PPs. I wasn’t real comfortable with the vague response I heard to the question about how many and/or which abort sites would have to be no-go to cause a launch to be scrubbed by themselves. Those kind of informal criteria (if they in fact are…) are invitations to “go for it” risk-taking.

The Russians didn’t have any conveniently located oceans, so they don’t use water landing, but last-second retro-rockets. Boeing uses airbags, which strikes me as a simple and effective solution. SpaceX of course wanted to use propulsive landing, but applying that to manned vehicles was a bit too far of a step for NASA.

Bottom line is we on Earth live in a deep gravity well, the deepest in the solar system of any surface we could launch from or land on. It is a penalty we have to find a better solution for than landing in water just because that’s the way we’ve always done it.

LocalFluff Re: Boca Chica, I have no doubt that’s in the future (SpaceX is growing there, and fast) but I suspect NASA wanted this done on their turf, and there is likely a lot more infrastructure in place for manned launches at Canaveral than in Boca Chica. That said, Boca’s got some serious advantages as well.