Blue Origin: Successful Reusable Rocket Test

November 24th, 2015

Via: NPR:

It started with a boom and ended with a touchdown: Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, has sent a craft past the edge of space and then landed its rocket safely – and vertically — in Texas.

The flight of the New Shepard spacecraft was the second full test of Blue Origin’s system that’s designed to take six humans into space before returning to Earth. The company plans to reuse both the capsule and rocket assemblies – and it calls the rocket’s safe return today a “historic” achievement. In a similar test in April, the rocket failed to land safely. The craft’s capsule lands via parachute.

In Monday’s test, the vehicle reached an altitude of 329,839 feet (100.5 kilometers) before landing back on Earth in a controlled descent. The craft went just over the Karman Line, which designates anything over 100 kilometers above sea level as space.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.