Likely 2 fold here:

A: Any mission later on may not have the luxury of an arm to help in docking maneuvers. Not talking ISS here, but say a private flight for the proposed Deep Space Gateway or some other mission that may be Moon/Mars Bound.

B: The Russians have been doing this on their manned flights for decades. It is…

absolutely every single spacecraft launched by the americans was designed and built by private companies. please don’t be an idiot.

No American government bureaucracy has ever done this. NASA has never built a human rated spacecraft. It has always hired aerospace contractors to engineer, maintain and provide the bulk of the operational labor for human exploration in space.

"But form your other comments it’s clear something about all of this rubs you the wrong way"

Towing in the capsule with the robotic arm creates an equal and opposite reaction that pulls the space station marginally towards the capsule and imparts some nonzero spin. So unless the capsule was inserted at an angle that has the station towing itself marginally towards a position that it was going to be…

“If they want to showcase the new capsule by using a little more CGT fuel to dock instead of berth, there is no harm in that.”

I realize this is the internet where people like talking out of their ass before they know what’s going on.

SpaceX is already saving millions by recovering the 1st stage, which no one else is doing currently.  If they want to showcase the new capsule by using a little more CGT fuel to dock instead of berth, there is no harm in that.

Since you obviously didn’t bother to inform yourself before commenting..

Thats cool but they probably wasted a lot of fuel accomplishing that.

It would be like owning a beautiful furnished mansion with a complete staff, and one day you accidentally break the thermostat, so rather than paying to have it fixed you march out the door and into the woods to begin building a crappy shack out of twigs.

Bill Gates has called dibs on Uranus.

We should be working on robots that can colonize Mars before humans even attempt to travel there.

$100 million would be a better start. $500 million for the Excelsior package.

Of course it’s not just for the rich. They’ll need someone to do all the shovel work.

In that case let all the rich folk go.

No plate tectonics, no magnetic field (or well thousands, nothing on a planetary scale to keep all the bad cosmic stuff out) no thickened atmosphere. Gravity a fraction of Earth’s.

This.

He’s right though. Think of an initial Mars colony like McMurdo station in Antartica, except more harsh.

As bad as it may get here on Earth, what with the climate change and murderous monkeys and all, it will be a long time before, say, all the iron oxide in the dust and sand burns our skin.