[namirez]

It’s a poor design. When you have 33 engines, the failure rate is 33 times higher. Although I’m not sure what’s the absolute minimum number of engines for a successful mission.

Regardless, it will go down in history as another unreliable design like the space shuttle.

[fastball]

I think you have it backwards, given that the stage which failed has 6 engines, and the stage that did its job and landed back on its own launch tower (inconceivable less than a decade ago) has 33 engines.

[yakz]

The booster did the job and was recovered.

[namirez]

True but on the way down, two out of 15 Raptors didn't fire. And of course the Raptor on the Starship failed too.

[decimalenough]

They could still recover and catch the booster precisely because they had that redundancy.

For Starship, the spinning out of control was caused by four (!) out of 6 engines shutting off prematurely, from which they clearly could not recover.