Jeff Bezos’ New Shepard Vehicle made history when it became the first rocket to pass the boundary of space, what’s known as the Karman line, 100 km high, and then making back landing vertically on Earth.
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This is the first time a rocket of its kind has managed to complete two missions and now Blue Origin says it plans to continue launching and re-landing the rocket over and over again. That makes it the first commercial vertical rocket to launch into space a second time. That’s a totally different approach from SpaceX, which has gotten in the habit of live streaming almost every test, launch, or rocket landing attempt.
However, the internet community – via a series of humorous videos and photos (one on the left via a NSF member) – were quick to note the difference between Blue Origin’s suborbital success and SpaceX’s much more hard return of an orbital rocket.
Several modifications to the New Shepard’s configuration were made, such as replacing the crew capsule parachutes and the pyro igniters and conducting avionics and functional checkouts. Instead of directing the rocket to touch down at the exact center of its landing pad, the program now tells it to initially target the center, but to set the booster down at “a position of convenience on the pad, prioritizing vehicle attitude ahead of precise lateral positioning”. All going well, it should be ready to test with actual humans in 2017.
Bezos, though, wrote in his blog post that the vertical landings demonstrated by New Shepard are preferable to wings or parachutes. Blue Origin’s New Shepard is created to take future passengers into sub-orbital space, where they will experience four minutes of weightlessness before falling back to Earth.
Bezos and Blue Origin’s goal is to see people “living and working in space” and “You can’t get there by throwing the hardware away”. Falcon 9 can deliver a thrust of 1.5million pounds while the New Shepard only delivers a thrust of 100K pounds.
Fellow tech titan Elon Musk’s SpaceX in December successfully returned a rocket to a landing pad in Florida after it blasted off on a satellite-delivery mission. “And the vertical landing architecture scales extraordinarily well”, affirmed Bezos.
New Shepard is not the first reusable suborbital vehicle. Last Sunday SpaceX attempted to land a rocket on a platform floating in the Pacific Ocean, but one of the booster’s four landing legs gave way and the rocket keeled over and exploded.
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Not everyone, though, agrees with Blue Origin’s preference with vertical landings. “Theirs don’t”, Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, said of competition with Blue Origin and SpaceX during an interview with CNBC Jan. 22 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
