[This_Dude]

95% successful won’t get us to Mars and back. Everyone is cheering this like it was some kind of major space flight breakthrough, but it exploded after fuel issues.

Not the greatest example of success.

[rlmorel]

You should check out this Free Republic thread I started in September of 2017:

How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster (Spacex video showing landing failures)

It isn't that I have a need to self promote, but I did a search for "Bill Whittle Spacex failure" and...near the top on DuckDuckGo was my thread from FR...:)

The main point was: failures can be useful-very useful. And as Bill Whittle had pointed out when he showed it during a live SpaceX stream...this is a sign of a good company with a healthy attitude.

They are realistic, they KNOW there are going to be failures, so the extract every ounce of lessons learned and...positivity out of them, even to the point of making this highly entertaining video!

Bill Whittle was also right-NASA would be wringing its hands over each failure. SpaceX says, okay, lets fix the problem and test again.

Love it.

[markman46]

You do understand that starship is in development and this was a test flight. And bad stuff happens, also SpaceX has more protypes already either built or in different stages of building

[Ozark Tom]

The B-17 almost failed acceptance by the AAC in testing, as Boeing’s 299 prototype crashed upon takeoff of the second outing. Boeing built 13 more at their own expense and loaned them for testing against the Douglas B-18 Bolo. 12,000 B-17 versus 350 B-18 built.

That wouldn’t have been ideal for the war effort. That’s the whole point of prototypes put through testing. Fix it and fly again. All X-programs break hardware to step up to a better version through iterations adding more capability.

SN8 odds were 3/10 for a landing. That it performed properly until the last two seconds was an engineering success beyond expectations. They were very pleased that it pulled-off the return to vertical at the landing zone.