In a single moment, SpaceX earns itself more than $50 million dollars, right? That&#x27;s a big bonus for everyone who made this possible and some well earned time off, and then back to work changing the world!<p>So from what I&#x27;ve read, the returns are immense; the amount of learning they can do from examining their own rocket is the real initial treasure. Their rocket design should advance considerably based on this trove, and I suppose the source of many papers, publications, and public-sourced patents. Reusable rockets seems not quite a glorious enough term? There&#x27;s a massive dividend any time this actually works, and imagining the future of this tech is joyous.<p>We can guess how much this will bring down the cost. How much will it bring down the price? Say it&#x27;s just following the supply&#x2F;demand curve to get more customers. If landing was reliable and the rockets were durable, what would it really take to <i>scale</i>? If you actually got 10 of these going full-duty. How close can you back-to-back launches? The <i>scale</i> of that operation in terms of engineers to manage the workload... The return-on-automation (in other words, software) is immense the first few billion dollars you spend on it. That means they need to hire a fuck-ton of very good developers. Cool!<p>But what if it&#x27;s more of a binary market and the only new customers are only at a <i>much</i> lower price point? In that case it&#x27;s just serving the existing market at much higher margin. I believe this will make space more accessible -- cost savings ultimately flow through.<p>BTW, one of the advantages of pledging your patents for free use is you can really show off <i>the right way to write a patent</i>. The whole point is forcing disclosure in return for a benefit, so now make that disclosure top-notch. In theory, what if patent applications were examined by the top-of-the-field peers and only real advancements in the field which were fully and properly documented by the patent would be granted? I hope not all software patents are evil. The &quot;provisional patent&quot; is an interesting form of self-publication at least, but it does create a pesky 1-year ticking clock.<p>As a talent&#x2F;recruiting event this is pretty much about as good as it gets.