[cameldrv]

As impressive as the landing is, it won't yet make as dramatic a cost difference as people think. The problem is that there are a bunch of cost and performance multipliers that are easy to overlook.

1. Only a portion of the rocket is reusable, you still pay full price for the upper stage.

2. The part that is reusable has to be built better to survive multiple uses and needs to have extra equipment for recovery, so it's more expensive.

3. The performance of the reusable pieces is compromised due to the extra weight of the fuel and equipment for recovery.

4. There are still refurbishment costs after every flight, presumably we will know soon how significant these are.

5. You lose economies of scale in making the boosters since you make fewer of them.

Overall I would expect that with all of these together you'll see maybe a 30% total cost reduction. A lot of these same arguments were made about shuttle costs and reusability, and it didn't pan out. SpaceX certainly can and has learned from that failure, but many of the basic mathematical realities still apply.

[firebones]

6. Not enough data yet to determine rates of failure and associated costs.