I didn’t count all of the ones lit, just the ones not firing. The flight was not intended to fly dragging 7 unlit engines. Whether it is launchpad debris or inflight problems, it was still 7 of 33 which is right at 20%. By any measure, it looks bad.
I heard a commentator on the video talking about it flying back. Other than that, I have no idea if they were flying it back or not. IS his first stage disposable? If not they intended on recovering it somehow, which they cannot do.
Again, failure to separate is still a failure. Whether range safety pressed the self-destruct button or it suffered structural failure and broke apart or “blew up”, all of that debris raining down early is a failure of some type.
Wow you are stuck on black and white thinking. Of course it failed, but it did about as expected and Musk himself also said as long as it gets off the pad that’s some measure of success but set expectations low.
You don’t even know the basics of the system and are spouting off. Try to research things a little, like does it return to base or was it even supposed to this time, before spouting off so hard.
At liftoff, the engines are only operating at 70% throttle. This means that, theoretically, they could lift off with only 22 engines (albeit with no margin for error). However, as the rocket flies, the margin increases quickly as propellant is expended and the atmosphere thins. By the time they were down to 25 or 26 engines on yesterday’s flight, they likely only needed 10 or so to achieve their desired speed and altitude. So at all times, yesterday, they appeared to have the engine power needed to fulfill their mission parameters. That several failed, while sub-optimal, can not be used as evidence of failure for that phase of flight.
“I heard a commentator on the video talking about it flying back. Other than that, I have no idea if they were flying it back or not. IS his first stage disposable? If not they intended on recovering it somehow, which they cannot do.”
The first stages will be recovered later in the test program. For this flight, nothing was intended for recovery, it was strictly a first test with no reuse.
Falcon went through a similar development process, and recently achieved being the most reliable launch system in history.
“Again, failure to separate is still a failure.”
Again, for this flight, anything beyond the initial liftoff was a stretch goal. This was well documented before the flight.
That concept is not “rocket science”. I hope this cleared things up. ;-)