(1) Telsa CEO Elon Musk announced a major breakthrough in spaceflight on Friday (2) Musk revealed the potentially "revolutionary" news on Friday during a hasti

(1) Telsa CEO Elon Musk announced a major breakthrough in spaceflight on Friday (2) Musk revealed the potentially "revolutionary" news on Friday during a hastily organized press conference (3) "What SpaceX has done thus far is evolutionary, not revolutionary," Musk said. (4) "If we can recover the booster stage, the chance is there for revolutionary." What was announded today was a critical first step. But there is nothing seemingly new in the press conference report, beyond what Elon had tweeted on the day of the soft-landing itself. The only new news is that the vehicle was lost, which doesn't really seem to be a "breakthrough" in the context of Musk's own explanation. The bigger step here will be getting the recovery because the need to confirm empirically what kind of shape the engineered pieces come back in. Many problemes like the icing on the shuttle (which de-laminated and caused projectile damage) are not going to be discovered without such an inspection.