Reusable rocket: In a first, booster lands upright on Earth

Bezos, Musk, and other “new space” pioneers believe the best way to open up space is to dramatically lower the costs of getting there.

Reusable rockets are seen as an important and vital step in commercial spaceflight.

The critical point is that the rocket can be reused to cut costs. A loss of hydraulic pressure meant Blue Origin couldn’t recover the rocket for that flight.

“SpaceX is only trying to recover their first stage booster, which is of course suborbital”.

Under contract from NASA, SpaceX has already flown several supply missions to the worldwide Space Station. That’s where SpaceX’s SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is sending equipment to.

Bezos has a few interests outside of Amazon, the biggest being Blue Origin and The Washington Post. Right now, when we send something into space, most of the rocket is just dumped in the ocean. You can watch all of the test flights and landings on YouTube.

Blue Origin was originally only focused on suborbital flight, but in the past two years has become more involved in contracts for the United Launch Alliance.

Blue Origin launched its New Shepard space launch system, which consists of a BE-3 rocket engine and a top-mounted crew capsule. The crew capsule reaches a height of 329,839. It then managed to go on to make a neat, vertical landing, touching the ground at a sedate 4.4mph. However, the company has failed to have a successful landing of a rocket that has left the Earth’s atmosphere.

The rocket blasted off at 12:21 p.m. EST Monday, deployed its capsule and landed eight minutes later. The company plans to try again on its next launch, perhaps next month.

Jeff Bezos’ privately-funded space company Blue Origin announced a historic first today – it successfully landed a fired rocket back on Earth after an unmanned flight to space.

But the BE-3 rocket also began its own controlled descent, when its own rockets fired at 5,000 feet. It is also developing the BE-4 for its orbital booster and potentially United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan booster, which ULA hopes will replace its Atlas V rocket powered by Russian main engines.