Amazon’s CEO beats Elon Musk to landing a reusable rocket successfully

The feat was marked in a YouTube video, which shows the New Shepard space vehicle reaching more than 100 kilometres in altitude before descending back to its launch site in West Texas. But, he also has a space company – Blue Origin.

Musk noted that rockets that reach the space station have to go 10 times as fast, and use 100 times the energy, of suborbital rockets that reach the edge of space as Blue Origin did. It’s groundbreaking for the simple fact that space travel is now expensive, because each launch rocket that sends spacecrafts beyond Earth is then destroyed instead of reused.

The company says its New Shepard rocket – named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space – carried an unmanned crew capsule just over 62 miles up before landing mere feet from the center of its launch pad in western Texas. Founder Jeff Bezos hailed the success a real game-changer.

“This flight validates our vehicle architecture and design”, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos said in a statement accompanying the announcement of the flight. Blue Origin’s rocket achieved Mach 3.72. It travelled 329,839 feet into outer space and then landed upright back on earth.

Monday’s flight was Blue Origin’s second successful test flight of the New Shepard capsule, following one in April.

“Rockets have always been expendable”, Bezos wrote in blog post about the landing.

Rockets cost millions of dollars and are normally lost after each launch.

But as billionaire owner of SpaceX Elon Musk pointed out, they’re attempting to land a larger and more powerful reusable rocket that could orbit around earth.

Though Blue Origin is now teaming with United Launch Alliance to build an engine and launch vehicle for NASA’s future deep space missions, the New Shepard is meant to usher in the age of private space travel and space tourism. Blue Origin has a long-term vision of greatly increasing the number of people that fly into space so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. The crew capsule deployed parachutes and landed about 11 minutes after launch.

Still, the New Shepard is remarkable and its successful landing is a massive moment in the commercial space race.