“Now safely tucked away at our launch site in West Texas is the rarest of beasts-a used rocket,”Bezos said”.
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In this photo provided by Blue Origin taken on Monday, Nov. 23, 2015, an unmanned Blue Origin booster rocket sits after landing in Van Horn, West Texas.
Private spaceflight company Blue Origin has successfully launched and returned its New Shepard space vehicle in a test flight that could revolutionize spaceflight.
In Monday’s test, the vehicle reached an altitude of 329,839 feet (100.5 kilometers) before landing back on Earth in a controlled descent.
He is the CEO of Amazon.com Inc.
The landing was cheered as a momentous milestone in the history of space flight that could one day make human travel far more accessible and affordable.
Even the Space Shuttle was only technically reusable because its giant fuel tank was discarded after each launch, and its side boosters were parachuted into corrosive salt water every flight, which required them to be extensively refurbished after use, making the Space Shuttle exceedingly expensive.
Reusability has been SpaceX’s goal from the get-go, and while it’s come close to succeeding several times, its strategy of attempting to land on a floating barge in the middle of the ocean has made the task hard.
It’s a surprisingly lovely thing, to see something manmade touch space and then fall back toward the ground, firing up its rockets again about a mile above the surface to execute a graceful and controlled landing; the same machine created to overcome gravity now working in concert with the mysterious force to avoid being destroyed by it in the hopes that it will fly and conquer it again another day. The secretive company, based in Kent, Washington, did not invite reporters to attend. In a similar test in April, the rocket failed to land safely.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle, named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, landed under the power of its BE-3 engine.
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According to Bezo’s blog post, the booster was moving at just 4.4 miles per hour through the last 100 feet.
