

It isn't a "new time saving" trajectory. They just changed from a guidance shutdown to a propellant depletion shutdown, something that is used by other vehicles regularly. As far as subcooled LOX, others have used it too. It isn't bleeding edge.



Take away recovery, and Spacex looks just like the other contractors, they tweak their vehicles all the time, just that people don't care to watch since it is not Spacex



I beg to differ, there was a trajectory change from the originally planned GTO where the satellite would have needed both chemical propellant and several weeks of electric propulsion to circularize it's final orbit, to a supersynchronous GTO where circularization can be done with the sats on-board propellant (I think someone calculated that as in the order of 1200 m/s based on state of the art hypergolic ISP, and the known propellant ratio of the sat) and electrics is only needed for orbit and slot fine tuning.If the original trajectory was GTO-1800-ish then its now GTO-1200-ish which is a significant improvement. And you don't get 600 m/s extra deltaV on a 6 ton payload just by switching from a nav shutdown to a depletion burn!Most and foremost, aside of pushing the second stage to the very last drop of coldest possible LOX, it's the first stage that has to work it's ass off to give the second stage the needed headstart. And that would likely be where most of these (assumed) 600 m/s are coming from.I can't see any other launch provider just magically present an extra 600 d/v for an already planned out mission out of their sleeve.And then they still want to land that thing ?!?!