Amazon Founder Goes to Space

It started with a boom and ended with a touchdown: Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, has sent a craft past the edge of space and then landed its rocket safely – and vertically – in Texas. “Full reuse is a game changer, and we can’t wait to fuel up and fly again”, said Bezos in a press release on Tuesday.

His other company, Blue Origin, scored a big symbolic first in the private-sector space race Monday – launching a rocket that returned back to ground base in one piece. New Shepard has a crew capsule and a rocket booster by a BE-3 liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen engine.

Richard M. Rocket, chief executive officer and co-founder of market researcher NewSpace Global in Cape Canaveral, Florida said, “This is a major breakthrough for the commercialization of space”. Blue Origins does plan to open its space flights up to the public soon, and ticketing information is now available at their website.

Then Musk got a little sassy and pointed out all the successful tests SpaceX has done, including the grasshopper test and tests over the open ocean.

SpaceX, the rival private space company run by Elon Musk, has been trying to do the same thing but from a much higher altitude. It’s being developed for Blue Origin’s orbital launch vehicle and United Launch Alliance’s next-generation Vulcan launch system. And Blue Origin’s 62-mile mission barely counts as “space”.

The booster stage, meanwhile, used a series of hydraulic fins to steer as it plummeted back to Earth, upright.

In this photo provided by Blue Origin taken on Monday, November 23, 2015, an unmanned Blue Origin booster rocket sits after landing in Van Horn, West Texas.

While Blue Origin has pulled ahead in vertical rocket landing technology, its rockets have not been used to carry a payload into space yet. Bezos congratulated his company’s team in a blog post – as did Elon Musk on Twitter.

“It is, however, important to clear up the difference between “space” and ‘orbit, ‘ as described well by (link)”, Musk added with a second tweet.