If he doesn't write his own tweets then he hires someone with the same personality to write them. They are not notably restrained or anti-inflammatory.

Such Elon rage! I love the downvotes. Always worth it.

That's basically what Musk said, yes: that they need to work on both engine performance and performance consistency. He said they'd be cutting off the main engines one second sooner to provide more margin for boost-back.

Amazing that a one-second difference can matter, but those things go through tons of fuel every one of those seconds!

landing footage shows exactly why they didn't attempt the tower catch - the final braking burn was engine rich (green tint), it didn't blow up, but there was a respectable chance of it just crashing into the tower running on less than fumes

The goal, as I understand it, is to return the booster with as little fuel as possible at time of catch -- and not run short.

The booster footage indicated to me that its engines turned off, and then the body of the booster imploded, before it touched the ground and then became the expected fireball.

I'm definitely not a rocket scientist, but this series of events leads me to believe that the fuel was absolutely exhausted.

Their risk tolerance would probably be greater if both towers were fully operational. But any damage to the only functional tower during booster catch = an automatic abort to the ship catch one day later, and the ship catch is what was really interesting at this point of development.

The existing towers can only handle empty ships & boosters. The tower stacks them, then they’re fueled. A catch-only tower would avoid some cladding and the propellant loading lines, but it would still need a deluge system and a QD arm to replace any remaining propellant with inert gas. At that point you might as well pay a little more and get a fully capable tower.