Balex

But SpaceX has literally lowered the cost of a launch by an order of magnitude. They also are flying one of the most successful rockets ever flown.

Fair enough. I've just been jaded from reading people bash on SpaceX anytime anything in space "fails". But yeah, those events are similar in the sense that on the surface it looks like a failure, but they met their main mission goal and learned a lot from it. It sounds like the engine issue might've happened for them before, so hopefully they got a lot of good data from this and are able to fix the issue.

It's important to keep in mind that going to space is very hard. Landing on another celestial body is order of magnitudes harder.

I don't know why people insist on trying to diss SpaceX anytime there's space news... Anyway, last time they missed the Autonomous Drone Ship was years ago when they were first trying to land. So I'm not exactly sure what you are referring to.

Plus, with space missions there are usually many different mission objectives, and with this mission the main mission was to "demonstrate its highly precise navigation and landing system" which they determined to be a success. The extra credit mission would be if it landed properly and they were able to do more science with it.

I read aggressive as in accelerating aggressively. Possibly to get around people?

While that is true, it's not fair to say "see they lied! In completely different circumstances you only get a fraction of the range!" Even for ICE vehicles they use ideal conditions to measure their MPG/range even though most people aren't driving in ideal conditions.

Looks like the plan is for it to eventually reach speeds over 4000 mph.