The flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle reached an altitude of 100.5 kilometers and landed back at its West Texas launch site.
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It is true that Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket can reach sub-orbital space, while SpaceX’s Falcon 9 can surpass orbital space, marking the difference that Musk was trying to steal Bezos’s thunder with. He added, “Full reuse is a game changer, and we can’t wait to fuel up and fly again”.
The landing – Rocket booster is reignited at 4,896 feet above ground level.
New Shepard climbed to an altitude of 329,839 feet, which is where the vehicle’s crew capsule is meant to detach.
In a move that could pave the way for affordable space flight, Bezos’s independent firm sent a BE-3 rocket into suborbital space and brought it safely back down to Earth. The flight marks an historic milestone for Blue Origin and the space industry as a whole, with reusability considered by many to be a key requirement for affordable spaceflight.
SpaceX’s rockets have been used for commercial, military and NASA payload launches since 2012. The company hired its first in-house lobbyist and is now shelling cash to get Blue Origin on par with everyone else looking to explore a planet beyond our own.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk apparently wasn’t ready to let Amazon’s Jeff Bezos bask too long in the glory Tuesday of his space achievement. That’s also a central goal of SpaceX, which has twice tried to land a rocket vertically that had been to space.
“Congrats to Jeff Bezos and the BO (Blue Origin) team for achieving VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) on their booster”, Musk tweeted.
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Private space companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX have been in the race to create recyclable rockets, not just to lessen the cost of space travels, but also to make it possible for space tourism to happen.
