Blue Origin soft-lands a rocket!

Bottom line: Blue Origin, a private spaceflight company founded by Jeff Bezos, sucessfully soft-landed its New Shepard rocket on November 23, 2015.

Everyone is anxious to crack the code on reusable rockets because they have the potential to reduce the cost of reaching orbit dramatically. This win for Bezos with his Blue Origin reusable space vehicle will now up his company one level above Elon Musk’s spaceX in this arena.

In the test, the crew capsule separated and coasted into space and then descends and lands deploying three parachutes.

SpaceX gets most of the attention when it comes to private spaceflight firms, but Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is doing some impressive things too. It has recorded soft landings on the ground by rockets that flew less than a mile high, an altitude far lower than what the new test achieved. SpaceX was contracted by NASA to transport their astronauts to and from space for a nice $2.6 billion, and it did the same with Boeing for $4.2 billion.

The New Shepherd vertical takeoff and vertical landing vehicle is aimed at carrying six people into space to enjoy four minutes of weightlessness and a view of Earth at altitudes beyond 100 kilometers (328,084 feet), the internationally-recognized boundary of space. This is necessary for space travel to become mainstream and sustaining multiplanetary life, according to SpaceX founder Elon Musk. SpaceX has said it’s going to make an overland reusability attempt, but the company still doesn’t have a return-to-flight date after its June mission failure on an International Space Station resupply mission. In fact, Blue Origin is already compiling something of a “waiting list” though it hasn’t publicly listed prices or provided a time table for any future manned flights.

The company, based in Kent, Wash., south of Seattle, is selling space on the capsules during the uncrewed test flights for research experiments, and the company plans to begin flying them next year.

“Congrats to Jeff Bezos and the BO team for achieving VTOL [Vertical take-off landing] on their booster”, Mr Musk tweeted.