SpaceX: “First stage landing confirmed at LZ-1”

It's not exactly cheap to launch a full rocket, especially when you involve hundreds of engineers.

I would be curious to know what's more expensive. Build again a satellite that exploded or planning an empty launch?

Not only is that a hefty profit margin, it's a full-scale, live-fire, "all up" test of reusability, all on someone else's dime.

This has been SpaceX's genius move since the start, they've been developing reusable rockets which normally would be a multi-billion dollar R&D effort. Except they've been able to fit that development program into a commercial launch business, so that the vast majority of the costs have been subsidized by their customers. Instead of being chumps who spend tens of millions of dollars per flight of their own money to test hardware, they get the same testing, or better, while turning a profit. And that's why Blue Origin is still working with incredibly small sub-orbital boosters that are not even in official service yet while SpaceX has been making money hand over fist for years and has also managed to pioneer reuse of orbital launcher stages (while at the same time doing R&D for manned capsules, next generation methalox rockets, Mars colonization, etc.)

For first stages that land on a barge, they are already planning on returning them to the mainland by partially refueling them and boosting them back under their own power.

From this they'll be able to optimise their design (more so than already) to be more resilient to these forces, and will end up with standardised check-lists for re-flight. They're also working heavily on autonomy, so the current ground crews of hundreds could diminish to the same kind of numbers one has for commercial flight. If you launch 200 times a day, which is where they are headed, it becomes routine space traffic control with inexpensive ground crews following procedural manuals.

So, I wouldn't expect any rapid turnarounds soon, but give it ten years and they could be turning them around in hours or days, which would absolutely change the economics of space flight. I don't think Musk is into demand driven pricing - he wants his eutopia to be for all - so we may see spaceflight costs rapidly trend down to the same order of magnitude as current commercial flight, perhaps by the 2030s, perhaps sooner. So far they've maintained fantastic momentum.

I'm pretty confident they are well on their way towards pretty quick turnarounds though - the engines are the biggest hurdle and they seem to be remarkably robust as demonstrated by the number of times they light them before sending them up already, and the relight tests they have done on recovered cores.

Sometimes it is a little too unpolished for me though - the guy running his pencil down a chart of mission activities was pretty weird. The whole time I was thinking: is the timeline for the next few activities not on your laptop screen?

Jeez. Talk about a low bar.

The problem with most journalists is they don't really know anything, so they just repeat what people tell them. These folks have a huge advantage in that they're only covering a single subject, and they understand that subject very well.