Retro thrust slowed the unmanned crew capsule down from 15 miles per hour to 3 miles per hour for a soft landing.
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“The very same New Shepard booster that flew above the Karman line and then landed vertically at its launch site last November has now flown and landed again, demonstrating reuse”, Bezos said in a press release.
New Shepard happens to be the smallest booster designed and constructed by Blue Origin, and possibly the smallest in the company’s orbital vehicles.
Blue Origin will attempt to land the same New Shepard rocket “again and again” later this year, according to a January 22 statement on the company’s website.
“The team replaced the crew capsule parachutes, replaced the pyro igniters, conducted functional and avionics checkouts, and made several software improvements, including a noteworthy one”.
This is what informed the vehicle landing on a position of convenience on its pad rather than the exact center of the pad, giving priority to attitude ahead of exact lateral positioning.
“It is like a pilot lining up a plane with the center line of the runway”.
Blue Origin announced over the weekend that the same New Shepard booster that blasted off and landed in November had repeated the feat, hitting an altitude of 333,000 feet before “gently” returning to Earth.
SpaceX likely will not try to launch the same Falcon 9 rocket again, Musk told reporters December 21. It is the first that successfully achieved vertical landing of the rocket. It’s the typical inverted pendulum problem, wrote Bezos, who noted that such a problem can be solved easily as the size of the pendulum increases due to its greater moment of inertia.
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That scaling means that balancing the rocket will only get easier as the vehicle is built larger, he said. But Blue Origin is also planning a true orbital launch vehicle. More flight tests on the New Shepard will occur this year.
