Saturn V had a launch failure...NEVER.
I equate the “Winston Smith” panel’s efforts to spin the launch to NASA claiming,
“Columbia flew a successful mission until reentry”
The Winston Smith panel literally said of the test’s terminus,
“Starship just experienced what we call a “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly” during ascent” as the other 2 Winstons giddily laughed & sported fake smiles.
Yes, rocket flight is fraught with risks, but we are exponentially more advanced than the slide-rule engineers of 1967. I don’t care that Musk started the gaslighting weeks ago by setting odds of even a successful clearing of the launch tower at 50/50. ‘Data’ doesn’t remedy the disconnect between engineering & flight in this event. I am not impressed neither at their engineering nor professionalism regarding a rocket intended to ferry astronauts in complement to Artemis to the Moon.
It was a pathetic display for a photo op; they handled the vehicle’s performance failure miserably.
You still seem to be missing the point. SpaceX launched a rocket that contained quite a significant number of “previous generation” parts and systems in order to gain data that can be applied to the present generation rocket and its systems & parts (some, not all!), make corrections, and so on.
Saturn 5 was literally, I think, a combination of genius, huge application of resources, relative simplicity at cost-no-object, and some luck.
True, more of this “Super Heavy” + Starship development “could” be handled by modeling and other non-flight testing to destruction, but, as systems get more and more complex, trying to handle all the interactions and foresee how and what to test in less than a full scale manner becomes ever more difficult. And, speaking from experience as a former product design and development engineer, of much less complex systems, who in the latter half of his career either did an enormous amount of such testing himself, or was involved or privy to such efforts (the last smallish company (300 employees) I did consulting work for did subsystem or full system destructive testing on an almost 24/7/365 schedule — and they had the most advanced modeling programs in the industry.)
One problem is that some of those modeling programs even with very fast very powerful computers simply take a long time (days) to run the simulations on seemingly relatively “simple” parts or subsystems alone, and it takes VERY long times to set up the simulations (set up is still dependent on human capacities to enter all (hopefully!) the relevant information. NASA of this century takes the path of modeling, modeling, modeling, and then seemingly countless delays and fixes even after a full assembly is built for launch. SpaceX takes the approach of “let’s launch what we actually can assemble & launch now”, at high risk, and shortcut a lot of the tedious modeling and “takes forever” developmental work with actual performance (and hopefully flight) data, which may even reveal an unexpected (except of course in hindsight) problem no one would think to model.
Both approaches are valid, and both are in reality blends. (I’m quite sure SpaceX does millions of hours of modeling each year.) The difference is, Elon is determined to get to Mars in his lifetime.
Or, in my case, the Marketing Dept. damn well wanted that product ready for sale by next November, or, the Customer Service Dept. damn well wanted a problem showing up in the field (never underestimate “creative” customer abuse!) solved yesterday.
You discount the data, indicating you do NOT understand how it crucially feeds into SpaceX’s developmental process. (Which has been incredibly successful with the Falcon series rockets.) Literally anything past the tower WAS a big success, as no one has ever even tried launching a rocket this size...
Besides, who even cares about the TV panel? Not me.
Saturn V had several close calls, ever hear of POGO? Apollo 13?
Something you really aren't getting is that the sort of development SpaceX does expects failure during development. They were on booster 7 and ship 24 and most of the ones they have build have been scrapped without ever being used. Yes, 100% reliability is the most important goal, but they also need reusability and affordability.
If operational costs and availability are not important, you do what NASA does and pick a bad design, mostly for political reasons, then spend a crap-ton of money only on reliability. They don't care if it costs a billion dollars to launch and can only launch every five years. What they care about is not looking bad on TV so they can please armchair quarterbacks like you.