On April 29, Blue Origin flew the first development test flight of the New Shepard space vehicle.
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Space transportation company, Blue Origin, successfully launched and landed a suborbital rocket Tuesday in an important step toward making reusable rockets.
Bottom line: Blue Origin, a private spaceflight company founded by Jeff Bezos, sucessfully soft-landed its New Shepard rocket on November 23, 2015.
The space capsule on the top of the rocket that will someday carry space tourists separated from the rocket once it reached space and returned to Earth via parachute. Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket reached 329,839 feet before returning to touch down on its Van Horn, Texas concrete landing pad.
“Full reuse is a game changer, and we can’t wait to fuel up and fly again”, he said.
Elon Musk has yet to react to his rival’s success on Twitter – though we’re guessing that he might be thinking twice about renewing his Amazon Prime subscription. This is necessary for space travel to become mainstream and sustaining multiplanetary life, according to SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
Rockets cost millions of dollars and are normally lost after each launch.
“Rockets have always been expendable”, Bezos wrote in blog post about the landing.
The landing was cheered as a momentous milestone in the history of space flight that could one day make human travel far more accessible and affordable.
SpaceX has tried on several occasions to land its rockets on Earth undamaged, but weather and technical problems have prevented it from doing so.
As The Wall Street Journal notes, the rocket landed just four feet from where it took off at in West Texas.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, for example, runs his own privately-funded aerospace outfit by the name of Blue Origin.
The world’s first reusable rocket after a successful landing at a site in West Texas.
Blue Origin launched its New Shepard space launch system, which consists of a BE-3 rocket engine and a top-mounted crew capsule.
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The company says the rocket flew to 329,839 feet, which is high enough to be considered “space”.
