Blue Origins successfully lands its reusable rocket before Elon Musk’s SpaceX

This week, Blue Origin, the secretive space company backed by Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, launched an unmanned vehicle called the New Shepherd to the edge of outer space. It not only paved the way for the advent of reusable rockets, but it also sparked a spat between Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin’s founder, and Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO. Blue Origin is a private space exploration company.

Blue Origin-whose goal is “to seed an enduring human presence in space, to help us move beyond this blue planet that is the origin of all we know”-isn’t the only private space company working to develop a reusable rocket”.

Therefore, Blue Origin’s flight has so far achieved vertical takeoff and landing, which is significant, but it has not proven it can fulfill the parameters of an actual NASA mission. Also, if it’s about suborbital reusable rocket landing, Musk says the SpaceX Grasshopper already accomplished this in 2013, only at a lower height of 0.25km.

“Rockets have always been expendable”, Bezos wrote in a statement. Space X talked about a 10x reduction in launch costs if they could reuse their rocket.

Since the dawn of the Space Age, rockets have been treated as a regrettably disposable byproduct of getting a payload into orbit.

Blue Origin’s first commercial flights will push through if there is success in all of its current set of flight tests.

On Monday, November 23, Blue Origin successfully flew the first fully reusable rocket into space, giving the company first bragging rights. “Full reuse is a game-changer, and we can’t wait to fuel up and fly again”. Just prior to landing, the booster re-ignited its BE-3 engine which slowed the vehicle to 7.1 kilometers per hour for “a gentle, controlled” vertical landing, only 4.5 feet (1.37 meters) from the center of the pad.

USA Today cited that the New Shepard capsule moved up to about 333,000 feet and landed via parachutes on Blue Origin’s ranch in West Texas. Now Mr Bezos’ firm has beaten Mr Musk’s to the punch. The rocket, fittingly, is named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space. He predicts the first launch will occur by the end of the decade and said more details would be forthcoming next year.

That’s because both have ambitions for deep space missions, which would require different capabilities. Branson’s company launches space vehicle from an airplane and that lands on runway similar to any other normal aircraft.

That’s a fun little zing at a competitor who was apparently trying to steal some of his shine-or at the very least, it’s clear that Musk doesn’t want Bezos to get credit for landing an orbital rocket when it’s just a suborbital rocket, which, you know, your kid has probably done in the backyard a million times.