They know how the press works though. There's a huge amount of attention being paid to this launch, and journalists will be racing to report it ASAP. If they announce immediately that the centre core has been destroyed, the headlines around the world are going to be "SPACEX LAUNCHES CAR BUT LOSES SPACECRAFT", and the failure, however partial, will be a central plank of the story.

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.

Yeah, presumably they worked out the various optimal messaging strategies for every possible combination of failure/success of each part of the mission in advance. Amazing work on their part; I was super impressed after I deduced what you wrote about 2 minutes after the stream ended.

Agree it is strange. I love their "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster" film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ

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

It wasn't a lie; they just didn't know the result. There have been multiple cases in the past when contact was temporarily lost after drone ship landing.

It's ok to be professional and say that you need a day to look at a failure (if it's that) before you announce it with the beginnings of an understanding.

A restart failure indicates there may be a systemic flaw in all Falcons that could impact recovery efforts in the future as well as other missions that depend on reliable restart capability. One would hope that they have enough telemetry to diagnose the cause.

I'm sure they do, they normally have pretty detailed information on failures.

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.

They do eventually come out with it but pretty much every failure they've had so far they've kind of glossed over it during the livestream then come back to it later during a separate press conference.