Supposedly that's the big question for them as well; its why they needed to land it. Now they need to break it down and see how much it costs to rebuild. However, if it saves even half the cost of Stage 1, that's a huge drop in price per pound.
Edit: Btw, here is a great article on how
Space X is driving down costs.As said in the article, they don't even go for patents on their tech to protect it from the Chinese. Their operational cost is around 2500$ per pound into orbit, which is exceptionally low.
If this can knock off another 50% off stage 1, and lets say that's 20% in total off the operational cost? Its an enormous savings, especially if they can apply it to the Falcon Heavy, which will drive it below 1k a pound. You can read in the article a bunch of flaws that have risen up from this industry not having a focus on cost savings (Privatized mind set) and instead being more concerned with performance (Which they have a huge incentive to increase thanks to how government procurement works which ensures even if X company goes over budget, they still get a profit. So they have an incentive to make it as high performance as possible and push the costs up to just below what would cancel them. And we wonder why the F35 costs so much.)
But he talks freely about SpaceX's approach to rocket design, which stems from one core principle: Simplicity enables both reliability and low cost. Think of cars, Musk says. "Is a Ferrari more reliable than a Toyota Corolla or a Honda Civic?" Simplifying something as complex as a rocket is no easy task. And historically, most rocket makers have made their top priority performance, not cost.
In any case, he now has an incentive to reduce cost in order to sell and create an industry, just like the auto industry had an incentive to help build up the petroleum infrastructure. And the common sense methods he's done to reduce the price per pound are so simple, you'd wonder why they weren't done before; of course, the way government works does explain a lot of it.
But the point is that any further reduction in cost is HUGE considering how cheap the Falcon program has already made the launches. In terms of price efficiency they are already so far ahead of NASA its unreal.
