Reusable rocket: In a first, booster returns safely to Earth

A human aboard that rocket would be considered an astronaut. Then, the engines were cut and the New Shepard fell back toward Earth with its airbrakes deployed, restarting its engines and landing gently at 4.4mph.

On its second try, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space launch company successfully returned a New Shepard rocket and capsule after blastoff, a key step in ongoing efforts to develop a reusable space transportation system.

“That’s a game-changer because it changes the cost structure of space travel completely”, he said.

Blue Origin employees celebrate the successful landing of the New Shepard. But that test failed to land the booster, which was lost after it separated from the capsule.

The rocket was named after the first astronaut in space, Alan Shepard.

After his major success, competitor and fellow billionaire Elon Musk’s rival company SpaceX congratulated Bezos on Twitter although the importance of the achievement was played down. It is the first time a rocket has landed back on Earth without blowing up, which could pave the way to reusable rockets in the near future.

SpaceX so far has been unsuccessful in two attempts to land larger and more powerful Falcon 9 rocket boosters on an ocean platform.

With a fleet of reusable rockets, companies could launch the same rocket many times over instead of building new multi-million dollar rockets for every flight.

According to Bezo’s blog post, the booster was moving at just 4.4 miles per hour through the last 100 feet.

Blue Origin’s competitors in the suborbital space race include Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace, which are now assembling their rocket ships. It is worth noting that Musk is trying to take his rocket to an “orbital spaceflight”, in which a spacecraft is dispatched onto a trajectory that would enable it to remain in space for at least one full orbit of the Earth.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin.

After all, SpaceX has sent rockets up into the air and landed them before, too.

Commercial flights for tourists, also to launch from West Texas, could begin in a couple of years.