The quickest (in terms of time elapsed) crash I've been able to get is 5 seconds. I think 4 may be just about possible, with the right initial conditions.

    A smooth… wait… you crashed

    Score: 26.1 point crash
    Speed: 94.8mph
    Angle: 140.9°
    Time: 5 seconds
    Flips: 0
    Max speed: 94.8mph
    Max height: 240ft
    Engine used: 1 times
    Boosters used: 4 times
    https://ehmorris.com/lander/

ehmorris, this is addicting for all the wrong reasons.

4 seconds on my 3rd attempt somehow

  A smooth… wait… you crashed

  Score: 29.0 point crash
  Speed: 88.2mph
  Angle: 173.4°
  Time: 4 seconds
  Flips: 0
  Max speed: 88.2mph
  Max height: 218ft
  Engine used: 1 times
  Boosters used: 3 times
  https://ehmorris.com/lander/

Nice. I can get 5 reliably, but haven't been able to get 4 at all.

Apparently the timing isn't tied to the framerate, so after I ran the game on a faster computer I got 2 seconds quite consistently

  A smooth… wait… you crashed

  Score: 28.7 point crash
  Speed: 80.4mph
  Angle: 178.4°
  Time: 2 seconds
  Flips: 0
  Max speed: 80.4mph
  Max height: 185ft
  Engine used: 1 times
  Boosters used: 2 times
  https://ehmorris.com/lander/

When you can actually land (not crash) in 2 seconds, NASA may have a role for you...

(8s was the best I managed but still a "fender bender").

Yeah that is a flaw. You could also just make your browser window very short on desktop. I think if it’s shorter than the lander height you may land in 0 seconds?

I made my browser short and then zoomed the window as large as possible

Daily Challenge #5 8.4 point crash

3.2mph | 82.2° | 0 flips So, so close to a landing, but still a crash

https://ehmorris.com/lander/ 0 seconds Max: 3.2mph | 12ft Game size: 191x57

I managed to get my rocket very very slowly rotating (<0.1° / s), so that I could just hold the acceleration and have it do one arc from launch to crash:

    Unbelievable, the crater is visible from Earth

    Score: 1712.2 point crash
    Speed: 15226.2mph
    Angle: 174.3°
    Time: 5963 seconds
    Flips: 0
    Max speed: 15226.2mph
    Max height: 1993862ft
    Engine used: 21 times
    Boosters used: 14 times
    https://ehmorris.com/lander/

Now that's impressive.

1h40m for it though..., that's an extra 1h15m for just 800mph more. With some tweaking of your initial launch angle (get it somewhere between 40-60° rather than 0° which is what I'm assuming yours was, correct me if I'm wrong), plus maybe a second fine-tuning once you reach apolune, I'd guesstimate you could make 25000mph in ~3000 seconds.

This reminds me of when I made a parody "game" once, where all you had to do was click to get a point.

I had included a message at 10k, for a friend that I had expected to check the js source, but to my surprise a non-programmer friend send me a screenshot of it. He just kept clicking "to see if something would happen".

If only I had thought to turn it into an app with some ads at the time, there's a whole idle game genre these days. In some situations people will go to surprising lengths for a basically meaningless and pointless payoff. I still enjoy driving off the map in Trackmania myself. Takes almost an hour, but it's very zen.