Jeff Bezos One-Ups Elon Musk in the Reusable Rocket Race

After deploying a space capsule, the rocket then plummeted back toward the ground, reignited its booster, and – in a world first – gently and safely touched down in the middle of a landing target. Blue Origin’s “historic” controlled landing edges out SpaceX in the race to create a successful reusable rocket, according to The Verge. The company succeeded in testing at landing a rocket sailing up 1,000 meters, or about 3280 feet.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has started his space company, Blue Origin, in the hopes of using his New Shepard rocket to carry tourists into space.

“We are building Blue Origin to seed an enduring human presence in space, to help us move beyond this blue planet that is the origin of all we know”, Bezos wrote in a blog post on the company’s Web site.

A video from Blue Origin showed the rocket moving gently as it prepared for a touchdown in the middle of swirling wave of dust.

The news is a giant step forward for the commercialization of space: Reusable rockets make for huge cost savings.

“Rockets have always been expendable”. But instead of flying them back to Earth, the engines would float back on parachutes and then be snagged in mid-air by a helicopter with a grappling hook.

In addition to SpaceX and Blue Origin, Bezos faces competition in space tourism from Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic….or does he?

SpaceX has taken a very similar approach in trying to recover the first stage of its Falcon 9 rockets, coming close to landing them on a floating platform in the Atlantic. The 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.

SpaceX, Musk noted, wasn’t even the first to land a rocket. “It is, however, important to clear up the difference between “space” and “orbit”…” The top speed reached by New Shepard was over three times the speed of sound, the company said. Everything went as planned with this launch as the rocket shot straight up to an altitude of 100km (about 60 miles), which is considered the beginning of space.