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Re:Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appear... by zymhan on Thursday April 11, 2019 @03:54PM (#19638484)
When you're floating along on a stable orbit not about to impact the surface.

Or with more time to recover from the outage before landing. If it happens within the last minute (wild estimation) then you have little time to recover the lost velocity.

Re:Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appear... by Hamuko on Thursday April 11, 2019 @04:19PM (#19638737)
But you're still having an engine failure when the engine is far away from anyone that could potentially start mending it.
Re:Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appear... by Jach on Thursday April 11, 2019 @04:44PM (#19638990)
Not an engine failure, but: "Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience." http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
Re:Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appear... by zymhan on Thursday April 11, 2019 @10:43PM (#19641479)
"failure" does not necessarily imply it is permanently disabled. It just means the engine stopped working as expected at some point.

Obviously they restarted it after this failure so it was not a complete breakdown of the engine.

Re:Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appear... by Voloskaya on Thursday April 11, 2019 @04:00PM (#19638542)
When you are floating along on a stable orbit the engines are off, so it's quite hard to have a failure in this context.
Re:Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appear... by ses1984 on Thursday April 11, 2019 @04:04PM (#19638578)
Maybe the failure occurs as you are initiating acceleration burn, while you are in stable orbit.
Re:Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appear... by nkrisc on Thursday April 11, 2019 @04:20PM (#19638744)
They could fail to ignite if you were attempting a burn from a stable orbit into another orbit.