I might be reading into something that's not there, but the presenters (I didn't get their names) acted like they received surprising news in thier monitors at 39:03[1] just as they were about to report on the drone ship landing.

Dude: "We've just gotten confirmation..."

Lady: "oh!"

Dude: "Oh"

Lady: "[laughs] We are waiting to hear what happens..."

1. https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=39m5s

https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=38m20s

... and then back to the presenters. As someone said to me, "That's their lying face!" :)

Can't fault them for wanting to dwell on the positives though, was an amazing moment to watch.

Edit: You can switch cameras on the above youtube video to the countdown net; you can clearly hear them saying "We lost the centre core" at 38m30s - not sure if that means "lost signal of" or otherwise. The people in the control room appear to become more muted at that point, though they still seem composed. It's really not clear.

Edit: On the countdown net you can hear some minutes later "suspected loss of signal": https://youtu.be/-B_tWbjFIGI?t=42m21s

Doubly so when the "failure" isn't part of the primary mission.

If they delay the core announcement by a couple of hours or so, the headlines are all "SPACEX SENDS CAR TO MARS", with a minor note appended later to say, "A SpaceX spokesperson later confirmed the landing of the spacecraft's central core did not succeed and it has been lost." Like it or not, issues of timing like this makes a big difference to how the exact same events are reported and perceived.

Watching the countdown net it seemed plausible that they didn't know whether it had successfully landed either.

But even in the worst case first stage engine restart issues will never halt falcon launches. The first stage engines don't ever need to restart to complete the primary mission, and while landing the first stages is a great bonus, it is and always will be a secondary mission objective.

It is a bit odd they haven't announced that it was lost yet, but I agree that seems very likely.

Also in the video if you watch mission control’s wall of monitors you can see the feed cut back with an empty drone ship a minute or so later. Seems to confirm that the rocket missed the deck due to the engines not lighting.

Just speculation, but it makes sense to me...

Although there hasn't been an official statement by SpaceX yet, and whoever said "we lost the center core" could have just been referring to the video feed from the drone ship.

For those like me unfamiliar with the terminology used in this context, is this wording reserved for situations where the rocket is destroyed or could it also mean they lost contact/video feed with the center core?

We already dig other nice videos on youtube with rocket launches and the like. "How it's made" and so on. Some manufacturing videos have, believe it or not, caught her attention for half an hour! I think it was especially a video from manufacturing the Mini (car), lots of robots and automation.

You can hear "Centre core defect on shutdown". Definitely didn't make it.