Blue Origin, a private company developing vehicles and technologies to enable commercial human space transportation accomplished a key goal most recently.
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Its New Shepard vehicle consists of a capsule that is created to take people into space for suborbital flights someday, and a booster.
New Shepard launched from Blue Origin’s test site in west Texas, soared to 329,839 feet (100.5 km) before returning safely to terra firma.
The capsule landed under parachutes on the company’s private range in West Texas.
Blue Origin made history Monday night with the launch into space and safe recovery of an unpiloted New Shepard Crew Capsule and its Propulsion Module. Meanwhile, as demonstrated, the rocket returns to Earth to make a controlled landing. During the test mission, its BE-3 rocket and crew capsule were launched to a height of 62 miles.
This is the second full test of the Blue Origin New Shepard booster, which didn’t have a payload on-board this time.
The modern space race is far from over with several players in the market making their presence known, as Amazon’s Jeffrey P. Bezos is one of them. New Shepard uses a technique known as a propulsive landing, in which the rocket’s engines are reignited as the vehicle plummets to Earth. Although Musk took to his Twitter account Tuesday morning to congratulate Bezos and Blue Origin for the landing, he made sure to also remind his fellow billionaire that their rockets aren’t quite traveling as high or fast as SpaceX’s.
Reusable rockets are considered a major advance in the rocket industry as most of the cost of spaceflight is not in the fuel, but rather the rocket components.
Blue Origin has been competing with other companies, like SpaceX, to develop the first fully reusable rocket.
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And yet the video also does not shy away from mixing in its marketing message, as the entire thing is an advertisement for similar manned flights to the edge of space that Blue Origin plans to offer to citizen space tourists in the future. The craft came to rest just a few feet from the center of the landing pad’s bulls-eye.
