The money quote:

> Musk said that a rocket's first stage accounts for three-quarters of its total price tag, so a vehicle with a reusable first stage can be produced at far less cost — assuming the hardware is fully and rapidly reusable.

~75% savings seems like a "best case scenario" number.

Good enough for me. Even if it is only 25% in practice they'll own the market.

They're already insanely cheap compared to most competitors. This should take them to being ludicrously cheap.

Let's see who tries to imitate them and do a re-use, some real competition is what's needed next.

Now for second stage re-use ;)

I think SpaceX is sufficiently motivated by their man at the top that they'll keep doing great things even in the total absence of competition. But it would still be great to see others go this way, to see different approaches tried and such. It sounds like some other launchers were looking at reusability plans before (Ariane had plans for some wacky thing that would fly back just the engines) but now that it's been demonstrated to work I imagine it will become much more serious.

And then for the crew capsule reuse... oh wait :).

Seriously though, now I'm just waiting for updates on BFR / Mars mission development progress.

ULA is already trying to imitate them with their announced 'Vulcan' concept, where the engines eject and parachute back, but that's (many) years away from actually happening.

The other important factor is how many times you get to re-use the stage, because that tells you the saving per launch. If you get to re-use it once, then on each flight you save 37.5% of the launch cost. If you re-use it again twice (3 launches of the first stage) you save 50% of the launch cost per flight (each flight costs you 1/3 of the first stage cost). And so on. That's not factoring in refurb and re-fueling costs, of course.

If I understand correctly, even if they can only reuse the rocket motors, that would still be most of the 75% figure.

Aside from the cost savings, the other goal of reusing boosters is to reduce the time between launches.

The challenge for SpaceX is to inspect the booster, integrate a new second stage & payload, and relaunch in a few weeks. With a few years of work, it should be almost like a cargo jet turnaround.

ULA's Vulcan plan is to parachute the engines and pumps back, catch the rope with a helicopter, inspect and reattach to a new set of tanks. That seems likely to be a little more complex to me.

The catching with a helicopter part is complex, but not time-consuming - either it works or it doesn't. The rest is probably if anything easier - I'd imagine SpaceX will have to tear down the booster entirely for inspection, at least for the first few hundred. These things are (or will be) built to be disassembled and reassembled, attaching engines and pumps to a new tank is not going to be a long and complex process.