What Is a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly?

That was enough for employees at SpaceX headquarters to cheer the performance — one employee sprayed a bottle of champagne on colleagues — and for Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, to congratulate the company.

Daniel Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, said that SpaceX is accustomed to airing both its successes and failures, like it did when it first tried to land Falcon 9, the rocket that is its current workhorse. Many of those attempts ended unsuccessfully.

“They put them out there for everybody to see,” Mr. Dumbacher said. “And that’s great. In fact, I applaud them for that because it demonstrated how hard some of this stuff is.”

Big NASA programs like the Space Launch System that the government agency used for a launch to the moon in November are generally not afforded the same luxury of explode-as-you-learn. There tends to be much more testing and analysis on the ground — which slows development and increases costs — to avoid embarrassing public failures.

“Government programs are not allowed to operate that way because of that, because of the way we have all the stakeholders being able to watch over and tell you no,” Mr. Dumbacher said.