[martindevans]

Early in the development of the Saturn-V they had issues with thrust instability in the F1 engine (in the worst cases causing it to explode). They had trouble diagnosing the issue (and blew up some engines) before they came up with the idea of setting off a small bomb inside the engine to trigger instability on demand (destroying some more engines).

Do you consider that a failure of the Saturn-V program? Or do you understand the value of testing prototype hardware to destruction?