Video: Falcon Heavy | Flight Animation

[RobinF]

I wonder how many Dragon Version 2 capsules they will have to throw away during the testing phase? Those are reusable too but everything says that they won't be making any powered landings with it for quite a while. For now, it seems as though they aren't really interested in recovering the second stage. It makes sense since it probably isn't too cost effective. I'd think you'd need to maximize the usability over recoverability for that stage. Just a WAG but I'd guess that the three booster stages would account for at least 75% of the cost of the rocket excluding payload.

Capsules are not thrown away. Regardless of whether the Super Draco engines are used on flights they can deploy parachutes and land in the ocean for the first manned flights. They will likely test the powered landing on cargo missions using the new capsule in parallel. The Service module behind the capsule is always thrown away after the deorbit burn.
The second stage uses a single Merlin engine and may not be valuable enough to distort the trajectory performance to recover it.

 

[chickensevil]

Elon recently said that they have put 2nd stage reuse on the back burner mostly because the ROI on the research isn't worth the amount of time it would take for them to get it working and he wanted to focus toward getting something worthy of going to mars.

Keep in mind that it costs a lot of money to develop and fly these things and they only have so much gross profit to spend on these R&D ventures so it comes down to priorities.

They want to get to mars, not really focused on staying in LEO. And a good second stage is going to be put on a path out of orbit that would likely make it unrecoverable anyway (when shooting for something like mars)