It was a successful landing lol.

In fairness to the engineers and scientists working on it (and definitely not to the brainless shithead who owns the company, fuck him) it is a type of rocket that has literally never been attempted before, using dozens of prototype technologies that have never been used before by anyone. Frankly I’m surprised that they’re not blowing up half of the prototypes on ascent.

Managing to bring a ship the size of a Saturn V first stage back down through the atmosphere intact from orbital speeds and successfully doing that wild flip landing on-target with automated guidance is a major accomplishment. That it exploded after tipping over doesn’t take away from that. That’s going to happen to most steel tubes the height of a 20 storey building if filled with oxygen and methane fumes and pushed over to bellyflop on the ocean. That’s why everyone was shocked that the prior starship test vehicle didn’t blow up when it inevitably tipped over in the ocean.

What I really like about Starship is that it’s proving the wisdom of Sergei Korolev’s N1 concept, with many engines of the same type controlled by a central guidance system instead of a handful of big engines. The N1’s two big problems were a lack of needed computer technologies to run a reliable automated control system, and no way to test engines before flights. Neither is an issue with Starship. All Korolev would have needed to make the N1 work was a better engine mass production system, and to wait a decade or so for computers to improve. It’s not his fault he was ahead of his time.

I imagine they were flashing the ‘APPLAUSE’ sign in front of the mic’d audience at Space X headquarters.