Rocket Booster Landings

It's not about the rocket tipping over. The use of parachutes would require the loss of landing accruacy. They want to be able to guide the first stage to a specific location (like a launch pad), and parachutes would not allow them to do this.

Can't you ship it home with a heat shield and a parachute?

Not really... you'd still have to do the earlier burns to slow the stage down enough that it doesn't break up in the atmosphere, and the burn to boost it back to the launch site. The parachutes would just save the final 'hover slam' burn, but the terminal velocity of a practically empty first stage is already pretty low, and the complexity of a parachute system wouldn't be offset by the minimal savings in speed reduction.

You don't have to send most of the landing hardware into space.

Perhaps on Mars, unlikely on Earth. With our dense atmosphere a vehicle like a mostly empty Falcon 9 first stage is going to have a fairly low terminal velocity, in the low hundreds of km/s range. Slowing down from that speed to a controlled hover/landing is pretty easy. The cost/benefit on Mars might be different though, since the atmosphere is thinner.

The goal is an eventual "soft landing" on a rocket, which isn't feasible with parachutes. Such a rocket could be landed in a specific location, refilled with fuel, and be available for relaunch fairly quickly.

Not terminal velocity, just fairly fast: there's a deceleration burn earlier in the descent plan. If that doesn't work, the big red abort button can be used to blow it up at high altitude.

At the very least, reducing the number of concerns on the rocket is definitely worthwhile. They are going to have an engine in any case, and using just that and nothing else on the rocket itself simplifies testing and reduces risk. The tower can have a separate testing and there's no way something that happens on the way to orbit and back breaks the tower.Wings, parachute, etc... All very easy to break or burn at hypersonic speeds, and very chaotic to control. It probably (very pr

The fuel used to attempt the landing the instead be used to launch.

Wouldn't the reentry ioniztion mess with this?