[olex]

"Completely successful" would've been reaching orbit. They didn't expect to get that far, but this was still a far cry from a complete success. Only milestones cleared are countdown, launch, and stable flight in fixed attitude - which still leaves a lot of big ones on the way to orbit (controlled pitchover, max-Q, stage sep, second stage ignition and operation, payload fairing separation, orbital insertion, payload separation at the very least).

[ivan_gammel]

That would be “wildly beyond expectations”. If some project achieves 100% of the goals, that is complete success by definition. They did it.