Blue Origin: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Successfully Launches, Returns Rocket

But Bezos, the billionaire entrepreneur and owner of The Washington Post, has been working on creating reusable rockets that act like airplanes – fly, land, then fly again.

As Bezos noted, it then returned “through 119-mph high-altitude crosswinds to make a gentle, controlled landing just 4½ feet from the center of the pad”. New Shepard has a crew capsule and a rocket booster by a BE-3 liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen engine. The booster rocket soared about 62 miles high and released a capsule before it came back to Earth. Later when the crew capsules starts back towards home, t reenters the atmosphere with astronauts experiencing about 5x the force of gravity before deploying three main parachutes for landing.

(Photo: Twitter/Jeff Bezos) Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO and man behind private space company Blue Origin, proudly tweets this historical achievement on reusable rockets.

That boom – presumably around the time of the craft’s launch – may have drawn notice, but now it’s the rocket’s relatively quiet return that will draw the attention of competitors, such as Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

In a phone call with reporters on Tuesday, Bezos said he hopes to see people aboard Blue Origin launches in “a couple of years”. Monday’s launch also happened in secret, though the company is obviously doing a big media push right now.

The world’s first reusable rocket after a successful landing at a site in West Texas.

“What SpaceX is trying to do is very similar”, he said.

The space vehicle was traveling at four times the speed of sound during much of its flight. The boosters, on the other hand, descend under guided flight to the landing pad.

The effort was congratulated by SpaceX’s Elon Musk. This means the rocket can be re-used for subsequent flights, which companies like Blue Origin claim will make spaceflight far less expensive.

The New Shepard rocket was launched Monday from the company’s launch site in West Texas and climbed to an altitude of 100 kilometers before landing eight minutes later, according to the company. “Getting to space needs Mach 3, but getting to orbit requires Mach 30”.