Rocket Goes To Space, Lands Back Safely Upright In Texas

Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ (Amazon.com’s CEO) commercial rocket tourism company, just completed its first successful test launching and landing its New Shepard rocket after a 100 km flight into the atmosphere.

The New Shepard is a fully controlled space vehicle that takes commands from the Blue Origin’s West Texas launch site. “Full reuse is a game changer, and we can’t wait to fuel up and fly again”, Blue Origin founder Bezos wrote in a press release. A capsule that is created to hold human tourists separated from it and safely touched down on Earth using a parachute.

The New Shepard suborbital space vehicle launched successfully to an altitude of 100.5 kilometres Monday morning.

Virgin Galactic launches its spaceship from a specially made jet aircraft, which then lands on a runway.

SpaceX, the rival private space company run by Elon Musk, has been trying to do the same thing but from a much higher altitude.

The flight which was suborbital and only lasted eight minutes represents a key step in the company’s drive to make reusable rockets.

Like another upstart rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, Bezos and Blue Origin are betting that reusable rockets can greatly reduce the cost of getting to space.

SpaceX of Hawthorne first landed a rocket vertically two years ago, but that rocket didn’t go into space. Right now, when we send something into space, most of the rocket is just dumped in the ocean. In May a Roscomos Proton M rocket exploded 497 seconds into its flight and came crashing back to earth, taking a Mexican satellite with it.

Elon Musk explained the difference on Twitter shortly after congratulating Jeff Bezos and the Blue Origin team for the achievement.

Bezos and Musk have both said they aim to help humanity become a truly spacefaring species, with a permanent presence on Mars and other off-Earth locales.

Musk added that his SpaceX had conducted a suborbital VTOL flight in 2013 – referring to a test that showed a test rocket rising to 250 meters before descending to a vertical landing.