Apparently you know nothing about PR "best practices". No consultant worth their salt would have allowed SpaceX to handle the secondary mission failure they way they did. They made a series of classic and potentially disastrous mistakes. The best thing they could have done was address the issue head on with what information they had and then filled in further details as they were known.
To build credibility you have to admit failure. You can't just omit the bad news while focusing on the good news. You can't allow rumor and speculation to be your spokesperson. There's no way around the fact that an engine failure led to the failure of their secondary mission. Test platform or not, fully insured or not, an expensive piece of hardware became a shooting star. Someone didn't get what they paid for.
How it was handled was seriously amateurish. It made me cringe because I really want to see SpaceX (and Musk) succeed. Shit happens, but how you respond to that as an organization defines you for better or worse.
To build credibility you have to admit failure. You can't just omit the bad news while focusing on the good news. You can't allow rumor and speculation to be your spokesperson. There's no way around the fact that an engine failure led to the failure of their secondary mission. Test platform or not, fully insured or not, an expensive piece of hardware became a shooting star. Someone didn't get what they paid for.
How it was handled was seriously amateurish. It made me cringe because I really want to see SpaceX (and Musk) succeed. Shit happens, but how you respond to that as an organization defines you for better or worse.