Indeed, SpaceX has already sent its Falcon 9 two-stage rocket into orbit and back three times, delivering and returning cargo to the International Space Station. Falcon, along with the company’s Dragon spacecraft, was designed to deliver cargo as well as humans into space, and the company is actively working with NASA to achieve that goal.

SpaceX has taken the old way of building a rocket and modernized it, and in the process lowered the cost of launching into space by about 50%, says Andrew Nelson, chief operating officer at XCOR. It used to cost about $10,000 to $20,000 a pound to launch something into space—meaning it could cost $100 million to send a 10,000 pound geostationary satellite into space. If the first stage of the rocket can be reused, something SpaceX is experimenting with now, the price per pound may be brought down to about $2,000, bringing the cost of putting that satellite into space down to about $20 million, Nelson says.

“Eventually, there will be a whole new different generation of launchers, where the whole vehicle will be reusable. It will look more like a space plane operation, where the vehicle flies up, delivers the satellite and flies back, and be ready to launch again tomorrow. The costs will be closer to $200 per pound, and that might happen in the next 10 to 12 years,” Nelson says.

High launch costs were like a bottleneck inhibiting innovation in space systems. No one wanted to experiment with a new microprocessor in a satellite if it cost $200 million to build the satellite and another $100 million to launch it into space. The risk of failure was too great. The result is that technological progress in space has been much slower than that in, say, cell phones or laptop computers. As those launch costs come down, people won’t be skittish to try out new equipment and technologies, Nelson says.

For now, much of the activity in space is about satellites—vehicles for communication, observation and research. It’s already a $300 billion market because of government constellations like GPS and commercial systems like DirecTV. Space could easily be a multi-trillion-dollar market in 10 to 15 years, Nelson says, if the launch costs come down as hoped.

“Today, governments, the military, the civilian community, even the local weather station is buying data from satellite service providers,” he says, “but many new applications and systems will be possible when the launch costs are lower and the flight rate and safety are improved. It won’t just be about communications anymore.”