The reused New Shepard booster rolls out to the launch pad at the company’s West Texas launch site. (credit: Blue Origin)
The barriers to reusable rockets keep falling. Late Friday night Blue Origin posted a new video of its New Shepard rocket booster flying into space a second time and then landing safely again back in West Texas. This marked the first time a rocket booster has been flown into space, landed, and re-flown again.
Friday’s launch to an altitude of 101.7km, which is just above the Karman line considered to be the boundary of outer space, follows a similar flight of the same booster in November. A month later, in December, SpaceX landed a much larger booster, the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket, back at Florida for the first time. But even as SpaceX has begun testing that rocket, which will likely not fly again, Blue Origin has moved ahead to a second flight.
Video of the launch of a reused New Shepard booster.
The rivalry between Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos and SpaceX’s Elon Musk is spurring the race toward reusability, with the aim of driving down rocket costs so that more people and hardware can be launched into space. As the new video’s tagline says, “You can’t get there by throwing the hardware away.” This may be a subtle dig at NASA, which is building an expensive, massive new rocket, the Space Launch System, which is entirely expendable.
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