Elon:

"Successful ocean landing of Starship!

We will do one more ocean landing of the ship. If that goes well, then SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower."

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1859036912348262787

I'm a project management nerd, so let's take a look at the dependency chain to get to usefulness: to be anything other than an oversized orbital launcher, starship has to be refueled. Refueling depends on meeting payload specs, otherwise you need a too many starships to refuel one upper stage in orbit. Refueling also depends on rapid turnaround, which depends on near-zero damage to launch towers, engines, shields, and tanks. All of these dependencies depend on repeatability, which is why not catching the booster is a significant regression not a huge one, but marginal negative progress.

Cost cutting in effect at SpaceX: Falcon Heavy used a Tesla Roadster as their test payload, Starship only has a banana.

unfortunately they had to scrap the booster Catch, due to undisclosed factors.

The booster still looked a bit flamey on the landing burn, I wonder if this is expected