How is that exactly?

Launch one really was a comedy of errors in the launch platform.

In launch 2 the booster did exactly what every other booster by everyone else (except the falcon 9) does. Got it's payload to the target altitude before separation.

The second stage reached space.

The N1 platform didn't do any of that.

You have no idea what a testing platform looks like, and are too used to NASA one shot rockets that cost 3 billion each just to make sure nothing goes wrong.

The booster exploded after separation, which is never a good sign. Normal boosters for modern rockets don't do that.

The second stage exploded as well, possibly because of FTS, possibly not (was it ever confirmed?).

Well it's not a normal booster. It's a test booster. Also normal boosters don't do a flip while getting blasted with rocket exhaust.

SpaceX clearly has a winning method, as they have a success rate of 99.3% and hold the record for most consecutive successful launches at 253. Second place is Soyuz-U, which had 112 consecutive successful launches and an overall success rate of 97.3%. SpaceX has more consecutive successful booster landings (173) than any space program has had successful launches.

> The booster exploded after separation, which is never a good sign. Normal boosters for modern rockets don't do that.

It exploded while attempting to test its landing maneuver. If it just turned off the engines and dropped itself into the ocean like a normal booster, it likely would not have exploded (for one thing, there wouldn't be any fuel left in it being saved for landing).

It exploded after flipping around 180 degrees.

A few people have slosh modeled the booster flip around duplicating observed speeds and accelerations and surmise the following. The flip around was too rapid causing slosh to one size of the booster. In addition there was negative acceleration that would have allowed the remaining fuel to experience zero gees pulling it away from the bottom of the rocket. When the engines fired back up it would have hit the bottom of the rocket with something between 20 and 100 tons of force. Based on SpaceX description, the FTS was not used.

The second stage at least appears to be oxygen leakage. The graphs shown on flight day started showing a more rapid depletion of oxygen after second stage lighting. SpaceXs language was something like 'flight was unable to reach orbital insertion and was terminated, pointing to the FTS being used.

SpaceX is taking a very different approach from those of other launch companies, taking a far more rapid prototyping style approach to development, knowing that the first few iterations are going to have problems that they can fix in the later versions.

This sounds wasteful on paper, but in practice it is much much faster and amazingly enough cheaper. With traditional rockets you never make enough to enjoy economies of scale, but with SpaceX's approach they've dropped the cost of the engine by about an order of magnitude over just a few years, and it was already a very inexpensive engine. For the cost of a single RS-25 you can buy 400 Raptors.

Exactly. With traditional development it is very expensive if you find a core problem in late development. In rapid development you expect to catch it early.

Seems to me it's more the inverse - Elon bashers trying to find a way to paint everything he's ever done as a dumb failure because they hate some unrelated thing that he did. Not saying the guy is perfect, but if he is a fuckup, you should be able to make the case without disingenuous arguments like misunderstanding the purpose of test flights.

Multiple iterations of test flights that are expected to fail is a much faster way to develop impressive tech than spending 3x longer doing on the ground analysis of every detail of everything because you can't bear the PR hit of something that can be painted as a failure.

I think you're showing a lack of understanding of Spacex's fast development processes but as an aside the word cue (rather than queue) is used when we are referring to a sign or signal given by something or someone.