Damien_The_Unbeliever

All indications currently are no, they don't plan to add legs. Not for terrestrial use. The catch arms aren't badly named and aren't just for stacking.

Bear in mind that whilst they splash actual SS booster cores, they can feed altered telemetry to the chopsticks *as if* the booster is trying to land within their grip (i.e. with just adjusted coordinates). They can then compare actual vs expected performance and not switch to actual catching attempts until confident. Heck, once they have one SS core ditch they can replay it multiple times. I'm not saying they will do this, just a simple, obvious, thing they can do before actual catch attempts, if they're not certain.

And yet, hear my out, the SpaceX engineers have still built this thing. They're not going by gut feelings. They're not going by "lets build this thing and see if it can catch a descending stage". They are going by a sincere belief that they have built something that, by the numbers, is going to work. So, maybe, since they have built this entire structure, wait and see if it will work.

The idea that the SpaceX engineers wouldn't be building off of the decades of experience since N1, in ignorance of N1, and not have any idea of how to protect their systems... Thank goodness a random Internet commenter is here (a random game forum) to set them right. Are you viewing the site as it will be used during any static fire attempts or launches? NO. We know the site is in flux. We know they at least know how to build berms, and are aware of flame trenches, etc. They've also expressed (via Elon's interview with Tim Dodd) that Stage 0 is the most important to preserve.

Also, and this is an area they can optimize around, is that air flow through the fins during ascent and descent is obviously in different directions. There are plenty of shapes/structures/profiles that will be far less draggy in one direction than the other.

And re-establishing a track record of doing the static fires with payload integrated. If the loss is far enough back and they're doing plenty of pre-integrated fires, they can persuade all but the most risk averse customers to go with it again and speed up their tempo.

Call me silly, but they probably don't intend to always run production in a field. They're building throw-away prototypes. They're already on version 2 and these things don't currently require precise engineering (of the bodies at least) nor much in the way of servicing.

I know this is "after the fact", and the launch was successful, but your "net win" analysis seemed to completely ignore that if there had been a failure in DM1, it would have been a CRS-7/Amos-6 scenario. Something unexpected happened. They'd have been shutdown, possibly from all ops, and a lengthy analysis period would have ensued. It's not KSP, you don't just dust yourself off and have another try.

And I think that would be precisely why they *wouldn't* go inert in the upper stage. You need to prove that the abort works even with tonnes of liquid kaboom in close proximity to the Dragon.

Nope. I think they're still planning the "catchers mitt" net recovery. They're using a helicopter for the practice *drops*.

I thought this was the Science and Spaceflight section of the forum. Where we'd only get reasoned opinions on things that can reasonably be specced out. Rather than people randomly speculating on future vessels. Why do I always have to wade through pages of people speculating about what SpaceX *might* do based on marketing materials rather than (as I'd expect here) people only talking about *proven* abilities. Seeing people randomly speculate at what SpaceX might do in the future is uninteresting to me. I want to find somewhere I can just find SpaceX **news** (and other providers) news. Where do I find that?

You could read the article. This is discussed.

back haul is the comms between the towers and the rest of the network. They're talking about being able to deploy cell towers to remote locations without having to get fibre to them or to arrange line-of-sight for microwave links.

Space isn't cold. It's well insulated, since there's nothing to conduct or convect heat away. There's a reason why radiators on e.g. ISS are huge deals.

But they need to stop making changes in order for it to get man-rated for Crew Dragon. So it's likely that this will be a stable design for some time, unless the early block 5 flights uncover some catastrophic unanticipated issues.