@YaakovSaxon pretty sure this is a NO - the booster got as far as engine relight for a landing burn, and seems to have RUD'd approximately at that moment.

@chrisjbillington

From SpaceX:

https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-3

• Following separation, the Super Heavy booster successfully completed its flip maneuver and completed a full boostback burn to send it towards its splashdown point in the Gulf of Mexico.

• Super Heavy successfully lit several engines for its first ever landing burn before the vehicle experienced a RUD (that’s SpaceX-speak for “rapid unscheduled disassembly”). The booster’s flight concluded at approximately 462 meters in altitude and just under seven minutes into the mission.

@chrisjbillington I think this is far from obvious; if "the booster reached the intended landing or splashdown zone in nominal condition to perform the landing" we would probably expect that the engines would relight as intended. It's at least plausible that the vehicle sustained some sort of damage that affected the ability to relight, or that it arrived at that 'gate' with non-optimal velocity or orientation such that they didn't.

@JoshuaWilkes I interpret the engines lighting to be part of the landing, and thus what this question is about - it would be very odd if the engines not lighting were strong evidence that the precondition wasn't met. The engines failing to light is one of the primary ways landing can go wrong.

I don't think "if everything upstream was nominal, the engines would have lit" is particularly true, except in the butterfly-effect sense where in some sense every failure is caused by things arbitrarily far in the past. Happy to wait and see if something dramatically went wrong earlier that caused the relights to fail, but I suspect that as with the boostback burn relights failing in IFT-2, SpaceX will keep the blame "local". I.e. even though the sloshing caused by hot staging plausibly made trouble for the relights, SpaceX did not eliminate the negative acceleration the booster experienced during stage separation instead modifying aspects of the booster so that it would work under those conditions anyway.

SpaceX said that the booster completed a full boostback burn, my previous hesitation to buy this down lower was due to not being sure this was the case. It's up to @YaakovSaxon, but I don't think it makes sense to blame earlier events unless there is something fairly dramatic.

@chrisjbillington I think my final sentence qualifying what I meant is broadly aligned with what you call 'fairly dramatic'. I'm happy to see what SpaceX say and what @YaakovSaxon thinks.

@JoshuaWilkes @chrisjbillington So it sounds like we have agreement to wait and see if any further evidence comes out (sometime between now and when they schedule IFT-4) suggesting that there was some particular damage to the booster that made it definitely not in condition to successfully perform the landing burn.

I will note that I think the implication from the statement Chris lined to is that they did not know at the time that the landing burn was doomed. So unless that statement is just misleading, I think the only remaining way for this to resolve YES is for them to realize after the fact that there was then some major damage that definitely doomed it.

Anyway I'm happy to leave this unresolved. I'm closing trading for now (but I could reopen if you prefer to keep trading on it, let me know), but will wait to resolve until IFT-4 is scheduled or we have consensus on the resolution, whichever comes first.