For whatever reason, Wired preferred the clickbait title, but the opening sentence of the article is: "On Wednesday afternoon, SpaceX successfully launched—and nearly landed—a fully-assembled prototype of its next generation Starship rocket on a suborbital flight from its facility in south Texas."
The Wired article was full of misleading information (implying that the rocket failed to reach space, when that was never a mission objective) and outright lies (stating that the Starship is a scaled-up Falcon 9, the name of the Starship+SuperHeavy combo, the number of engines that the system will have, etc, etc).
Headlines are usually written by an editor, not the writer, and chosen to generate clicks. That’s why there’s often such a contrast between the headline and the article.
To add to my comment-- I think the CNN headline got it better without the softening euphemism by pointing out it was a success: "A SpaceX Mars rocket prototype just exploded. It was still a success"
I don’t think it exploded. It broke up by hitting the ground (not by exploding) which caused fuel and oxygen to leak out, which then ignited in a large fireball. But maybe this is splitting hairs. It sure looked like an explosion.
Landing safely was
an unexpected outcome, so it’s remarkable (thus making it into the headline) that it came close to doing so. The right wording is highly context dependent. Here the “nearly landed” phrasing appropriately acknowledges the realistic expectations for the launch by those most in the know, the SpaceX team.
“Crash” would be totally appropriate in a different context with different expectations. But it would make less sense in this case.