see, there are balancing points that must be heeded, too.

I find it hard to believe that the MTBF of those engines is so near-perfect that the balance point of failure risk to needed thrust is at 33 engines. Or I should say, today proved that their calculations perhaps were off. Or maybe someone at the top of the org chart simply said, "those are the engines we have, I want this to work so do it anyway, it'll work".