You see, Bezos owns a private space firm called Blue Origin, and while it seems to fly under radar compared to the huge press that SpaceX receives, the company just celebrated an incredible milestone in the efforts to advance reusable rockets for future space travel. The space venture of billionaire Jeff Bezos has successfully landed its reusable New Shepard rocket, after launching it into space at an altitude of over 100 kilometers.
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New Shephard launched from the company’s test site in Van Horn, Texas, on Monday morning, rocketing into space before releasing the crew capsule from the rocket booster. “Full reuse is a game changer, and we can’t wait to fuel up and fly again”, Bezos said in the statement.
And Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle is not powerful enough to make it -; yet.
Jeff Bezos has a pet project on the side when he isn’t leading Amazon: space travel and exploration.
The successful flight keeps Blue Origin on track to begin commercial flights of research payloads by the middle of 2016.
SpaceX, the rival private space company run by Elon Musk, has been trying to do the same thing but from a much higher altitude. The rocket portion of the vehicle, on the other hand, falls safely back to Blue Origin’s Texas spaceport, where it reignites its main engine for a powered vertical landing. “When you lower the cost of access to space very significantly you will change the markets, you will change what’s possible”.
Blue Origin plans to fly up to six paying passengers on suborbital trips offering brief periods of weightlessness.
The booster stage, meanwhile, used a series of hydraulic fins to steer as it plummeted back to Earth, upright.
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SpaceX has tried on several occasions to land its rockets on Earth undamaged, but weather and technical problems have prevented it from doing so. It slowed its descent by firing its engine, starting at about 4,900ft above ground. But SpaceX founder Elon Musk was gracious on Twitter, regarding Blue Origin’s achievement.
