Huge! If SpaceX pulls off a ship catch, it’ll be one of the biggest milestones and achievements for the program so far. Or, if they miss too late, potentially one of the biggest disasters if they take out launch infrastructure. Excitement guaranteed.
At the same time, it’s depressing to see the 1st stage seemingly take a step back. Hopefully this is just a reset to a new local minimum on the way to a higher local maximum.
With V2, the booster performed very well, but it took the ship a few tries to reproduce all milestones V1 had already accomplished. With V3, we are seeing the opposite. Still, the booster performed better than on the previous flight.
My impression is that the ship has performed exceptionally well for all (controlled) reentries and landings, even far outside of the expected operating regime. Without a flap to watch that gets slowly eaten by plasma, the last reentries were delightfully boring. Of course, we cannot judge if the landing precision was sufficient for all those flights, but they seem to be confident.
I guess Raptor 3 is to blame. All problems we seen in V3 flights are engine related.
Could also be a hotstaging issue. All the major engine issues occurred soon after that.
