One keypress and six seconds is genuinely good, so scratch most of my retry-loop worry 🚀 — that loop is not what is costing you. The only thing left in it is whether those six seconds include an explosion you cannot skip; letting the same keypress interrupt the death animation takes it to about two.
But I want to push back gently on the conclusion you drew, because the thread has since said something louder than the controls point, and you are about to ship a final build against the wrong fix.
Three people have now independently told you the rotation input is optional. nknknk3 finished the game without knowing left and right existed at all. iria-1342 said the auto-level button and the arrow keys are “kinda too good”, and that you generally do not need the thruster until landing. feramalli said it outright: completed missions without ever needing to use the rotate mechanic.
That is not a discovery problem. A control that nobody discovers and nobody misses is not undertaught, it is unnecessary. Adding a controls reminder to level 1 would make players aware of an input they still will not need, which reads as clutter rather than onboarding. The fix is in the level design, and feramalli named it: one or two landing sites that cannot be reached without rotating. That is a terrain edit, not a system.
It is also worth noticing what nknknk3 added after my post, because it kills my discovery theory as well as your tutorial-skip one. They did go through the tutorial. The problem was that the glyphs “left arrow” and “right arrow” sitting in an English sentence did not read as “press these keys” to a non-native English speaker. That is a third cause, and it is exactly why a level that requires rotation beats a written reminder: it is language-independent, and nobody has to read anything to learn it.
One knock-on, since you mentioned it earlier: your disabled abort system might be worth re-measuring afterwards. You judged it too easy against a version of the game where the hardest input is not load-bearing. Make rotation matter and the difficulty baseline moves underneath that judgement.
Good luck with the final build — landing it and stopping is a real skill, and plenty of learning projects never get that far.