/mark
This just in...
It’s Alive! NASA’s New Horizons Pluto Probe ‘Wakes Up’ for Work
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/its-alive-nasas-new-horizons-pluto-probe-wakes-work-n262996
SpaceX founder Elon Musk said... if you can recover a rocket, it means you're not throwing away millions of dollars' worth of hardware. Launches would cost a fraction, perhaps a tenth, of what they cost now.They've reduced launch costs already, simply by re-inventing some wheels in-house. Naturally it's hard for me to criticize what he's saying, because he's shown he knows what he's doing time after time, but IMHO the fact is, payload costs will go up with this part of his approach, because the mass budget for the payload will go down. The workaround will have to be, using more rocket than would ordinarily be needed, in order to orbit the same payload while also carrying the fuel for the landing.