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AMAZON founder Jeff Bezos’ space firm has successfully tested a reusable rocket for the second time, signaling a dramatic step forward in the development of cheaper space travel.
Blue Origin, the company created by Bezos, successfully launched the New Shepard rocket for the first time in November.
And they have repeated the takeoff successfully just two months later, with the rocket hitting an altitude of 333,582 feet (101,675 km) before “gently” returning to Earth in west Texas on Friday morning.
A video released by Blue Origin showed the launch and landing from the Texas site Jan. 22, with the rocket slowed to 5 kilometers per hour on its descent with the assistance of parachutes. Although designed to carry six passengers, the test launches have been carried out with no one on board.
The breakthroughs by Blue Origin and parallel efforts by rival Internet mogul Elon Musk’s SpaceX open up the potential for cutting costs for space travel and making rockets as reusable as airplanes.
Bezos called the accomplishment a “game changer” in November, which opens the door to lower costs in space travel and his vision of people living and working in space.
“I’m a huge fan of rocket-powered vertical landing,” he wrote on the Blue Origin website.
“Why? Because to achieve our vision of millions of people living and working in space we will need to build very large rocket boosters. And the vertical landing architecture scales extraordinarily well.
“When you do a vertical landing, you’re solving the classic inverted pendulum problem, and the inverted pendulum problem gets a bit easier as the pendulum gets a bit bigger.”
Bezos, who founded online giant Amazon and also owns The Washington Post newspaper, said Saturday that Blue Origin has solved the problem of balancing to keep the rocket in an upright position as it lands.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX in December managed a similar feat for the first time with its Falcon 9 rocket in Florida, after it blasted off on a satellite-delivery mission.(SD-Agencies)
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