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SpaceX Plans Drone Ship Landing On January 17th (nbcnews.com)
Rei writes: With the world's first successful low-speed landing of an orbital rocket's first stage complete, SpaceX looks to continue that success by attempting its second landing — this time, on their new drone ship in the Pacific. While SpaceX has announced plans to turn their successfully-landed rocket, reportedly flight-ready, into a a museum piece, the stage they recover next may be SpaceX's first chance to prove the mudslinging of their competitors wrong and show that Russia's worries are well founded. That is, if they can successfully pull it off.
Just a guess, but they probably don't consider a splashdown-landed rocket viable to be relaunched, or that the refurbishment costs of a rocket that has been immersed-in and possibly flooded-by seawater is too high to justify doing that over building a new one.
This argument was made back when the Shuttle Program SRBs were ocean-landed and recovered, if I remember right they were never reflown either.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Because you will be shocked at what happens next!
With all due respect, they can waste their money in whatever fashion they want to - the primary mission is to launch something, if they accomplish that and then want to land the next 100 boosters so Elon Musk can make his own private modern version of Stone Henge out of them, thats his affair.
Or, you simply realise that landing and reusing are only loosely linked, in that you cannot reuse until you land, but you don't have to reuse just because you land.
The two things that are different between the Shuttles SRB situation and SpaceX's Falcon situation is that the SRBs underwent a significant impact with the ocean and a prolonged dip in salt water, so they literally needed to be stripped down, checked for stress issues etc etc, especially as there was a lot of rubber seals in there which are all suspect after that salt water bath. The Falcon undergoes none of that, so hopefully requires less stringent checks before it can be reused.