Bezos-owned company launches, lands reusable rocket

Blue Origin on Saturday took another step toward making reusable rockets a reality by launching and landing the same rocket for the third time on an unmanned test flight.

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Blue Origin and Amazon.com, said the rocket’s hydrogen-fueled BE-3 engine fired properly to enable a soft booster touchdown in west Texas, followed by a crew capsule landing nearby under parachutes.

"Flawless BE-3 restart and perfect booster landing," Bezos said on Twitter. "CC chutes deployed."

Before the launch, Bezos described the flight as "pushing the envelope" with a greater chance of a booster crash, since the engine would re-start to slow the New Shepard rocket's descent at higher thrust and lower altitude than before — just 3,600 feet above the ground.

Blue Origin is testing New Shepard with plans to launch space tourists and more experiments on suborbital rides. The company has not said when commercial flights might begin or how much a ticket will cost.

The company is also developing a larger orbital rocket that it plans to build at Kennedy Space Center and launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, possibly late this decade.

Blue Origin first launched and landed the New Shepard in November at the company’s private range in Texas, in what was then considered an impressive and historic feat — the first landing under its own power by a vertically launched booster that delivered a payload in space.

SpaceX followed a month later with a successful landing by a larger booster at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

In January, Blue Origin flew and recovered the same rocket a second time, with Bezos saying the New Shepard required minimal refurbishment after the first flight.

“Launch. Land. Repeat,” he said then.

Bezos sees resuability as essential to achieving his ambitious vision to lower the cost of human spaceflight and make space accessible to millions of people.

SpaceX does not plan to fly the booster it recovered in December a second time, but expects to land more that can be reused.

SpaceX’s next opportunity will come Friday, when it is scheduled to launch an International Space Station cargo mission from Cape Canaveral. The company will try to land the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

Saturday’s Blue Origin launch carried two experiments aboard the capsule to take advantage of the flight’s few minutes in microgravity, one built by students at the University of Central Florida.

The UCF experiment, selected by Blue Origin in 2009, gently pushed a marble into a bed of dust and filmed the interaction. The goal was to better understand collisions in the early solar system, and between particles such as those in Saturn’s rings or on the surfaces of asteroids.

"We have been waiting for this day for a long time," said UCF physics professor Josh Colwell, who was at the launch site and exchanged high-fives with colleagues afterward. "A lot of talented students have helped make this happen. I’m just thrilled that we’re going to get data back immediately after flight and get a look at the strange behavior of dust in a microgravity space environment."

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