With that said, the cult that surrounds his projects where people say things like "this is what success looks like" when a big metal thing blows up unexpectedly or robot car goes flying off an exit ramp is a never ending source of amusement.
"So as manufacturing pathfinder, this is what success often looks like. "
If blowing up a prototype enables changes to the manufacturing process that prevent the same thing happening later with a live crew on board, then it's considered a success. It doesn't matter who the CEO of the company happens to be.
See also: Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11, Challenger, Columbia, Apollo 1 - and that’s purely spacecraft which have killed people, never mind the vast list of experimental aviation deaths.
Much better to blow up some prototypes than some humans.
Suppose SpaceX had used a very similar prototype, but some process or engineer had caught the fault. Few here would be taking the lack of an explosion as evidence that SpaceX are not innovative. Instead, if anything, they would be praising the superb processes in addition to the cool prototype.
So, there is always room to improve. The reaction to this essentially anodyne point here has been really interesting.
AFAIK nobody has built something like this before. To have it fail during an early test doesn't seem unusual.
When something doesn't behave as desired, it is a failure. You can learn from failure, that's how you get to success, but the failure itself is not a success.
The rocket has static landing coordinates, and if the boat were to move a few meters to either side it would miss it.
But there are definitely no “static coordinates”, it would have to move a lot more than a few meters for the rocket to miss, and it would be due to trajectory and fuel constraints rather than ability to maneuver.
I don't see any constructive reason to look at it negatively, failure is part of testing. We don't test to find success, we test to find failures so that we can get them out of our systems.
We are silly animals. Links I can't help but click on....comments I can't help to respond to. The algorithms are winning.
In a Chemistry Lab, I put two elements together to show off a little explosion to my students, if it did. It was a successful demonstration, if it didn't go according to plan, it was a failure. And we will be wondering why this didn't work.
The OP said it from his perspective of pathfinder. And I assume these results were expected. And if it didn't blew up and they did not understand why it didn't, it create more uncertainty and variables during real launch. And I am sure everyone would want to minimise of that happening.
I am not sure how hard this is to see thing from his perspective, I would agree if Elon calling it a success would be hyperbole, but the OP stated he is a pathfinder, and finding out failure is exactly his job.
I find it fascinating that we get to observe this all playing out in real time. You might agree.
Experimental rocket/spacecraft (that's a fairly rapid prototype as far as rockets are concerned), made out of non-traditional material for rockets, fails one way yielding tons of data to do it better on the next version.
That's some modicum of success no matter how you slice it. Go plug 'rocket launch fail' or 'rocket explosion' or some such into YouTube and watch various rockets failing spectacularly on the launchpad both during development and carrying actual payloads and compare it to this failure at this stage of development.
I mean, look at stuff like Apollo 1. An electrical fire killed all of the crew during a test less roughly a month before launch. Starship is a very early prototype that probably yielded more actionable data than the Apollo 1 accident did.