Reusable rocket landed successfully by Blue Origin

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said on Tuesday his space transportation company, Blue Origin, plans about two more years of test flights before it will offer rides to passengers.

“It’s a huge moment for the company – it’s the first time they’ve actually reached space, and it’s the first time they’ve managed to safely return the craft’s six-person crew capsule and its rocket system back to Earth”.

The unmanned crew capsule landed separately using parachutes. You would allegedly get four minutes of weightlessness after the capsule disconnected from the New Shepard rocket, which then lands for refueling.

Nor is Blue Origin the only private firm in the game.

The space vehicle reached an altitude of almost 330,000 feet after it launched from Van Horn, Texas, then made a “gentle, controlled” descent back to the launchpad.

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. So far, Blue Origin has not started selling tickets for commercial flights, and neither has the company settled on for the cost of a flight. And last Friday, SpaceX was approved by NASA for its first human transport mission to the International Space Station in late 2017.

But another spaceflight entrepreneur, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, was quick to point that this is not the first successful rocket landing. Until the recent achievement of Blue Origin, rockets launched in space have either burned up in the atmosphere or ended up crashing in the sea, according to CNet.

SpaceX’s Elon Musk congratulated Bezos and the Blue Origin team for yesterday’s flight.

Richard M. Rocket, chief executive officer and co-founder of market researcher NewSpace Global in Cape Canaveral, Florida said, “This is a major breakthrough for the commercialization of space”.

This if the first successful launch into space and subsequent landing of a reusable rocket. That makes it less hard than landing a rocket from orbit, which is what SpaceX is trying to achieve.