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Nah, this is standard stuff for SpaceX. They always get signal dropouts and someone always says "conspiracy!"

They're not interested in the extra hassle of continuity for the sake of putting on a live show. The droneship has tons of cameras, the booster has tons of telemetry, that's all they're interested in.

(if you must spin a conspiracy, the one where they deliberately don't upgrade to keep their fans guessing is more credible - it's zero effort)

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I have nothing to gain by SpaceX failing. I wish them all the best. I'm just stating what I think is pretty obvious - that this was a massive PR exercise, apart from anything else. My BS detector goes into overdrive at times like that.

When you mount cameras on a landing barge, you would expect there to be a high likelihood of them being damaged or affected in some way when your rocket lands. So you do the obvious thing, and setup a redundant camera feed somewhere at a distance. Previous test landings at sea had a chase plane. Where was that this time?

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