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My mind is so blown. Definitely disappointing, but let's be honest: this is a win for SpaceX, given that this was the first fully integrated flight test of a very complex, very unproven vehicle. (Yes, the ship has flown before, but this was the booster's first flight.)

Did anybody else notice the Apollo-style maneuver to avoid the launch tower?

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How could this be a success? It was a catastrophic failure. Sorry but bullshitting releases only works in software.

Sorry but engineering doesn't give a shit about your feelings.

The primary objective was to leave the pad and not destroy the billion dollars of gear on it. Everything else after that was a win.

How was the gear not destroyed in that explosion? I genuinely don't know.

The mean the gear on the launch site

Got it thanks.

Keeping the Starship intact wasn't a primary goal it seems.

They also seems to have been up front about it to both internal and external audiences.

The goal of this flight was always to prove they could get off the launch pad. They got past max-q, ergo it’s a success.

The launch pad is intact, so the next starship rolling off the assembly line should launch in a couple months.

> The launch pad is intact

For a very loose definition of intact. It had a crater gouged out underneath it including under some of the supports. They'll have to rebuild that, and "couple months" sounds optimistic.

When SpaceX says their goals were to clear the launch tower, collect data and nothing more this seems like a huge success.

That's the benefit of setting expectations at zero. "We only guaranteed excitement!"

I sure hope the engineering team is more honest about the results.

Seems to me like it's a kinda medium result.

A failure would've been "oh shit we discovered another problem with the launch sequence, guess we're a few weeks behind where we wanted to be."

A catastrophic failure would've been "oh shit we didn't discover a problem with the launch sequence and it blew up on the pad and damaged our ground facilities."

A huge success would've been the planned mission.

This seems like, "Well, some thing went well, some went poorly."

If you watched the spacex youtube feed there's no denying it was a smashing success. The employees were clearly celebrating even after the Rapid Unplanned Disassembly.

It didn't blow up on the pad. They'll be happy to blow up dozens of these, hopefully incrementally perfecting the design each time.

That's not engineering. What they did is identical to developers copying code from SO and running it to see if it works.

That's exactly engineering. A complex system seldom has a 100% success on first launch, all engineering products are incremental success. There are thousands of small factors that can deviate a live test from their theoretical assumptions. The fact that they have got past the first hurdle for a completely untested product is worthy of appreciation. Just a few years back, everyone would have unanimously applauded the launch. But now, people are letting their personal bias about the CEO cloud their judgement about the achievements of the engineers working on the product.

How is it not engineering? They engineered it to clear the launch pad, and it did.

What SpaceX are doing in Texas is the literal definition of engineering.

What on earth do you think engineering is if building a first of its kind rocket and launching it to see how it works doesn't qualify?

Only in old fields with a long history of failures to learn from are engineers expected to be failure-free. You're absolutely right that civil or structural engineers should not be expected to build a few bridges or houses and hope that eventually they come up with a design that doesn't fall down anymore.

Starship is far outside the realm of rote engineering codes that just need to be faithfully executed. They've simulated and tested and validated as much as was reasonable, now they're working with and learning from full-scale prototypes. If it just worked, they wouldn't know how much margin they had. Now that it's exploded, they know a large number of components that were good enough for the phases of flight that it went through, and also the exact stress at which a particular component/system failed: that's incredibly valuable and useful information, and not something you can find on Stack Overflow or an ISO standard.

Yes it is. Source: am Engineer

Tons of data, including achieving max-Q

I agree with you. "clearing the launchpad" we did back in the 60' with 60+ year old tech. Sure starship is bigger but not that mutch.