I'm not an expert, but here's my understanding: > What happens once it lands successfully? It becomes a lot easier to get permission to attempt a landing on d

I'm not an expert, but here's my understanding: > What happens once it lands successfully? It becomes a lot easier to get permission to attempt a landing on dry land. But, as I understand it, they will always need to land some rockets at sea. In the long run, they hope that they can then re-use the rocket, which will drastically reduce the cost of launches. > Are they perhaps really trying to develop a Dragon landing system? They almost certainly are, but this is unrelated to that, I believe. > And using this extra tall rocket as a worst-case scenario? No. The length of the rocket is ultimately determined by the amount of fuel it needs to carry. The first stage will always be very long like this. Note that this rocket came from a successful mission which launched a Dragon capsule to the ISS on a re-supply/science mission.