Once they've done a lot more landings, yes. Until then, I'd wager their focus is on testing materials after re-entry for annealing, heat and stress fractures, ablation, and so forth.
From this they'll be able to optimise their design (more so than already) to be more resilient to these forces, and will end up with standardised check-lists for re-flight. They're also working heavily on autonomy, so the current ground crews of hundreds could diminish to the same kind of numbers one has for commercial flight. If you launch 200 times a day, which is where they are headed, it becomes routine space traffic control with inexpensive ground crews following procedural manuals.
So, I wouldn't expect any rapid turnarounds soon, but give it ten years and they could be turning them around in hours or days, which would absolutely change the economics of space flight. I don't think Musk is into demand driven pricing - he wants his eutopia to be for all - so we may see spaceflight costs rapidly trend down to the same order of magnitude as current commercial flight, perhaps by the 2030s, perhaps sooner. So far they've maintained fantastic momentum.
SpaceX was founded 14 years ago. In another 10 years, they'll likely have what you describe on their Mars base. The velocity of this company is simply unprecedented. SpaceX was founded in July of 2002 and the first F9 (I'm purposefully ignoring the Falcon 1 program) went up in July of 2010.
For reference, the Space Shuttle Program was formally created by President Nixon in 1972. The first Space Shuttle launch, STS-1, happened on April 12th, 1981.
To be fair, Apollo ran from '61-'72, developed the Saturn series of rockets, associated technology, landed six missions on the moon, and cost somewhere around $100-200B* (USD$2010).
That's 8 years for F9, and 9 years for the Shuttle.
I wouldn't call 1 year faster unprecedented. The Apollo program was unprecedented. It took only 8 years to put a man on the moon, from putting a man in space.
9 years for an agency with lots of space and rocket experience vs 8 years for a company with no space or rocket experience at all. There is no comparison between the two.
SpaceX is staffed by some of the brightest aerospace engineers and scientists with decades of aerospace industry experience. Tom Mueller and Gwynne Shotwell had over 3 decades of experience between them in the aerospace industry before they joined SpaceX. To say they had not space or rocket experience is absurd.
Additionally SpaceX has received tremendous support from NASA both financially and technically. SpaceX has received close to half a billion dollars in "seed money" from NASA and has contracts for almost three billion dollars from them. NASA provides an extraordinary amount of technical oversight and guidance to SpaceX.
That's not to say SpaceX hasn't made significant advancements, Boeing has considerably more experience and received similar amounts of funding from NASA but has failed to achieve nearly what SpaceX has.
Sorry should have specific, otherwise I'll get downvoted into oblivion. In lack of experience, I meant supply chain / logistics, manufacturing, etc.
They had to spin up a factory from scratch with, as a company, having never done it before. Sure NASA had to do some of that, but they largely had much of these bits in place from past projects or could re-use contracts from existing manufacturers. A huge part of this is simply negotiating with other companies that supply parts.
Additionally, they did a lot of entirely new ways of doing things. As far as I'm aware, SpaceX's method of friction welding is one of the best in the industry. Additionally, they 3d print some of the parts for the engines, the main oxidizer valve is one of note. Pretty sure they were also one of the first to do this.
So in summary, even with veterans of the industry, they are doing things in a way never done before in history, so that doesn't negate the fact that it was revolutionary what they've managed to do.
SpaceX isn't mass producing rockets, it's low volume to the point that each rocket is almost a one off custom development. There's no robot factory churning out rockets.
This is also where Musk comes into play, he isn't the rocket scientist behind SpaceX, he's everything else. Musk keeps his companies fairly interconnected and manages to effectively share resources between them.
Sure SpaceX has a lot of innovative technology but then so did the Space Shuttle. It certainly wasn't cobbled together from off the shelf technology. Almost everything about it was new and innovative. Additionally SpaceX has the advantage of advanced technologies that weren't available when the shuttle was designed. Additive manufacturing is one you alluded to but also advanced computer modelling, advanced alloys, and all of the advanced sensor technologies that simply didn't exist for the shuttle. All of this allows for a level of rapid prototyping not possible in the 70s.
Yup, I've read Musk's biography. Very familiar with his unusual style. But they've achieved something a private company has never done before. They were the first non-nation state space company to launch a liquid based rocket to orbit.
I guess we should politely agree to disagree. They're amazing however you look at it and the rest is just splitting hairs.
Not diminishing SpaceX's achievements, but like everything else they've been built on the back of a lot of basic science. One of NASA's primary goals is actually technology transfer (see: http://technology.nasa.gov/ ).
From this they'll be able to optimise their design (more so than already) to be more resilient to these forces, and will end up with standardised check-lists for re-flight. They're also working heavily on autonomy, so the current ground crews of hundreds could diminish to the same kind of numbers one has for commercial flight. If you launch 200 times a day, which is where they are headed, it becomes routine space traffic control with inexpensive ground crews following procedural manuals.
So, I wouldn't expect any rapid turnarounds soon, but give it ten years and they could be turning them around in hours or days, which would absolutely change the economics of space flight. I don't think Musk is into demand driven pricing - he wants his eutopia to be for all - so we may see spaceflight costs rapidly trend down to the same order of magnitude as current commercial flight, perhaps by the 2030s, perhaps sooner. So far they've maintained fantastic momentum.