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Blue Origin's New Shepard Rocket Lands Again

Jan 23, 2016Guy Norris | Aerospace Daily & Defense Report

 

Blue Origin

 

 

 

 

 

 

LOS ANGELES -- Sixty days after Blue Origin achieved its first milestone vertical landing with the New Shepard sub-orbital launch vehicle, the company has repeated the feat with the same rocket. The flight, which occurred on Jan 22 at Blue Origin’s test range near Van Horn, Texas, saw the capsule which will be used to take passengers to sub-orbit, separate before the New Shepard reached an apogee of 333,582 ft. 

Amazon founder's reused rocket successfully launches, lands

 Elizabeth Weise, USATODAY2:13 p.m. EST January 24, 2016

(Photo: Blue Origin)

 

SAN FRANCISCO – Jeff Bezos’ space transport firm Blue Origin successfully launched an unmanned sub-orbital rocket that reached a height of 63 miles over the Earth before landing in Texas on Friday.

The launch, the rocket’s second, was another step forward in Amazon founder Bezos’ goal to develop reusable rockets that will eventually make possible “millions of people living and working in space,” he said in a blog post on Blue Origin’s web site.

The company posted a video of the rocket, the New Shepard, launching at 11:22 a.m. local time in Van Horn, Texas, then returning and landing itself on the launch pad a few minutes later. The craft successfully has made the same trip in November.

The aim is to build rockets that can fly into orbit and then return to Earth and be reused, making space travel less costly by lowering launch costs.

Bezos wrote proudly of the vehicle’s computerized landing strategy, which gives it leeway in how it positions itself on the landing pad as it comes down.

“It’s like a pilot lining up a plane with the centerline of the runway. If the plane is a few feet off center as you get close, you don’t swerve at the last minute to ensure hitting the exact mid-point. You just land a few feet left or right of the centerline,” Bezos wrote.

New Shepard’s rockets are only powerful enough to do suborbital runs. However Blue Origin is working on building more powerful rockets that could put a spacecraft into orbit.

“We’re already more than three years into development of our first orbital vehicle. Though it will be the small vehicle in our orbital family, it’s still many times larger than New Shepard,” he wrote.

Tech space race

Blue Origin is one of several space ventures being pushed by tech titans, with Elon Musk's SpaceX a notable rival.

SpaceX successfully launched a satellite for NASA on Jan. 17. The Falcon 9 rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base and performed well in flight.

However the touchdown, on a barge floating off the California coast, failed when a leg collapsed, causing the rocket to fall over.

Musk tweeted, "Well, at least the pieces were bigger this time."