On July 16, 2026, four seconds before the planned liftoff of Starship Flight 13, six of the 33 Raptor engines on Booster 20 failed to reach the required oxidiser turbo pump speeds. The onboard computer caught it, cut all engines simultaneously, and aborted the launch at T-minus zero. The vehicle sat there, intact; the launch pad; the crew safe. Nobody was hurt. Nothing exploded.
That date was exactly 57 years after Apollo 11 launched from Kennedy Space Center.
It was also exactly the scenario that destroyed a Soviet rocket half a century ago — minus the part where the computer worked.
The Question Everyone Asks About Those 33 Engines
If you have ever watched a Starship launch and wondered why anyone would put 33 engines under a single rocket when five or six powerful ones would theoretically do the same job, the answer is not hubris. It is economics, redundancy, and a philosophy of engineering that the Soviets pioneered decades before the technology existed to make it viable.
Smaller engines are cheaper to develop and manufacture in volume. They can be produced on an assembly line. If one fails in flight, the others compensate. You can lose several and still complete the mission.
On paper, it is an interesting argument. For decades, it was catastrophic.
The N1: Same Idea, Wrong Decade
The Soviet N1 rocket was Moscow’s answer to Apollo, a hundred-meter-tall colossus designed by Sergei Korolev, the man who had given his country Sputnik and Gagarin. Korolev died in January 1966 without ever seeing his rocket fly. The problem his engineers inherited was blunt: the USSR had no engine comparable to the American F-1, the five massive powerplants that lifted the Saturn V. So instead of building one enormous engine, they built thirty smaller ones: NK-15 engines designed by Nikolai Kuznetsov, arranged in two concentric rings beneath the first stage.
The engineering logic was the same logic SpaceX would revisit fifty years later. Thirty small engines cost less to build than one enormous one. They can be manufactured in series. If one fails, the others compensate. The problem was not the idea. The problem was the tools.
Soviet engineers could not build a test stand capable of firing all thirty NK-15 engines simultaneously. Such a facility would have cost more than the program could afford, especially competing for funding against multiple parallel Soviet lunar projects. Worse, the NK-15 engines could not be tested and reassembled — certain components were single-use. So engineers would test a random sample from each production batch, and if the sample passed, they would mount the remaining engines on the rocket without ever firing them. Then they crossed their fingers.
To manage engine anomalies during flight, the Soviets built a monitoring system called KORD, designed to detect failing engines and shut them down before they could damage their neighbors. The principle was sound, while the execution was not. The KORD system suffered from a lack of speed and precision compared to modern computing capabilities. Its most hazardous characteristic was its tendency to shut down engines incorrectly due to misinterpreting pressure and flow indicators.
The second N1 launch attempt, on July 3, 1969, illustrated the consequences. Seconds after liftoff, a metallic fragment entered the liquid oxygen turbopump of engine number eight and caused it to explode. The shock wave severed nearby propellant lines and triggered a fire at the base of the vehicle. KORD detected abnormal pressure and flow readings and began shutting down engines one after another. In roughly two seconds, 29 of 30 first-stage engines went silent. The one remaining engine pushed the rocket sideways. This N1 climbed to about 200 meters, tilted, and fell back onto its own launch pad.
The explosion that followed is one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in recorded history, with an estimated yield of approximately seven kilotons. Their launch facility was obliterated.
This occurred thirteen days before Apollo 11. Two more N1 attempts followed in 1971 and 1972, both failures. The program was cancelled in 1974, and the remaining rockets were cut apart with torches. Their archives were destroyed, while improved NK-33 engines, which remained in storage, were eventually purchased by an American company decades later and refurbished as AJ26 engines for the Antares rocket — one of which failed six seconds after launch on October 28, 2014, destroying the vehicle and its cargo.
