It was said somewhere that one of the previous ditches in the ocean. the booster remained a little too intact and floated into Mexican waters creating a navigational hazard. So the idea was also to make sure it broke up on splashdown.
Even if they don't get to a no replacement....they still already have a massive improvement over Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle basically every tile was unique, and and the pattern was different between the different orbiters. A good bit of the months of refurbishment of the Orbiter between flights was heat shield repairs. SpaceX has already shown from when they completely retiled one of the ships. they have cut down the time to replace a single tile down to minutes instead of the hours it took with the shuttle. The Tiles are also alot more standardized so they can be more mass produced than shuttle tiles.
I think there are still a few unique tiles on Starship around joints and such IIRC, but either way, the number of tile types is much smaller for Starship.
To my thinking, the sane sequence will be launch; catch; survey and maintain (heat shield and other items); and then launch again 24 hours later if everything checks out.
And that will be an absolutely massive improvement over what we have today, let alone what we had with the Shuttle.
I work from a coffee shop a good bit. They don’t care for the most part. Assuming you tip reasonably, be nice to the staff, don’t be annoying, don’t negatively impact the other customers, be helpful when the occasion calls for it.
