HAWTHORNE, Calif. — A company that has flown unmanned capsules to the Space Station unveiled a spacecraft designed to ferry up to seven astronauts to low-Earth orbit that SpaceX founder Elon Musk says will lower the cost of going to space.

The futuristic, cone-headed craft dubbed Dragon V2 featured landing legs that pop out and a propulsion system designed to land almost anywhere “with the accuracy of a helicopter,” Musk said Thursday at the Southern California rocket builder’s headquarters near Los Angeles International Airport.

The technology would enable rapid reloading and reusability of the spacecraft, he said. He noted that in the past, many rockets and space craft return to Earth in a fireball, rendering them unusable.

“You can just reload, propel it and fly again,” Musk said. “This is extremely important for revolutionizing access to space because as long as we continue to throw away rockets and space crafts, we will never truly have access to space. It’ll always be incredibly expensive.”

“If an aircraft is thrown away with each flight, nobody will be able to fly or very few (can),” he said. “The same is true with rockets and spacecraft.”

Since the shuttle fleet retired in 2011, NASA has depended on Russian rockets to transport astronauts to orbit and back, paying nearly $71 million per seat. The space agency has said it wants U.S. companies to fill the void by 2017 and has doled out seed money to spur innovation.