The rocket itself then fell back toward Earth, relit its boosters, and landed just next to the launch pad.
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Reusable rockets and safe return flights are critical events if space travel is going to be commercialized.
His company recently succeeded in the very area that Elon Musk’s SpaceX has struggled so much with – safely landing a spent rocket.
“We are building Blue Origin to seed an enduring human presence in space, to help us move beyond this blue planet that is the origin of all we know”, Bezos wrote in a blog post.
There is an important difference, however, between New Shepard and SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which makes it trickier for SpaceX to land their rocket than Blue Origin. Until the recent achievement of Blue Origin, rockets launched in space have either burned up in the atmosphere or ended up crashing in the sea, according to CNet.
SpaceX has also built reusable rockets, and has attempted two landings, so far.
And Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle is not powerful enough to make it. However, Bezos announced last September that they are in the preliminary stages of designing a rocket that could achieve orbital spaceflight.
While Musk did tweet his congratulations to Bezos and Blue Origin he quickly pointed out that the rocket only reached the edge of space. Although he didn’t offer an estimate for ticket prices aboard future commercial space flights, Bezos told CBS that he “can’t wait to go”.
In a phone call with reporters on Tuesday, Bezos said he hopes to see people aboard Blue Origin launches in “a couple of years”.
“Congrats to Jeff Bezos and the BO team for achieving VTOL [Vertical take-off landing] on their booster”, Mr Musk tweeted. It was descending at just 4.4 miles per hour when it touched down at the launch site, still standing up, the company said. It is worth noting that Musk is trying to take his rocket to an “orbital spaceflight”, in which a spacecraft is dispatched onto a trajectory that would enable it to remain in space for at least one full orbit of the Earth.
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The mission is in some contrast to rival company SpaceX’s recent attempts to land a rocket on a barge, which have all crashed.
