@TapRackBang45

Okay, a little. And a lot of hyperbole.

Obviously it wasn't supposed to go through several 360° flips. The spin-flick to get Starship clear of Superheavy with the minimum amount of hardware and complexity is maybe 30° or even smaller. Not like it's supposed to wind up like a baseball pitcher in Looney Tunes then let go.

Although... if the stack could actually handle it, the release timing/attitude was accurate, and you've got an unusually heavy payload, or need to hit an apogee somewhat outside the normal maximum it can achieve, and the extra m/s² from making the whole stack windmill through a few full 360° flips then fling/release might be valid, in a Hail-Mary sort of way.

Superheavy could be tumbling well past what it's RCS could handle for backburn and recovery, so it might be a case of operating it in disposable-mode. And there's issues with Starship having tank slosh pointing upwards towards the nose, until release then rebound as it's back in ballistic/zero-g. All the systems meant to work under gravity/thrust-acceleration etc.

But, maybe, if payload mass or the initial LEO insertion was critical or worth the expense, and the necessary RPM for the extra m/s² needed was survivable without massive redesign, perhaps it's a valid strategy.

And obviously, in normal circumstances, in space launch especially, you want stuff to go 100% right 100% of the time. "Burning Semi down the freeway style" isn't a valid or sustainable operating mode. But the amount of abuse and failures that happened to that Superheavy/Starship, and it kept functioning, and even how long it spun 360° and held together was just nuts.

And n the flaming 18 wheeler analogy, if everything that caused it to be on fire, have blown tires, and a chunk of engine non-functional gets fixed and designed out, you might consider how amazingly reliable it might be under normal circumstances. Or in the event of more minor failures.

And that could be an iverall indication of how robust, redundant, and fault-tolerant Superheavy/Starship is to more minor and less dramatic failures, ones that can still easily cased a failed launch with other rockets.

You never want to rely on a system's ability to be resilient to accidents or failures, but damn if it isn't nice to have. If this test does indeed indicate there's a "reliability divadend", there's a ton of potential implications. For eventual man-ratmg, and even boring and un-sexy things like lower premiums for satellite/payload insurance.

And I'm indeed serious in that I don't recall any rocket having that much shit fail, that many significant off-axis events, large corrections, engine CATO/RUDs, and get as far as it did. And even how long it held together while tumbling was impressive. And I don't know if SpaceX command-detonated it, or it finally spontaneously RUD'ed yet [edit: comand detonated, so it could ave conceivably held together longer...] And all of this being the first attempt at launch of the largest rocket in human history. By a private company.... One mostly operating in "If you build it, they will come..."-mode.

And frankly, despite having a ton of telemetry, and a Superheavy & Starship recovered from the ocean for analysis in the "success scenario"... had everything gone 100% perfectly, a "success" is also somewhat "spooky" too. Especially if you're on a strategy of physical testing and rapid iteration.

Because when there's no demonstrable failures to correct,  you're left wondering if there's any chznce you just got lucky, and there's a landmine or pitfall waiting to bite you in the future, especially when you're using the system in production, for paying customers, or entrusting human lives to it. And something finally rears its head after significant time, effort, and money is invested and is now suk costs. And the initalbsuccess is actually very unlucky in the long run.

And don't forget whatever might be FOD related from the impressive amount of concrete, rebar, sand/soil/rocks that went flying at an appreciable fraction of a Raptor's sea-level exhaust velocity of around 11,706 fps, and bouncing back or riccocheting around.

Looking at the pad, I'm left wondering if the Superheavy might have dual-use tech-transfer aspects that could be beneficial to Musk's Boring Company.

I think a lot of people have a sort of binary "Rocket go space! Vs. Rocket explode!" mentality.

This is sort of like stuff that only happens in movies. The common trope where the heroes are striving to "invent XYZ" that'll save the day etc. And after a montage of funny/disappointing failures it blows up in spectacular fashion. After a second of shock, they're screaming and celebrating like madmen because it worked. And maybe was even better thsn they'd hoped.

That's kind of what happened here. Except SpaceX didn't even have much of a funny/disappointing montage first.

And the Superheavy/Starship stack survived,and continued to function, after at least a half-dozen things happened to it that would have very likely caused many, if not all previous space launch rockets to RUD almost instantly.