Blue Origin Is First To Achieve Reusable Rocket

Blue Origin’s fully reusable New Shepard space vehicle rolls out to the launch pad at the company’s West Texas launch site.

The launch and landing was not disclosed publicly until after the fact by the notoriously secretive Blue Origin, but nearby residents reported hearing a loud boom Monday morning.

The video illustrates a major feat: showcasing the first rocket to ever launch into space and then land back on Earth without being either damaged or destroyed.

The unmanned New Shepard rocket blasted off from its west Texas launch site and then returned and landed safely, representing a coup for spaceflight. Being able to refly a rocket will slash launch costs, a game-changer for the space industry, Bezos said. Historically, manned space flights are enabled by a rocket that powers the capsule in which humans travel. Then the rocket grazed the lower reaches of space before returning to Earth and slowly touching down in a blaze of glory.

In addition to SpaceX and Blue Origin, Bezos faces competition in space tourism from Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic….or does he?

Musk congratulated Blue Origin on its successful rocket landing on Tuesday but noted that suborbital rockets are not flying high or fast enough when compared to his rockets.

By the way, SpaceX has been trying to soft-land its main rocket, the Falcon 9, for the past year, also using propulsive landing.

The company has launched a You Tube video documenting the take-off, an animated stimulation of what the flight in space will be like and the landing.

New Shepard is created to carry six passengers to suborbital altitudes, similar to Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo.

But could the project have been developed in secret when many of Blue Origin’s customers stand to stem from the federal space?

A little before touchdown, the booster re-ignites its BE-3 engine, slowing the vehicle down to 4.4 miles per hour for a gentle, powered vertical landing, enabling vehicle reuse.

Bezos took to Twitter on Tuesday to note the achievement. “It is, however, important to clear up the difference between “space” and “orbit”…”