Blue Origin Successfully Flies and Lands New Shepard Suborbital Vehicle

New Shepard launched from the company’s West Texas test site at 12:21 p.m. Eastern time November 23, reaching a peak altitude of 100.5 kilometers and top speed of Mach 3.72. “Everything that we have learned here on New Shepard is completely applicable to our orbital booster”, Bezos said.

Space company Blue Origin has made history by successfully landing a reusable suborbital rocket back on Earth.

According to Bezo’s blog post, the booster was moving at just 4.4 miles per hour through the last 100 feet.

Named after the first American in space, Alan Shepard, the New Shepard vehicle is comprised of two elements: a crew capsule in which the astronauts ride and a rocket booster powered by a single American-made BE-3 liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen engine.

It is the first time Blue Origin has reached space.

Regardless of the technicalities involved, you can’t take away from what Blue Origins has accomplished.

Space transportation company, Blue Origin, successfully launched and landed a suborbital rocket Tuesday in an important step toward making reusable rockets.

So far, rockets like the one used by Blue Origin have either disintegrated in flight or landed with so much damage that they could not be reused.

Both modules of New Shepard are created to be reused.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket hasn’t been able to stick a landing from space.

Bezos also shared the news in the only tweet on the Twitter account he set up in 2008.

The founder of Amazon had first revealed that he was entering the commercial space flight business back in April.

Reusable rockets are considered a major advance in the rocket industry as most of the cost of spaceflight is not in the fuel, but rather the rocket components.

The results have been fun to watch, but presumably frustrating for Elon Musk, who may be Bezos’s frenemy #1 judging from the shade he threw on the Blue Origin accomplishment. If people had been aboard the capsule, though, they’d have experienced four minutes of weightlessness before falling back to Earth.

A controlled landing on solid ground.

Bezos is the founder of Blue Origin, a private company that develops vehicles and technologies to enable human space transportation.