Blue Origin Launched New Shepard Rocket Successfully

Private spaceflight company Blue Origin has successfully launched and returned its New Shepard space vehicle in a test flight that could revolutionize spaceflight.

Like another upstart rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, Bezos and Blue Origin are betting that reusable rockets can greatly reduce the cost of getting to space.

Eventually, Blue Origin plans to offer suborbital flights to space aboard New Shepard, but the company’s ambitions don’t stop there.

The rocket, created to transport six passengers, lifted off from Texas on Monday and reached an altitude of about 100 km (62 mi.), crossing the acknowledged limit of Earth’s atmosphere and briefly entering space then returning to the launch pad eight minutes later, Blue Origin said.

The achievement produced “the rarest of beasts: a used rocket”, Jeff Bezos, founder of the company Blue Origin, said in a statement. Instead of effectively throwing away rocket components after one use, Bezos hopes to use those rocket parts again and again over the course of at least a few missions. The results have been fun to watch, but presumably frustrating for Elon Musk, who may be Bezos’s frenemy #1 judging from the shade he threw on the Blue Origin accomplishment.

“Congrats to Jeff Bezos and the BO team for achieving VTOL [Vertical take-off landing] on their booster”, Mr Musk tweeted.

It’s called suborbital because the spacecraft is not high enough or moving fast enough to actually orbit Earth, but people can still experience a brief period of weightlessness, just like the astronauts aboard the worldwide Space Station. In that operation, the launch and the landing of the capsule were flawless, but the rocket crashed, because of a failure with a hydraulic system.

SpaceX has been trying-and failing-to neatly land its rockets on a barge for months now. Crew capsule drogue parachutes were then deployed at 20,045 feet above ground level. The engines help control the rocket’s descent.

Musk offered a lukewarm congratulation to Bezos on Twitter this morning, calling the New Shepard a “booster” instead of a “rocket”.