Yes, absolute success. All primary mission objectives achieved successfully AND all but one secondary objective achieved. Launch, ascent, MECO, controlled descent, turn and re-orient with nose thrusters, fire engines, decelerate, position over landing pad, in correct orientation, AND, most importantly, capture all mission telemetry and data until after ground contact.
As a mere spectator, I'll add they achieved ALL my additional personal objectives, including: end-to-end live video/audio transmission from multiple onboard and ground tracking cameras, conveniently streamed in the late afternoon for free, near-instant pre and post-test insights direct from Elon via Twitter, AND a perfectly-framed SPECTACULAR live explosion in HD to cap it all off. From my (somewhat self-centered) perspective, how could it have been any more successful?
As for your "losing money" question, I'm not sure that's much of a factor with SN8 because it was a test article not expected to probably survive. It didn't even have final or complete flight systems. If it had remained more intact after landing, perhaps they could have reused some raw materials eventually for future test articles but that also requires extensive inspection to re-validate, disassemble and integrate - all of which would consume scarce schedule time, assembly space and the limited time of skilled personnel able to build final Starships. IHMO, SpaceX wisely prioritizes speed and learning over testing costs or PR optics.
The biggest unexpected cost may just be the "cleanup on aisle SN8" but they probably didn't expect SN8 would reach the landing pad as on-target as it did and may have budgeted even more time/money for clean-up than they'll need since it was pretty dang tidy for a RUD. I guess an over-water loss might be a bit faster/cheaper to reset but then they would have lost higher priority objectives and we wouldn't have had such a SWEET front-row ticket to the finale :-).
It's not just "cleanup" - they would probably reuse the raptors and maybe batteries/ other stuff too. Losing 3 raptors is probably what hurts the most at this point (but it wasn't unexpected). All in all, the test was most definitely a success.
I'm not sure they'd even reuse them, they're still tweaking the design. The Raptors that flew yesterday were probably already outdated; the ones on SN9 are improved versions already.
As a mere spectator, I'll add they achieved ALL my additional personal objectives, including: end-to-end live video/audio transmission from multiple onboard and ground tracking cameras, conveniently streamed in the late afternoon for free, near-instant pre and post-test insights direct from Elon via Twitter, AND a perfectly-framed SPECTACULAR live explosion in HD to cap it all off. From my (somewhat self-centered) perspective, how could it have been any more successful?
As for your "losing money" question, I'm not sure that's much of a factor with SN8 because it was a test article not expected to probably survive. It didn't even have final or complete flight systems. If it had remained more intact after landing, perhaps they could have reused some raw materials eventually for future test articles but that also requires extensive inspection to re-validate, disassemble and integrate - all of which would consume scarce schedule time, assembly space and the limited time of skilled personnel able to build final Starships. IHMO, SpaceX wisely prioritizes speed and learning over testing costs or PR optics.
The biggest unexpected cost may just be the "cleanup on aisle SN8" but they probably didn't expect SN8 would reach the landing pad as on-target as it did and may have budgeted even more time/money for clean-up than they'll need since it was pretty dang tidy for a RUD. I guess an over-water loss might be a bit faster/cheaper to reset but then they would have lost higher priority objectives and we wouldn't have had such a SWEET front-row ticket to the finale :-).