ALL HAIL KAYAK MAN! wow.. Three MARMAC barges?? And one with enclosed wing structure!? This is insane!



Which ones could these be? 304 is supposedly fleeted in Amelia(same design as 300). 302 was recently busy on salvage operation in April. 303 is unknown. How will other one cross Panama? So many questions..



This weekend, I hit an entire handful of launches and spent plenty of time and more than a few miles out on the water, and at one point or another during the weekend's excursions, I did indeed see three MARMACs. I got to see MARMAC 300 with the open framework under the wings (as we've all seen in photos of it performing as "Just Read the Instructions"), and from water level, the fact that twice it's caught rockets (albeit not *quite* nominally... yet) has left no marks. Later, I got to pass by MARMAC 304, which looks strikingly like MARMAC 300 but with closed wings instead of visible support beams -- another ASDS applying SpaceX's incremental upgrade approach? Elsewhere, I also came across MARMAC 303, which looks almost stock but has slight alterations that match the location of the wings on the other two MARMACs (to me, that strongly implied that it will follow its siblings in ASDSification).I imagine we'll get to wait until they're each shiny and ready to catch rockets and hope Elon posts wallpaper-worthy photos for us, as he did with JRtI. (Well, that, or the triumphant return news coverage we all hope follows the next rocket-catching voyage.) Going purely by water-level barge viewing, however, it seems more amazing ASDS videos are certainly in our future.(If only we had a house billionaire here on the forums. We could pick up MARMAC 302 when it comes available and use it as the NSF launch party barge. We could have a party on station-keeping a nominal distance outside the range exclusion zone -- great for launch viewing *and* with adequate gear, we could even keep those annoying boats from fouling the range. We'd have to give it a good Culture name, of course, perhaps from a GCU?