That booster must have landed inches from dead center on the drone ship. Beautiful landing. And I believe the next launch will be the tenth for another booster.
“SpaceX will never land an orbital booster.”
“Okay, they landed a booster, but the refurb costs will be as high as building a new one.”
“Okay, they managed to turn around a booster fairly quickly. But they’ll be lucky to get two or three launches out of one. It’ll never make financial sense.”
“My old space rocket company just went bankrupt.”
The reality is that the more these things fly, the better they’ll get at reusability. It reminds me of Rotax aircraft engines. When homebuilders started using them, they were crude and there were some failures. But lots of data coupled with rapid rework and design changes made them reliable. Originally certified with something like a 400 hour TBO, you can now get Rotax engines with 2000 hr TBO’s - the same as traditional light aircraft engines.
Reusability allows inspection of wear, and therefore constant improvements in reliability. Someday people will laugh at early space programs throwing away billions of dollars in rocket parts on every flight, I’m looking at you, SLS.
Starlink has turned into a huge win for SpaceX, in part because it allows them to continue essentially a test program with their rockets without heavy insurance costs or convincing customers to trust their payloads on a rocket that’s flying more than any other has. If they lose a batch of Starlink satellites, oh well. They are being mass-produced. So SpaceX can run a commercial satellite launch program and a rocket development program at the same time, with a high cadence.