Its likely that full-fledged Space Travel with reusable rockets will be possible in the coming years
The very next Falcon 9 flight (out of Vandenberg) will use the performance overhead provided by the v1.1 upgrade to do a controlled reentry of the 1st stage and then after it has reached terminal velocity it will slow down to a hover out over some remote part of the ocean, then splash down. This is a good and cheap test of a huge part of the flight profile. Meanwhile, the Grasshopper 2 will be more of a full-up Falcon 9 (v1.1) first stage, with 9 engines and will include retractable landing gear. Instead of testing controlled hovering and precision landing it'll go up to supersonic speeds and potentially up to 90km altitude. Essentially testing the return to launch site flight profile in a more realistic setting with more realistic hardware.
And then if that proves fruitful they will essentially just stick that hardware into the Falcon 9 stack and do a full up orbital launch with a flyback 1st stage. Possibly within the next few years even. If that works it'll be rather amazing, since much of the cost of a launch is in the manufacture of those 9 engines on that first stage. Even if a reusable stage costs 3x as much as a regular stage and halves the payload capacity if they can get just 6 flights out of each one it'll break even, and if the numbers are more favorable they'll drop the floor out of the orbital launch market and then own it, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year in revenue (a feat they are already on their way to doing with their current lineup of rockets). Perhaps more profoundly it'll hasten the day when it will be conceivable to use kickstarter to fund an interplanetary science mission.
If you don't mind me asking - where did you find all this out? I've been looking for a good source of SpaceX news. The official website/g+/facebook/etc just posts short updates whenever a mission occurs. I'm looking for news about what is on the horizon and more detailed analysis.
That is where you will find the best info for the space industry more than likely. A lot of the info is in the forums though and you will have to kind of hunt it down. They also have a private section of the site that you can pay to gain access that has a lot of insider info.
I'm a bit worried about the bimodality of the future but man the good parts are going to be good.
I think there are a few major, mostly technological, developments which haven't happened yet but are essentially inevitable which will tend to tip things even stronger toward the "good" side. I should probably write about that at some point.
Seems to me that this would yield an even better test "for free" and even provide the possibility of recovering the first stage for analysis.
They do plan on retrieving the stage if possible, it should float.
Could you explain the first part a bit more, or point me somewhere? How was is the first stage going? Does it need a heat shield?
EDIT: Ha, looks like a lot of people had the same question at the same time.
edit: Can't find it at the moment. So far I've found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X which did what grasshopper and more almost 20 years back. I still believe I've read something earlier though. Will edit when/if I find it.
That's a moderately ironic statement, given the fact that SpaceX wouldn't be doing anything remotely close to what they're doing today without the very large contract they got from NASA.
This is how NASA was able to spend over 30 years and $30B trying and failing to develop a new orbital vehicle, where SpaceX was able to do it for under $400M.
The DC-X program, and others like it were spawned by private industry who were betting on a huge 'single stage to orbit' (or SSTO) model for satellite launches that would be needed for the Reagan 'Star Wars' missile defense program. They died when Star Wars died and NASA briefly assumed control of DC-X when its private backers pulled out but was stretched too thin to give it any real push.
That said, Elon and others will tell you that the current crop of rockets would not be possible without the work that NASA did and has shared. SpaceX also has benefited from computer systems that are 10,000X more powerful than the ones that NASA had available for their use, and materials that are 1/3 to 1/2 the weight and yet stronger than their NASA counterparts. Sensors that are 100x more sensitive and 1/1000th the cost. A six degree of freedom inertial unit was $125,000 in 1970 and resolved differences of .1G. A 9 degree of freedom unit from Sparkfun Electronics [1] is now $125, and reliably resolves 1/4096'th of a G. So I don't doubt that the same engineers at NASA could build what SpaceX is building today, today, but I assure you they didn't have the tools to build it back in the 70's or even in the 90's.
And the 1970s one weighed a lot more than 3.52 oz!
All these things could have been done earlier if the politics was different.
DC-X used F-15 gyros / guidance with some software tweaks for example.