SAN FRANCISCO – Jeff Bezos' space transport firm Blue Origin successfully launched an unmanned sub-orbital rocket that reached a height of 63 miles over the Earth before landing in Texas on Friday.
The launch, the rocket's second, was another step forward in Amazon founder Bezos' goal to develop reusable rockets that will eventually make possible "millions of people living and working in space," he said in a blog post on Blue Origin's web site.
The company posted a video of the rocket, the New Shepard, launching at 11:22 a.m. local time in Van Horn, Texas, then returning and landing itself on the launch pad a few minutes later. The craft successfully has made the same trip in November.
The aim is to build rockets that can fly into orbit and then return to Earth and be reused, making space travel less costly by lowering launch costs.
Bezos wrote proudly of the vehicle's computerized landing strategy, which gives it leeway in how it positions itself on the landing pad as it comes down.
"It's like a pilot lining up a plane with the centerline of the runway. If the plane is a few feet off center as you get close, you don't swerve at the last minute to ensure hitting the exact mid-point. You just land a few feet left or right of the centerline," Bezos wrote.
New Shepard's rockets are only powerful enough to do suborbital runs. However Blue Origin is working on building more powerful rockets that could put a spacecraft into orbit.
"We're already more than three years into development of our first orbital vehicle. Though it will be the small vehicle in our orbital family, it's still many times larger than New Shepard," he wrote.
Tech space race
Blue Origin is one of several space ventures being pushed by tech titans, with Elon Musk's SpaceX a notable rival.
SpaceX successfully launched a satellite for NASA on Jan. 17. The Falcon 9 rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base and performed well in flight.
However the touchdown, on a barge floating off the California coast, failed when a leg collapsed, causing the rocket to fall over.
Musk tweeted, "Well, at least the pieces were bigger this time."
Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 to develop vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing rocket ships that take passengers to the edge of space and beyond.
In his blog posting about the Friday's launch, he signed off with the company's motto, Gradatim Ferociter!, Latin for "Step by step, ferociously."
