Your last two posts! A lot of information to absorb.
Will NASA ever land and reuse as does Space X? Probably not, they have the federal budget to waste.
Those two Falcon 1st stages soft-landing was a sight to behold.
Was there not what seemed like an impossibly long checklist of launch items for fed gov to sign off on before they would sanction another Starship launch?
After the first Starship launch and its destruction of the launch pad flinging chunks of concrete miles away the febs out the slow walk on it that and both vehicles blew up not self destructed. The second launch also had RUDs and again fedzilla said wait we wanna know why.
The third launch only the booster after its successful boost back burn didn’t light off enough engines to softly splashdown but it was at all times on a safe flight path so no hold there. Starship itself made the climb to orbit and main engine cut off their primary goal.
Somewhere just after MEO you could see in the HD video stream venting and the start of rolling of the ship. This means they lost their reaction control system RCS. The large amounts of gas seen venting is most likely the dreaded stuck open valve fault that plagued American space rockets all through the development phases of virtually every rocket system. Still Starship managed to get deep into the plasma sheath phase of reentry with it’s flaps valiantly trying to save the ship you could see full over flap movements as they desperately tried to get a grip on the thin air to save the ship. The fact that they had not only video of a tumbling ship in mach 20 plasma but HD video is nothing short of a breakthrough they used multiple starlink sats and antennas to shoot a microwave beam back out the tail of the plasma wake. That alone is a major accomplishment.
None of those issues would cause another ground hold since the booster did its job in disposable mode it’s already a go for those kinds of launches. They want to catch the booster in a hover with giant “chopsticks” as Elon calls them. Evil genius that he is, as only a evil genius would try to fly back a 40 story building sized rocket hover it and then grab it Mr. Miyagi style with chopsticks.
The RCS problem is fixable with fail safe valves as in fail closed by default on your vent and purge lines you can always vent in an emergency via the thrusters themselves using two at a time to cancel out any pitch roll or yaw. If they need more RCS control than cold gas thrusters can provide they already tested bifuel gas/gas methane/oxygen spark ignition thrusters with ten to 100 times the thrust of ppfft off gas bleed RCS. Hot gas RCS has never been done with methane O2 but it has been done with H2/O2 or they could go old school and use N2O4+MMH nasty stuff but every time you pulse those two liquids together they ignite on contact every single time no matter how short burst ignition delay is microseconds.
SpaceX knows why they lost RCS they have starship 4 tested and ready to fly in short order it already did its main engine full length test burn and its single engine deorbit burn test. I expect that S4 will make it to soft splashdown they probably will hover it proving it’s not a suicide burn on landing.