Good business: make the hard seem easy and the nigh on impossible seem merely hard. They do these landings so well now it almost seems normal that rockets land after taking off and boosting a second stage to orbital velocity.
I don't believe it's likely that we'll see recovery of an orbital velocity stage anytime soon.
Just look at how much larger the first stage (mass almost all propellant) is compared to the second stage (large fraction of the mass is the payload).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
That fact is incredibly relevant for getting to orbit - however, it is not at all relevant for surviving re-entry, where all that matters is your kinetic energy.
I was mostly just correcting your "one-sixteenth of the energy required for orbit" statement. I agree that reentering at 7.8 km/s is much more difficult than 2.0 km/s, but the second stage is smaller and more spherical than the first stage. That might make reentering it a bit easier than if it had the shape of the first stage.
(If that made no sense, it's a variation on an old freshman physics joke.)
Oh, I wouldn't be so pessimistic.
"Considering trying to bring upper stage back on Falcon Heavy demo flight for full reusability. Odds of success low, but maybe worth a shot." - Elon Musk [1]
[1]https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/847882289581359104
Remember, everyone said they would never land the first stage....
Also, if they don't do it now, it's obvious they are working on it / thinking about it. Wait five years.
Everyone? That's a bit hyperbolic.
I understand it's a very different beast, but why do you think this is so much harder technologically? We bring things back from orbital velocity routinely, indeed much more frequently than anyone landed a rocket vertically prior to SpaceX.
Minor nit: the Falcon Heavy demo flight (with upper stage recovery attempt) is set for late THIS year, it's just that Musk puts the odds of successful upper stage recovery fairly low: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/847882289581359104
Musk is "fairly confident" to have upper stage reuse operational by sometime next year: http://www.space.com/36412-spacex-completely-reusable-rocket...
Musk is notorious for doubling down on bets when the first bet seems like it most likely will succeed. I would bet you we'll see upper stage recovery within 1 or 2 years, with reuse of that stage within 2 to 4 years. (Particularly if SpaceX doesn't suffer another major failure within the next 2 years... Failures are always a significant possibility in this business given enough launches.) That counts as pretty darned soon.
So, adapting the first-stage recovery strategy is not an obvious slam dunk -- in fact, it might very well be worth considering alternatives involving parachutes if you can get the thing intact through re-entry. (Note that the Falcon 9 v1.0 first stages on which they actually tried parachute recovery are believed to have not gotten that far -- they reportedly broke up before the parachutes even deployed.)
The devil is in the details, of course.