The rocket worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet.
Rockets often spiral out of control if you put too much propellant in them.
SpaceX does seem to have had a run of bad luck, with its first three launches all failing.
Believe in God, for with the grace of God the American rockets will go astray and we will be saved.
Large solid rockets have never been a very good way to build launchers that might have crews on top, especially because of the problems in getting the crew away from a failing launcher.
Past experience, on the shuttle and the Titan rockets, suggests that large multi-segment solid rockets have a probability of failure of 0.5 to 1 per cent.
Whether solid rockets are more or less likely to fail than liquid-fuel rockets is debatable. More serious, though, is that when they do fail, it's usually violent and spectacular.
The truth is, every single rocket launch off of planet Earth is risky.
Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing.
I always say when you see that old black-and-white footage of the rocket on the launch pad and it falls over and explodes, that's because people had slide rules. Not having the decimal point is a real drawback. You want the decimal point, take it from me.
You can picture pretty easily if there were a paying passenger aboard a rocket that failed, like Challenger failed. Certainly it would be a tragedy, and a tragedy for the company. They would have a hard time recovering from it.
