Jeff Bezos’ private space company Blue Origin just released incredible footage

Jeff Bezos’ rocket ship achieved a breakthrough Monday by traveling 329,839 feet into outer space and then landing upright upon its return to earth. It’s secondary school physics, and it’s what proves that Blue Origin’s recent suborbital flight and controlled landing is a success. As this was just a test launch though, the capsule came back to earth and landed safely with parachutes.

“Now safely tucked away at our launch site in West Texas is the rarest of beasts-a used rocket”, said Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin, in a statement.

While this week’s achievement is being celebrated, Bezos said his company plans to fly the vehicle “many, many times and then when we’re completely confident in it, we’re going to start using it to take people into space”. This means the rocket can be re-used for subsequent flights, which companies like Blue Origin claim will make spaceflight far less expensive.

Elon Musk has serious competition in the private spacecraft business. The Mach number he points out is the ratio of the speed of the rocket to the speed of sound in the gas, which determines the magnitude of the compressibility effects.

There is an important difference, however, between New Shepard and SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which makes it trickier for SpaceX to land their rocket than Blue Origin.

“Rockets have always been expendable”.

New Shepard touching down in west Texas. SpaceX, which like Blue Origin, has had several failed attempts to return a launcher to earth, pointed out that the Blue Origin flight was only to a suborbital altitude, making the return less complicated.

SpaceX has been trying-and failing-to neatly land its rockets on a barge for months now. It landed on its planned landing pad, only 4.5 feet from the center from which it launched. An American-made BE-3 liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen engine pumps out 110,000 pounds of thrust. A brilliant three-minute video was just uploaded onto Blue Origin’s YouTube documenting the entire feat.

Now that NASA has essentially retired its rockets, both SpaceX and Blue Origin hope to take both astronauts and tourists into space in the future.