So far, Musk has done everything he's promised: decent electric roadster, electric luxury, SUV and mid-priced cars, powerwalls and roof panels, re-usable light and heavy launchers for obscenely low prices and turnaround times, tunnels under LA. This stuff is all real and working. You can quibble about schedule slips or whatever, but none of this is vapor. In fact there's already an F9H payload overshooting Mars orbit.
My favorite part - beyond watching SpaceX embarrassing the critics over and over and over again, with reusable rockets, bringing down launch costs by 80-95%, out-launching the rest of the world, and just surviving in general - is that if you can do Falcon Heavy, you can do BFR, which gets you Mars. The engineering keeps proving itself, no need to buy any marketing spin. The only debate left is whether it's going to be closer to 10 years from now or 20.
SpaceX is supposedly selling F9 flights for $50 million already, while the competition is selling comparable flights for $150/$170 million.
As SpaceX is still recouping the technology research investment, 95% may be a stretch, but 80% reduction is not that far of really, it will probably be very close to that if they are able to reuse fairing.
The competition is only selling at $150-$170M today because SpaceX pushed them into it. 10 years ago, F9-class payloads would've cost $400-500M (on Western launchers; Russia and China were always cheaper). Those prices had been pretty stable for decades; the key thing which has changed since then is the presence of a real competitor.
Let's begin by seeing that SpaceX increased it's launch cost by 50% for 2020 to $228 million while Orbital ATK is launching for $223 million, meanwhile actually being a profitable company. [1]
SpaceX blames this on NASA. So Orbital ATK didn't have that problem because, reasons?[1]
Unbiased sources on launch costs are really hard to find.
And about the Mars thing, it's not going to happen. SpaceX works for contract work, not for dreams. Nobody's going to pay for that. Why not the moon first anyway? Almost just as cool and way more practical.
I haven't seen any practical unpartial sources for savings from reusable rocket stages.
I expected the hackernews community to be more skeptical.
Only if you believe marketing bullshit.