Did Blue Origin beat SpaceX in landing a reusable rocket?

“Supporting a regulatory environment that catalyzes innovation and ingenuity in design was Congress’s intent with the CSLCA and, as the recent flight of New Shepard demonstrates, it clearly payed off”. Could space be the new travel destination for explorers?

It would be unfair to suggest in any way that Blue Origin has beaten SpaceX in the contest to determine which vector will conquer the next phase of space exploration.

Experts say that finding a way to reuse rockets is vital for making projects such as space tourism viable. The capsule separated and returned to Earth, landing with parachutes. Traditionally, rockets have been treated as expendable – used once, then left to fall into the ocean. Bezos managed to land back a rocket following a suborbital flight (ie up to 100km while orbital flights go up to c.2000km), so more development is needed.

The difference between the New Shepard and the Falcon 9 is that the Falcon 9 wentinto orbit, rather than suborbital like the New Shepard.

However, he later pointed out that Falcon 9 could not be compared to New Shepard in what Ars Technica described as a classic case of “mine is bigger than yours…”

Musk congratulated Bezos on Twitter before briefly explaining why SpaceX had more ambitious plans by using a much more complex engineering. In the other corner, Paypal and Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk’s SpaceX attempts to do the same thing down in the Rio Grande Valley.

At the moment it costs on average about $1.5bn (£1bn) per flight to send a shuttle into space, and due to the fact that excess weight slows a spacecraft down once it is in space, different stages of the space shuttle detach once the shuttle has cleared Earth’s orbit. Reuse is a key, since throwing away expensive equipment after each trip clearly increases the cost, which SpaceX pretends to bring closer to $6 million per launch.

Blue Origin’s New Sheppard vehicle flew a suborbital test of 333,000 feet at four times the speed of sound and safely landed in West Texas. NASA recently gave SpaceX the second-in-history order for private companies to transport astronauts to the International Space Station in 2017.

VAN HORN, Texas-A billionaire-backed space company has completed the first-ever flight of a reusable rocket system-and it’s probably not the billionaire you’re thinking of. The X-15 climbed above the atmosphere, flew 65 miles above the Earth, and then glided back to Earth, landing on a runway like a regular airplane. The company is so confident in its ability to routinely stick the landings, it is building a landing pad at Cape Canaveral, not far from the launch complex it has taken over at the Kennedy Space Center.