The New Shepard space vehicle blasts off on its first developmental test flight over Blue Origin’s west Texas launch site in this handout provided by Blue Origin. The space capsule touched down under parachutes, which is nothing new, but Blue Origin also brought it’s booster rocket back to earth. In the other corner, Paypal and Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk’s SpaceX attempts to do the same thing down in the Rio Grande Valley.
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The private space firm founded by Internet entrepreneur Jeff Bezos claimed a breakthrough for its space travel efforts Tuesday with the launch of a reusable rocket. The company is now looking to sell space on the rockets during test flights to accommodate researches and experiments.
Then, hydraulically actuated fins steered the vehicle through 119 miles per hour high-altitude crosswinds to a precise location 5,000 feet above the landing pad.
One of the implications of Blue Origin’s success is the high possibility of conducting more space experiments through its successful spacecraft.
“That’s a game-changer because it changes the cost structure of space travel completely”, he said.
After explaining to his 2.95 million Twitter followers that Bezos’s rocket went to space, but not, like, space space, Musk turned his attention to an audience of one, playing “whose rocket is bigger” with Bezos.
Led by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin would like to transform space tourism from the stuff of fantasy into viable business, available to the public like a luxury vacation.
Commercial spaceflight companies have been engaging in a quietly competitive race, with each careful not to give away too much, while working to gain mindshare despite the public’s loss of passion for space exploration following the Apollo missions. He disagreed, for instance, that the New Shepard’s landing is historic, citing the rocket X-15 as the first reusable suborbital rocket. Bezos managed to land back a rocket following a suborbital flight (ie up to 100km while orbital flights go up to c.2000km), so more development is needed.
Blue Origin is not the first company to achieve a landing of this nature. Blue Origin has a long-term vision of greatly increasing the number of people that fly into space so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system.
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The New Shepard space vehicle is comprised of two elements: a crew capsule in which the astronauts would ride, and a rocket booster powered by a single American-made BE-3 liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen engine. Typically, rockets that lift large payloads into orbital or suborbital space fall back to Earth (usually into the ocean) and are discarded after one use. However, USA Today reported that SpaceX plans to try again during its next launch, which may come as early as next month.
