A private space company announced Tuesday that it had landed a rocket upright and gently enough to be used again, a milestone in commercial aeronautics. It has recorded soft landings on the ground by rockets that flew less than a mile high, an altitude far lower than what the new test achieved.
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In November this year, Blue Origin’s Blue Shepard spacecraft became the first ever to land safely (and vertically) back on Earth – and the huge team of rocket scientists and engineers that made the landing possible were pretty excited about it. Blue Origin has a long-term vision of greatly increasing the number of people who fly into space so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. According to the company, it was a suborbital test flight.
Blue Origin said the unmanned flight took place Monday morning at its site in Van Horn in West Texas.
Following powered flight, the crew capsule separates from the booster and coasts into space, providing several minutes of weightlessness. The greatest thing about the launch was that everything worked as planned by the company.
The group are fixated on a rocket slowly descending to the ground after returning from its trip to space on November 23. Just prior to landing, the booster re-ignites its BE-3 engine which slows the vehicle to 4.4 miles per hour for a gentle, powered vertical landing, enabling vehicle reuse.
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“The goal here is low-priced reusability”, Logsdon said.
