[adastra]

You won't find a bigger supporter of SpaceX, and no one wants Grasshopper to be doing operational flights tomorrow more than I do. But it will take 10 years, minimum.

Keep in mind no one has successfully done powered vertical landing from orbit. It's never been done. (Well, not from Earth orbit anyway. The LEM landed vertically from lunar orbit.) SpaceX is getting a taste of how hard this is by trying to recover their first stages using parachutes - their every attempt to do so has failed.

If they could focus the bulk of their engineering workforce on this problem they might be able to do it faster. But they have to massively scale up production to meet the orders they've taken, they have to keep their reliability up, they are constantly working on performance upgrades for Falcon 9's engines, and they have to get Falcon Heavy going to crack the DoD market. Oh, and there's this little thing called Dragon and NASA's Commercial Crew program. Something about launching those living sacks of meat and bones we call people tends to hold your focus pretty intensely.

[simonh]

They don't have to do powered descent from orbit for this to be worthwhile. Just doing powered descent for the recovery of the first stage would be a huge win.

[adastra]

The first stage isn't going at orbital velocity of course, but the second stage is. The SpaceX announcement for Grasshopper refers to both:

http://www.space.com/13140-spacex-private-reusable-rocket-el...

I'm sure they'll start with just the first stage, but you can't just do a powered descent - that would leave it in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. It has to be a return-to-launch-site maneuver and landing, which is what you see in the video linked to above. At the point where the vehicle does a 180-degree turn (referred to as a "death swoop" by rlv enthusiasts), it's going Mach 6 and is 1000 miles downrange. That's hard.

[jlgreco]

With their planned "helicopter like inaccuracy", could they just land it on a barge out in the middle of the Atlantic instead?

[Gravityloss]

Jeff Bezos has actually tried to patent the barge landing. Go figure. http://ipinspace.com/2012/02/13/repeat-after-me-patent-appli...

[adastra]

Bezos, or his handlers anyway, can be pretty outrageous with this kind of stuff. Water landings of VTVL's have been talked about since the 1960's by various people. It would be pretty ridiculous if he was granted the patent for it.