So beyond the success of yesterday's flight, let me point out that SpaceX still have a lot of issues to resolve. Booster had one outer engine shut off immediately after startup and the other engines compensated. OK, they can lose up to 3 engines before an abort is necessary. Presumably they are still using Gen1 or is this a Gen 2 engine? They definitely need to up their game for reliability in terms of eventual re-usability.
2nd, during the descent when the engines re-fired to slow the booster, one engine again shut off, and something exploded and fragmented and debris was seen flying past the camera. Was this the outer ring engine the perhaps exploded and perhaps damaged the middle ring engine? Or did the middle ring engine explode on its own? What would happen if the booster shed this debris while attempting to land at the tower - debris could rain over the entire landing site, puncture ground fuel tanks and infrastructure and possibly damaging the launch/landing tower. Until they sort out this problem, I don't think they are ready for IFT-5 to land on the tower. They need to fly again to PROVE reliability before capturing.
While we all marvelled at the fin that managed to stay on and function long enough to the end, they will have to redesign/re-engineer the fin going forward to prevent the burn-through, perhaps in version 2 of Ship but until then they still have a lot of work to do before it can be considered reliable enough to even begin thinking about capturing. I look forward to IFT-5, 6, 7, and likely 8th flights before they begin thinking about re-using any components.
