@DanHomerick @ChristopherRandles I just finished reading all of your comments. Thank you to you both as you’ve done most of the thinking for me already. I apologize for not better clarifying this in the original post. I am not sure if I had thought about it quite this thoroughly.

I agree with @DanHomerick ’s comment starting “IMO, Entry, Decent, and Landing should be considered one continuous sequence.” I will likely use almost this exact language in my update to the market.

I will add because i think it is more precise, at some point, as with the booster launches, I assume there will be some sort of call out that the ship is targeting a catch before entry. I would be looking for this or some other clarification later that this decision point was passed with the intent to follow the catch trajectory.

Let me know what y’all think. Probably will update in a few days.

@RyanTyznar Divert to a splashdown is obviously a no resolution per the description.

If SpaceX say they will attempt a ship catch, if all goes well, but ship burns up on re-entry or is lost at some other earlier time, then it wasn't possible for there to be an attempt. Does stating intention mean that launch counts as first attempt or does there have to be an opportunity to attempt a catch before you say there is an attempt?

Resulting in
A no resolution as ship lost despite there not really being a first attempt opportunity? or
Is it treated as not the first attempt because they couldn't attempt it? So we wait for another launch where a ship catch is both intended and there is an opportunity to have a first attempt?

If there isn't really an opportunity for a catch then a ship loss without attempting a catch resulting in a no resolution feels like the question doesn't really measure probability of a catch success?

@ChristopherRandles IMO, Entry, Decent, and Landing should be considered one continuous sequence. If the Ship is sufficiently damaged upon entry that they can't make the planned catch, that should resolve NO. Whether it is diverted to the sea or completely destroyed shouldn't matter, either way the planned catch wasn't successful.

Still just IMO, a mishap that cancels that attempt sometime prior to EDL shouldn't resolve NO. It would be good to have clarification from the creator (@RyanTyznar).

@DanHomerick yes I said if ship burns up on re-entry or before. So I was thinking ship completely destroyed in re-entry heating or earlier rather than a bit a damage.

But yes, re-entry could be a tricky one.: If the re-entry heat damages flaps rather than destroys ship and this is detected and they divert for this then that seems like a failure to catch due to something related to catching and the question should resolve no. If the ship gets a hole somewhere that doesn't affect catch hardware and ship blows up that seems like they didn't get to a catch attempt for reasons completely unconnected to catching.

If the ship is lost earlier, like never separates from booster then that seems more like they never got to attempt a catch. These earlier losses of ship seem like they should be easier.

If creator is trying to measure catch success probability seems like early loss of ship is not a first attempt and some form of definition of when the launch counts as a first catch attempt seems needed. "When the launch counts as a first catch attempt" might be defined as some flight stage such as re-entry has to commence or it could be done differently like whether the loss of the ship happened for reasons related or unrelated to catching hardware.

It is also possible creator might alternately want to measure probability of any failure not just catch failure when SpaceX say they intend to attempt a catch on a launch. This doesn't seem like it is the intention of the title question but that might just be my interpretation of the question.

A case for NO is that the tower is much more valuable than any given Ship, so they'll be very protective of it.

With the first booster catches, they were already planning on tearing down the tower -- it wasn't compatible with the V3 ship design, for multiple reasons.

I expect there'll be at least one flight where they'll try the catch if everything's perfect, but the Ship will be waived off for any one of a thousand reasons.

@DanHomerick Re "they were already planning on tearing down the tower"

They were planning and have torn down the launch mount at pad 1. While there may have been uncertainty about what SpaceX were planning to tear down before the work started, I am now pretty sure SpaceX never felt it was necessary nor planned to tear down the tower.

Protective and lots of potential reasons yes, but booster record is
Flight 5 Successfully caught on first attempt
Flight 6 had a tower damage issue so booster was diverted to gulf
Flights 7 and 8 had successful booster catches

Other flight did not plan to attempt catches. so 75% success on catch.

Starship is more difficult due to much faster re-entry speeds and the flip after the bellyflop, so it seems sensible for probability to be lower than 75% but how much lower than that is appropriate?

@ChristopherRandles good correction -- I should have said renovate the pad or something. As you say, the tower structure itself may one of the pieces that is only modified, rather than replaced.

NO @ 28%. SpaceX requires two perfect ocean soft landings of Ship before attempting a tower catch — they haven't achieved even one yet. Ship reentry is fundamentally harder than booster return: orbital velocity (~7.8 km/s vs ~2 km/s), extreme thermal loads, and no analogous Ship landing history. SpaceX lost Ships on flights 3 and 6, with reentry issues on multiple others. Historical pattern: novel SpaceX maneuvers usually fail on first attempt (Falcon 9 took ~6 landing tries). The booster catch success on Flight 5 was the exception, built on years of F9 experience. 53% prices this like a coin flip when the base rate for first-attempt novel maneuvers is much lower.