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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Elon Musk took to Twitter to remind Jeff Bezos – not to mention the SpaceX founder’s 2.9 million Twitter followers- that Blue Origin was not the first to vertically launch and land a reusable suborbital rocket. Meanwhile, SpaceX’s tests have been attempting to land a rocket on a floating barge rather than on land-again, much more hard.
You see, Bezos owns a private space firm called Blue Origin, and while it seems to fly under radar compared to the vast press that SpaceX receives, the company just celebrated an incredible milestone in the efforts to advance reusable rockets for future space travel.
“Now safely tucked away at our launch site in West Texas is the rarest of beasts-a used rocket”, Bezos said in a statement.
The rocket – New Shepard – soared 329,839 feet, or just above the 62-mile mark where outer space begins.
Blue Origin is a private company, which Bezos founded in 2000, that works to develop technology for commercial human space travel.
Blue Origin are planning about two more years of test flights before it will offer rides to passengers. Bezos congratulated his company’s team in a blog post – as did Elon Musk on Twitter. SpaceX was contracted by NASA to transport their astronauts to and from space for a nice $2.6 billion, and it did the same with Boeing for $4.2 billion. Until the recent achievement of Blue Origin, rockets launched in space have either burned up in the atmosphere or ended up crashing in the sea, according to CNet. The capsule made a parachute touchdown at 12:32 p.m.
It is the first time in history a rocket has been launched into space and has landed back on Earth without being damaged or destroyed.
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A video from Blue Origin showed the rocket moving gently as it prepared for a touchdown in the middle of swirling wave of dust.
