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The problem is not that they couldn't figure out how to land but, from what I think, the reason they didn't land it and let it get destroyed is the huge amounts of forces that the plane's body would experience during both the acceleration and deceleration. Those would heavily damage the body and, of course, we have got ways of making bodies hold that much pressure (in the case of space shuttles) but, perhaps, because this is a prototype, they didn't want to spend too much on it and just want to test how the engine itself would work.