They landed on legs for the suborbital hops. They will probably land on legs on the moon and on Mars. But for Earth recovery the plan is to be caught by chopsticks. Will we see them change that plan and return to landing legs?
Only counts if it's returning from orbit, that way I hope to skip any attempts for testing moon landing legs.
Resolves Yes if Starship lands on legs after returning from orbit.
Resolves No the first time Starship successfully gets caught by the chopsticks without blowing up or other major issues. Minor tile damage or something like that is fine.
This is only about the second stage, booster doesn't matter.
Market will be extended as needed.
1,000
3.00@Mqrius is the closing date on this also when you'd apply a NO resolution?
What flipped me to YES is the military's interest in Starship as a way to deploy stuff in a hurry. Landing legs required. I can see that at least making it to a testing phase.
You'd think that would be surely suborbital, but I think in practice they wouldn't be able to launch at just any inclination and going fully orbital allows more flexibilty.
@DanHomerick it's not date dependent.
Resolves No the first time Starship successfully gets caught by the chopsticks without blowing up or other major issues.
Reason for this is that I can see Starship will eventually land on legs in places, even if it's just the moon and Mars. But the question is trying to scissor for those who have no faith in chopstick landing at all and expect SpaceX to go back on that direction.
@Mqrius Whoops! Sorry, I had read it properly the first time, but on returning to the question I just wasn't paying enough attention...
Moon landing legs don't need same strength 1/6 of gravity but may need to cope with uneven surface. Seems like quite different requirements than on Earth. If they catch booster first, catching ship has less mass so shouldn't be a problem. More possible landing locations might be nice to have but is it worth sacrificing payload mass if launch tower availability doesn't look like a problem? So I am not sure I see a good use case for it but we don't yet know what problems will arise with attempted catches so never say never.
@ChristopherRandles The problem with catching Ship is that it doesn't have load bearing pegs like Booster does. They also can't easily add them because they wouldn't survive reentry easily. Elon has mentioned some vague ideas but we haven't seen any hardware that would allow easy catching of Ship.
I still don't think they'd add Earth legs but it's not impossible, especially if they want to recover this year.
@Mqrius Actually now that I think of it, where does the wonky load spreader attach that they use to transport it by crane?
Edit: it's the same hard points as the chopstick uses, but that's not pegs so it's almost impossible to land with.