Elon Musk is changing the rules of space travel – CNN

The reason for this is simple. Historically, rockets have been a single-use object -- imagine the cost of commuting to work if you had to buy a new car each day.

There have been several other successful vertical landings, but none of these rockets had been reused until now. Thursday, SpaceX launched a geostationary communications satellite using a refurbished first stage Falcon 9 booster. The launch not only successfully inserted the satellite into orbit, but the booster again landed as planned on a floating platform located in deep water off the Florida coast.

So, these successes are technically satisfying, but are they important? They most certainly are. In fact, they could be a game-changer.

Thus, the typical cost of a SpaceX launch of $62 million might be reduced to $43 million -- a considerable contribution to the satellite company's bottom line. The cost of Thursday's launch has not been released, but SES, the company owning the satellite that was launched, has said they were interested in an even lower price of $30 million for this first attempt.

Musk has made clear his near-term goal is is to drop the launch costs to 10% of the current costs, with a longer-term goal of dropping the launch price tag to 1%. If successful, a launch that costs $62 million in 2016 will eventually be $620,000.

A viable Martian colonization strategy will require an even greater reduction in the price tag, but this recent development is a key step toward a much grander goal.

On September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave an inspiring speech at Rice University, my alma mater, where he said, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade ... not because (it is) easy, but because (it is) hard."

Kennedy was speaking to Americans, but it was all of humanity that watched raptly on July 20, 1969, as Neil Armstrong took humanity's first halting steps on a heavenly body other than Earth.

The recent SpaceX achievement does not rise to that level of accomplishment, but there is no question that we have achieved a different, but important, step. The day that mankind returns to deep space is that much closer.

Excerpt from:

Elon Musk is changing the rules of space travel - CNN