>>12808482Non schizo answer:
A rocket and a lander are very different.
The Moon lander is light, manned (no 60s autopilot), landing on the Moon (less gravity makes it easier) and most importantly, it's a lander. It was designed from the ground up for this one purpose: it had a stage to land once, another stage to take off once, and a tin can on top to put astronauts in.
Rockets are large and heavy, but above all they are rockets: they are made to go up as efficiently as possible: your customer doesn't care about you landing, he just wants his satellite in orbit for as cheap as possible. Landing a rocket means adapting something that exists without adding too much weight because it still need to take stuff up there. You need re-ignitable engines (this is harder to do with cryogenic engines than it is with hypergolic engines commonly used in probes and lander), you need landing legs that are strong but as light as possible, you need to keep enough fuel to come back to the landing pad (fuel is heavy so the more you keep the less you can use to launch things), you need to have enough thermal protection to survive reentry (a rocket stage doesn't go at orbital speeds, but it's still quite fast) and finally you need to guide your rocket onto a very small target. Because you can't reignite your engines 10 times, because you can't keep enough fuel to waste time hovering above your target, and because you have to guide your rocket from 10s of miles up to the landing site, it's difficult
SpaceX's Starships also have to come down sideways (for heat protection) and then flip upright, which adds difficulty
TL;DR: a lander is built to land, a rocket is built to go up but only modified to land
>>12808496It's counterintuitive, but a rocket engine pushing from below does not make a rocket want to flip. That's called the pendulum rocket fallacy. Aerodynamic stability works differently so we have to use fins on Earth.
