WASHINGTON: The space science has witnessed another historic day when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ space firm successfully tested a re-usable rocket for the second time, reported Daily Mail.
Blue Origin, the company created by Mr Bezos, successfully launched the New Shepard rocket for the first time in November. And they have repeated the take-off successfully just two months later, with the rocket hitting an altitude of 333,582 feet (63 miles) 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 on January 22, with the rocket slowed to three miles per hour (five kilometres 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.
Mr 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.
