Steve,

That is a favorite scene of mine. However, they had to tell a story in only a couple of minutes. The following is half an hour of the same story from the 1940s to the 2010s (Goddard’s failures in the 1920s are not included).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McbCwSW2moo

To continue with the point that you were making: getting into space is difficult and dangerous. There is a reason that rocket science is considered difficult. The scientists and engineers have a relatively small engine that burns fuel and oxidizer at a rate of tens of Megawatts to tens of thousands of Megawatts. That lightweight, high temperature, high pressure, vibrating, high thrust engine is located only a few feet away from a thin, lightweight fuel tank. If something goes just a little wrong, such as the vibrations increase, catastrophically bad things can happen very fast.

Sometimes problems occur because of control problems. A rocket can get into an attitude in which it structurally breaks up due to atmospheric forces, or it may deviate from the planned course and head toward populated areas. A Long March actually crashed into the nearby town (24:15 mark in the above video).

The “Big Boys” didn’t have problems only in the 1950s and early 1960s. They continue to have problems to this day.

It’s rocket science.

But it sort of looks like the engines cut off for a second or so and then refired but the rocket was way off vertical.

Not being close to vertical is a major problem with this design. It makes any recovery very hard and more than likely would take up a lot of airspace. It would loose a lot of altitude before regaining full control.

That sounds like a normal edge case found, which was the purpose of the program.

Looks very unrelated to launch ops.