I can't wait to see them recover a first stage from an actual launch. Musk has said they might be ready to try it as early as next year. I wish it could be sooner, but space hardware always takes a long time to develop. The dragon capsule is already reusable, though they haven't reused one yet. So if they can reuse the 1st stage too, that could greatly reduce launch costs even before they achieve full reusability. The 2nd stage is probably the cheapest 'segment' of the stack, so it's less urgent to get them fully reusable right away. (I don't know how much the 2nd stage costs, compared to the 1st, but with only one engine instead of nine, it's got to be a huge difference.)
Between this and the upcoming human-rated Dragon with propulsive landing capability, there's a lot of "coolness" in the pipeline for the next few years. And not just from SpaceX... Lots of other "NewSpace" companies are doing cool stuff too, like Masten, XCor, Blue Origin, etc.. It's nice to see so much progress in so many areas.
Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/LoO_3IPMvS4/story01.htm
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