The Russians put stuff into orbit relatively cheaply, but not by a huge margin. Building the same rocket over and over again has worked out OK for them, but it hasn't dramatically reduced the cost of access to space.
The landing fuel for SpaceX's design is the same fuel as used to launch. A reusable Falcon 9 launch will have 30% less payload capacity than an expendable one, because of the need to save fuel for the landing. But the cost savings will be vastly more than 30%. So overall it's a big net win.
SpaceX isn't man-rated yet. They don't yet have a spacecraft that can carry people, so there's no point. That's being worked on, of course. The Dragon 2 spacecraft that will carry people includes a launch escape system, so it will be much more tolerant of launch mishaps than the Shuttle was, where the options for surviving a serious failure on launch were pretty much just "pray."
Turnaround costs and reentry shielding actually illustrate just how different SpaceX's approach is from the Shuttle's. They're only reusing the first stage for now. That means that there's no real need for a thermal protection system, so no worries with tiles. The engines are stressed a lot less, so they break less. The engines are also much less efficient (which is to say much less fragile) than the Shuttle's, and should need no refurbishment for subsequent launches. They're looking at reusing the capsules as well, but the heat shielding on those is tiny compared to what a Shuttle needed. They're not currently looking to reuse the second stage at all, but of course the rocket equation tells us that reusing the first stage is a much bigger deal. Just reusing the first stage gets you 90% of the cost savings of reusing everything.
The Russians put stuff into orbit relatively cheaply, but not by a huge margin. Building the same rocket over and over again has worked out OK for them, but it hasn't dramatically reduced the cost of access to space.
Buran, the USSR's shuttle, was a reasonably good idea. Although it looked like the US shuttle, it was really a vehicle carried on a big booster; it had no main engines. It flew once, successfully, unmanned. The Boeing X-37 unmanned mini-shuttle is similar, and seems to work well. The USAF keeps sending one up, keeping it up for a year, and then bringing it down to land on a runway.
The Buran is really interesting. It's a pity it never got enough love. I'm not hugely familiar with it, but it does seem superficially like a better approach than the Shuttle.
The landing fuel for SpaceX's design is the same fuel as used to launch. A reusable Falcon 9 launch will have 30% less payload capacity than an expendable one, because of the need to save fuel for the landing. But the cost savings will be vastly more than 30%. So overall it's a big net win.
SpaceX isn't man-rated yet. They don't yet have a spacecraft that can carry people, so there's no point. That's being worked on, of course. The Dragon 2 spacecraft that will carry people includes a launch escape system, so it will be much more tolerant of launch mishaps than the Shuttle was, where the options for surviving a serious failure on launch were pretty much just "pray."
Turnaround costs and reentry shielding actually illustrate just how different SpaceX's approach is from the Shuttle's. They're only reusing the first stage for now. That means that there's no real need for a thermal protection system, so no worries with tiles. The engines are stressed a lot less, so they break less. The engines are also much less efficient (which is to say much less fragile) than the Shuttle's, and should need no refurbishment for subsequent launches. They're looking at reusing the capsules as well, but the heat shielding on those is tiny compared to what a Shuttle needed. They're not currently looking to reuse the second stage at all, but of course the rocket equation tells us that reusing the first stage is a much bigger deal. Just reusing the first stage gets you 90% of the cost savings of reusing everything.