On its second try, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space launch company successfully returned a New Shepard rocket and capsule after blastoff, a key step in ongoing efforts to develop a reusable space transportation system.
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While this week’s achievement is being celebrated, Bezos said his company plans to fly the vehicle “many, many times and then when we’re completely confident in it, we’re going to start using it to take people into space”.
This win for Bezos with his Blue Origin reusable space vehicle will now up his company one level above Elon Musk’s spaceX in this arena. It slowed its descent by firing its engine, starting at about 4,900ft above ground.
Once in space, the crew capsule would separate from the booster, which would land back on Earth.
The rocket managed a vertical landing at a site in Texas, while the empty passenger capsule made a controlled landing with the help of a parachute.
Musk congratulated Blue Origin on its successful rocket landing on Tuesday but noted that suborbital rockets are not flying high or fast enough when compared to his rockets. The company succeeded in testing at landing a rocket sailing up 1,000 meters, or about 3280 feet. Everything went as planned with this launch as the rocket shot straight up to an altitude of 100km (about 60 miles), which is considered the beginning of space. In 2014, SpaceX and Boeing Co. shared the first contract to operate manned flights to the orbiting lab. And let the new age space race begin.
Blue Origin said the unmanned flight took place on Monday morning at its site in Van Horn in west Texas.
Blue Origin sticks the rocket booster landing.
In the past, owner of rival SpaceX Elon Musk has tried to land his rockets upright in test flights but they have never left the atmosphere.
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Reusable rockets are considered a major advance by the rocket and space industry as spaceflight cost lies not in the fuel, but rather the rocket components.
