Failure doesn’t have to have a negative connotation, we just match it as so in our culture. The full mission plan wasn’t achieved and the rocket did in fact fail. That said, it achieved precisely what they hoped it would achieve as failure was an expected and acceptable outcome.
The usage of “failure” as a way to describe not achieving the maximally ideal outcome makes no sense to me. I’ve never read or heard it used to mean that.
It would have been a failure if the data logging failed to transmit, or if it had immediately exploded and destroyed the launch tower.
Things are, they don’t fail or succeed in a qualitative sense. You can only fail against some objective measure. If you do nothing, you still haven’t failed. But you haven’t done anything either. If you try something and you establish an objective measure to achieve and it fails, you and your efforts _have not failed_. The positive action of doing still is, and the positive action of analyzing the failed objective still is, and it opens the way to another action as an evolution of the original action.
But things just are what they are. They aren’t good or bad. Good or bad is your interpretation of the way things are. If you consider doing nothing good, then you succeed by not trying. If you consider trying good, then you succeed by simply trying.
