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Originally Posted by spazzyfry123
Curious why, though? Just because it's extremely impressive or does it have a constructive purpose (to facilitate multi-use rockets for example)?
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They land the first stage boosters either on the barge or back at Kennedy Space Center to be re-used as a "flight-proven" booster on subsequent launches. They have also found a way to retrieve/refurbish some carbon fiber cargo fairing cover halves, which cost millions of bucks to make. SpaceX's goal was to get 10+ launches out of each of the current series of Falcon first stage boosters, IIRC. I'm pretty sure that this was the third launch for this particular booster, and second manned flight for the Dragon capsule.
The only thing thrown away in a Falcon 9 launch is the second stage (and its single Merlin MVAC engine) along with some inter-stage adapters like the "trunk" on the Dragon capsule. I wouldn't be surprised to see SpaceX develop a method to recover the (more difficult) second stage in the future, although I suspect that their research efforts are going into their "Starship" program which is 100% recyclable and a key part of their lunar lander contract with NASA.
Elon Musk's logic is that airlines don't throw away jets after every flight, and there's no reason to throw away rockets after only one flight.....