Blue Origins successfully lands its reusable rocket before Elon Musk’s SpaceX

For the first time, a rocket has traveled to space and made a soft-landing upon its return, allowing it to be reused for future missions. But it wasn’t SpaceX—the Elon Musk-led company that’s been attempting to accomplish the feat for more than a year—that pulled it off.

Rather, as Engadget and The Verge reported on Tuesday, Blue Origin—the privately-owned and operated aerospace development and manufacturing company established by Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos—took off from a West Texas location and reached a target test altitude of 329,839 feet (100.5 kilometers) before returning to its launch pad and successfully landing.

In a statement, Bezos said that Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft “flew a flawless mission”. It made it to its target height before “returning through 119-mph high-altitude crosswinds,” then completed “a gentle, controlled landing just four and a half feet from the center of the pad. “We can’t wait to fuel up and fly again,” he added.

SpaceX could be set to try again in December

Named in honor of Alan Shepard, the first American astronaut in space, the New Shepard is a vertical takeoff and landing vehicle capable of carrying six crew members to altitudes of more than 100 kilometers—the internationally-recognized boundary of space.

According to Engadget, during Tuesday’s test flight, the rocket and crew capsule separated after it made it to  a suborbital altitude of 100.5 km (62 miles). The capsule then separated and used a parachute to touch down, while the rocket itself descended to an altitude of approximately 5,000 feet. It then fired its rockets and made a controlled vertical landing at a velocity of 4.4 mph.

The technique used to land New Shepard is called a propulsive landing, The Verge explained, and while it is similar to the method used by SpaceX, the latter hopes to have its Falcon 9 land vertically on an autonomous floating spaceport in the ocean, the website noted. Unlike Bezos’s team, however, Musk hopes to have his rocket reach orbital, not suborbital, altitudes.

Both rockets separate at a height of about 50 miles, Engadget said, but the Falcon 9 does so at a speed of close to Mach 10 while the New Shepard travels just Mach 3.7. Musk’s program had a major setback following its last attempt, when the Falcon 9 exploded while trying to land on its floating landing platform. However, USA Today reported that SpaceX plans to try again during its next launch, which may come as early as next month.

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Feature Image: Blue Origin