On Friday, April 8, 2016 at 5:21:43 PM UTC-4, Vaughn Simon wrote:
We all got to see history made today.

If you hang out here, this is unlikely to be news to you, but SpaceX has
finally successfully recovered a booster by landing it at sea on their
barge. So, having landed one booster back in the area of the pad and
another out at sea, there really can no longer be any question if it's
possible to recover a booster.

The only remaining questions have to do with what percentage of boosters
can successfully be recovered. After all, ocean conditions won't always
be as pretty as they were today, everything must work perfectly every
time, and recovery still may not be possible for certain mission profiles.

Still, It seems to me that every launch provider must now be looking at
recovery, or innovate some other way of drastically reducing launch cost.

In short: This changes everything.

spacex is sending a dragon to mars asa proof of concept. it will be unmanned, but still that progress