They are already getting good experience (and can experiment with) Dragon Cargo capsule re-use to better understand the impact of salt water landings on their designs. And while it would be hard to find space for the landing struts to go back into D2, if that meant doing a parachute landing with a last minute landing burn similar to what Blue Origin has proposed in their sub-orbital offering and is currently used on Soyuz, I could see that working with a landing in Texas.
What amazes me that this seems like a "small" amount of engineering to go from where they are, to a capability that was previously considered impossible by many. I'm sure it is way more complex than I realize, but they have some so far from where they started.
Pretty unlikely. To have it landing on land would be incredibly difficult specially to qualify.
Also they already have Starship and Starlink as huge projects they have to finance. They will make as much money as possible of Dragon 2 with the flights from NASA and invest that money in Starship.
Starship could actually be useful for tourism.
But that's fine for NASA if they want to pay for a splash down? If somebody else wants to pay for propulsive landing, it's on the table?
EDIT: Sounds like a SpaceX driven decision.
Once they decided to go straight to Starship/BFR with the movable 'wings' and raptor engines on the bottom and cancelled the dragon missions to Mars, there was less reason to go though the huge amount of work to finish developing and qualifying dragon-style propulsive landing. NASA was never super happy with it and Dragon was designed to do water landings with parachutes in case the thrusters failed anyway, so it wouldn't have been too much work to make that the only option.
This has lead to a strange situation where it seems Boeing's Starliner has ended up being more reusable than Dragon as it comes back onto land... But if they get Starship going, all this will be irrelevant.
I'd guess that one of the big reasons they (and everyone else who does water landings) lands in the ocean, is that it is much more palatable to regulators to create an exclusion zone in the ocean, which people can easily route around.
Also, people live on the side of the lake, so there isn't much margin for error, which never warms the cockles of a regulator's heart.
So yah they didn't reach orbit but you betcha it was still pretty neat to see it.
Are you sure NASA was to blame for it? I remember Elon saying they are not perusing propulsive landing anymore because of the amount of resources it would take to develop and validate the design. From what I gather, it was SpaceX's decision.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201700...
http://news.mit.edu/2015/shockwave-process-desalination-wate...
Ships rust like hell. I've known some guys in the Navy and they said it was common for everything unarmored to have holes all over.
In comparison, splashdown capsules spend maybe few hours tops in the water.
I'm guessing there are things on the "outside" that might still have issues?
Professor Farnsworth: Good Lord! That's over 5000 atmospheres of pressure!
Fry: How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?
Professor Farnsworth: Well, it was built for space travel, so anywhere between zero and one.
... on the second reentry attempt.
The Soyuz fires retro-rockets just before landing in Kazakhstan to lessen the impact. Even with that, the landing is still pretty rough. Land landings are sometimes described as akin to a car crash - water landings are softer. I'm sure there's probably a contingency capability of being able to support a land landing for Crew Dragon in case of aborts.
Interesting history note: there was an actually a concern during some of the early Apollo flights (I'm specifically thinking of Apollo 7) of land landings during an abort. Apollo 7 used a Block II version of the Command Module, however the crew couches were still the Block I variant. There was evidence showing the couches wouldn't perform well during a land landing. The concern was that if the LES was used, winds could force the capsule to a land landing. The resolution was that wind speed was a factor in a GO decision for launch.
It's interesting to note that Starliner is planned to perform land landings (using airbags). Land landings for capsules have been worked on since the 60s with the Gemini initially having plans for a Rogallo wing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogallo_wing#/media/File:Gemin...). There were even plans for re-use of the Gemini capsule! Water landings quickly ended that discussion, since salt water is pretty terrible and corrosive.
Different capsule, different costs and development.
What was the price of that program module for propulsive landing? $2B or the amount of money wasted on the knucklehead category of Ofo bikeshare app business model?
The big problem is that while the capsule will be reusable, since NASA killed the propulsive landing for Dragon 2, it now needs to splash down in saltwater and therefore is not considered safe for humans after the first use.
This makes Dragon 2:s too expensive for large-scale space tourism. Unless there is suddenly a huge market for this, I think SpaceX would prefer to sell interested space tourism customers flights on Starship instead.