Yes. Chrome has multi-process architecture, with renderer processes running in a sandbox. They are the ones that deal with untrusted stuff coming from the Internet and so it is safe to assume that they can be compromised (relatively) easily. The puppet master for all those processes is the browser process, and it is Really Bad if you could exploit it. The described bug presumably does it (note how "sandbox escape" was used in one of the comments), but I'm not competent enough to say exactly how. ;)

Edit: just wanted to riff on your analogy. It is relatively simple to crash/shoot down a rocket, but this exploit gets into the control room and could allow the attacker to see where all other rockets are going & maybe redirect/crash them.