Failures point out flaws to be fixed but also stop you from gathering more data through the rest of the experiment. The earlier SN5 had a huge list of failures but at least landed in one piece which meant they could extract data from their equipment, tear down systems to understand how they handled the stresses and strains of the launch, and then they could launch it again to see how their fixes worked.

Thankfully this failure was at the very end instead of, say, twenty seconds into flight or exploding on the launchpad. This way they got to test every subsystem which is phenomenal and about as good of a result as they could have expected. However, the landing system didn’t trigger and they’ll never know exactly why. The engines ate themselves alive and it would have been great to study how it performed in that scenario but now they’re in pieces. The header tank failed to provide enough pressure and it would have been great to test it further. Now they have to comb through the pieces and piece things together like a detective. They learned A TON but it’s definitely better to get it home in one piece.