[ghostbrainalpha]

Was the request to restart the engine made from Earth?

It seems like the landing program would want to have a feature in place that automatically restarted the engine in a situation like this.

[karmakaze]

From the NY Times story “We are resetting the spacecraft to try to enable the engine.”

I can't tell from that if normally an engine outage would automatically restart but didn't or if the condition would always require manual intervention. I hope we get more details soon. The moon seems close enough (a few seconds), but accidents always happen closest to your destination. More automation is more complexity but it will be valuable for longer trips.