That was something to see those two booster rockets landing side by side at the same time. Wow!
Too bad about the middle booster.
On that middle section loss, that might have been a calculated risk to push an ultimate capability boundary. The center appeared to exceed the typical velocity profile for staging purposes.
The orbit actually achieved seems to extend to near Ceres in the asteroid belt, which is substantially beyond Mars orbit. Maybe this was advertising aimed for the Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries, and so forth type of operation?