The closest parallel is probably the N1 rocket that the Soviets developed in the late 1960s to take cosmonauts to the Moon. It had 30 engines arranged in two rings. But the N1 failed on all four ...

The USSR's needed to play catch up. By 1964, the Soviet rocket industry finally built the code-named L3 lunar lander, and a mammoth N1 rocket to go with it, designed to put a single cosmonaut on ...

The Starship's many engines are isolated from each other, preventing the risk of one engine failure causing failure of all as in the case of the Soviet Union's N1 rocket, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on ...