Blue Origin launches, lands rocket again

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’ private spaceflight company managed to launch and then land its New Shepard suborbital rocket during a test flight Friday.

The first rocket in the world to reuse is blue origin. That makes it the first commercial vertical rocket to launch into space a second time. Musk objected in a series of tweets, noting low-altitude vertical landing tests of SpaceX’s Grasshopper vehicle as well as the differences between suborbital and orbital flight.

Two months after Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin launched a rocket just past the boundary of space and then recovered it in a soft landing, the space company repeated the feat Friday in another breakthrough for the booming commercial space industry.

As things stand now, the SpaceX program is more complicated, and in some ways, more advanced than Blue Origin’s, since SpaceX actually flies into outer space, instead of just touching it before making a return, like the New Shepard did. The latest flight included new parachutes and pyro igniters, and incorporated software improvements to make the landing smoother. According to the team, the rocket’s landing protocol has also been adjusted, so it no longer tries to land dead-center on the pad, prioritizing its angle over location. All going well, it should be ready to test with actual humans in 2017.

“I’m a huge fan of rocket-powered vertical landing”, he wrote on the Blue Origin website.

After this week’s successful reuse of the New Shepard rocket, Bezos explained in a blog post why he had opted for rockets rather than a winged vehicle to open up access to space. For decades, rocket boosters, the most powerful – and expensive – part of the rocket were discarded into the sea after launch. But Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, and others, including SpaceX’s Elon Musk, has started developing boosters that launch vertically, thereafter flying autonomously back to Earth and landing in a way that they be reused. SpaceX has also registered success in landing Flacon 9 rocket’s first -stage booster in December. Last weekend, SpaceX saw its Falcon 9 rocket tip over and explode after attempting a third vertical droneship landing in the Pacific ocean. Because – to achieve our vision of millions of people living and working in space – we will need to build very large rocket boosters.

Blue Origin is aiming to join SpaceX in the orbital market, with a rocket powered by its 550,000-lbf thrust liquefied natural gas, liquid oxygen BE-4 engine.

“We’re already more than three years into development of our first orbital vehicle”, Bezos said. Blue Origin will be creating over 300 jobs at its East Coast home base for production and launches.