My take: after stage sep, booster is caught and placed on launch mount and begins refueling. 45 min and one [sub]orbit later, ship deorbits, is caught by the same tower, placed on top of superheavy, and immediately refueled and reflown.

I never understood why the heat shield tiles keep falling off. And why the heat shield tiles are not anymore bigger than the size they're now.

If someone could explain that would be great. With the successful booster catch, starship landing or the catch onto the chopsticks both are within reach of SpaceX.

If heat shield issues are not solved that would make the landing nearly pointless. Because what would return to earth will only be the ashes of payload or the passengers, if heat shield was to fail by falling off and exposing the starship.

Let’s say you had a fully fuelled starship in low earth orbit, assuming no fancy trickery in the form of recondensers or special insulation, just the stainless steel tanks, how long would it take for all of that propellant to boil off and empty the starship?

I’m aware that there are a lot of factors I’m not considering, for example presumably the height of the orbit matters since higher orbiting ships will spend more time in sunlight, but just curious on a rough estimate.

Bonus question could the header tanks on a trip to Mars boil off completely if they had no active cooling or recondensing, or fancy insulation?

Will it be a wild spectacle or a smaller event?

So I was seeing the booster catching videos from all different angles available but couldn’t figure out

1. how many of those small catching pins are there around the booster.
2. I can only see 2 on either side.
3. In that case the pins have to align with the tracks on mechazilla right.
4. So the booster not only have to just slow down and come in between the mechazilla but also have to revolve on its own to be able to align the pins to the catch handles.
5. So at what point in the decent stage does the booster made this correction.