On Nov 11, 2:32*am, OM wrote:
The issue was secrecy,
in that either a static test of the full 30+ engine cluster and/or a
single-stage launch test could/would have been detected by US spy sats
- which is what happened anyway when they rolled the full stack out to


It has nothing to do with secrecy. It was money and time, which they
didn't have.