If SpaceX can recover and re fly the booster staging as they hope to, we should see a marked decrease in cost to LEO. According to their numbers, the booster an

If SpaceX can recover and re fly the booster staging as they hope to, we should see a marked decrease in cost to LEO. According to their numbers, the booster and engines clock in at 16 million dollars. Normally that's a sunk cost every single launch, so even in a scenario where they fail to recover nearly 50% of the rockets, (they believe they can achieve <95% recovery eventually) the cost to orbit could fall by almost half in the immediate future. The reason I'm excited about this is that the really hard part (flipping a booster that's going 8,000 KPH around and flying it back to the landing zone) has worked pretty consistently. There have been several technical issues with the actual landings, I think they are 1 for 4 now but what people tend to forget is that that portion of the process is something we've done with rockets since the 60's - it's how we got down to the lunar surface.