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The failure system (with Critical Failure = Misson failed + all hand dead, (normal) Failure = Mission failed, astronauts survived .. and so on) sometimes can lead to rather strange results (at least if we look at it from the standpoint of realism)

I had one of the rather strange results in a moon landing mission (Apollo style):

In the first half everything went fine ... the lander landed on Moon, the astronauts did the Moonwalk, planted their flag and collected samples and the crew successfully returned to the mothership.
Then on the way back disaster struck ... while the spaceship coasted towards earth, it encountered a failure.
Immediately the astronauts were teleported back home and the mission gave no archievements (like the "Landed on moon" or "Collected samples" - archievement).

Lets visualize this a little bit:
I guess the failure that struck my ship on its way home could be rationalized s something similar to Apollo 13. Some major fault or explosion in the service module and the crew only barely making it back home.

What doesn´t fit into reality however is, that the failure resulted in not getting an archievement for landing on Moon.

The whole world was able to watch on their TV screens how Jose Rocha climbed down the landers ladder and said the well known sentence: "Wow, didn´t think it would be THIS grey".
The whole world also was able to watch as the astronauts collected samples and planted the flag on moons surface.

The astronauts even made it back home (despite the failure in the service module on their way home).

So, from a normal standpoint one would assume that even the russians would accept our claim that the mission (despite its failure condition on the way back home) resulted in a real landing on the Moon (after all we also have a flag on Moon to support our claims).

IMHO it would definitely ne great if the failure system (for the purpose of archievements) would make a distinctions between failures happening before the mission/archievement goalds have been fulfilled and failures happening after that.

fully agree, mission report screed need a lot of improving.

1. when viewing mission and something fail, lets we have yellow icon on screen on that system (isntead of all green), same red for failure.
2. posibility in yellow case to make a decision (in case of launc abodon/scurb mission, on case of astronaut problems - continue and try to finish mission/end mission prematurely....etc)
3. add partial succes missions - it make no sense to declare mission faulure and get 0 prestige for some glitch/failure which failed mission (like proposed shortening of mission due to astronaut sicknes) or mentioned moon mission - main goal was archived but in end something happened, mission failed but astronauts made it home alive.
4. when skiping mission videos, lets make color coded step circles (only rims?) so we instantly know if everhing went ok, were problems (yelow) or failed (red).
and i here report posible bug - when skipping one mission like this - manned one - whole mission was ok, until one step failed - reentry, mission was declareed (normal) failure, and astronaut was alive - wtf ? if reentry fail, then only 2 posible outcomes are posible - craft burned when reentying - crew dead, failed to enter atmosphere and go down - after time crew dead, and because crew was alive, well craft must maked it back to eart in one piece, so mission should be full sucess, despite problems with reentry.
more later

Fully agree,
the all or nothing approach should be improved

There where multiple times in history with the Russians program achieving partial success and then moved forward with something else
In the game it is either total success or defeat

I also fully agree. This is actually a step back from the original BARIS. In fact, one of the nail biting things in BARIS was having a failure, recovering, and watching through the mission steps to see if the astronauts make it home. Here it is just....failure. negative prestige and normally astronauts dead. I actually really like the new options in this version regarding hardware, missions, training up engineers and controllers, etc. However, the overly simplistic approach to failures removes a lot of the immersion.