Extracted from a comment of <someperson>: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752611

> But a fully reusable rocket could change the equation dramatically. Musk illustrated the point by citing SpaceX's Falcon 9, which costs between $50 million to $60 million per launch in its current configuration.

> "But the cost of the fuel and oxygen and so forth is only about $200,000," Musk said."So obviously, if we can reuse the rocket, say, a thousand times, then that would make the capital cost of the rocket for launch only about $50,000."

Direct link: http://www.space.com/13140-spacex-private-reusable-rocket-el...

The goal is to have a vehicle that can land on another planet and return to the surface of Earth in working condition with the only requirement as add fuel.

One hindering factor is the problem of having enough fuel to make the return trip.

There needs to be a better technology to harvest the massive amounts of energy wasted when decelerating from 30k mph to 1 thousand mph during re-entry. Convert the heat to a usable fuel. So we store the fuel needed for re-entry in the velocity of the craft.

A heat to fuel converter. If we could be 100% efficient at this, we would land with just as much fuel as we left to get into orbit.