Bezos-backed Blue Origin rocket’s 4th test launch is ‘picture perfect'

Blue Origin has just completed its riskiest rocket test yet, and it looked pretty good.

The Jeff Bezos-backed spaceflight company launched an uncrewed test of its New Shepard rocket system on Sunday at 10:36 a.m. ET from its test site in West Texas. 

This marks the fourth flight of this hardware, and the Sunday test was designed to push the New Shepard system to its limits.

Engineers purposefully made it so that one of the parachutes wouldn't deploy during the capsule's descent back to Earth after the craft reached a peak altitude of 331,501 feet. In theory, the capsule should be able to come safely back to the planet under just two parachutes, but engineers working with the company needed to put that theory to the test.

And it turned out just the way they'd hoped, judging by the webcast. The capsule came in for a relatively smooth -- if not somewhat hard -- landing, and the booster made it back to the ground intact. 

The hosts of the Blue Origin launch webcast called it a "picture-perfect" test. 

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On each of its three previous flights, the rocket and capsule made it about 100 kilometers up into the air before both came back down for a safe landing, but the wider world didn't know what those tests looked like until after they were finished.

On Sunday, however, Blue Origin's webcast of the launch and landing marking a change for the usually tight-lipped company. Until now, Blue Origin would only release video after the launch itself and give intermittent updates about its progress either through statements or on Bezos' Twitter feed. Now, the company seems to be a little more open to the idea of sharing its rocketry with the world.

The New Shepard system is designed to bring a group of paying customers to suborbital space and deliver them back to Earth again. The space tourists will see the planet against the blackness of space and feel weightless for minutes during part of the flight. A seat aboard New Shepard should run about $250,000, according to Bezos, which is in the ballpark of what a ticket to ride Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo costs.

Bezos has said that crewed tests of the New Shepard could begin as early as next year.

These reusable rocket tests are designed to help Blue Origin prove out the technology they need to be able to launch and land boosters in the future. Reusable rockets could greatly reduce the cost of flying to space for people and payloads hoping to get there in the future.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

And Bezos isn't the only one aiming for reusability. Elon Musk's spaceflight company SpaceX is also in the process of performing its own reusable rocket tests, landing boosters back on Earth after flying things to orbit in the hopes that they will be able to re-fly the rockets for new missions eventually.

Bezos and Musk's tests have been markedly different in some ways, however. 

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets are flying commercial and space agency payloads to orbit before coming back in for a landing, while Blue Origin's New Shepard is still in the early stages of development, though according to the webcast announcers, it only takes a few thousand dollars to refurbish the booster for each launch.

New Shepard is also designed to go to suborbital space, so the altitude and speed that system will reach is not the same as SpaceX's larger and faster rocket.

That may change in the future.

Blue Origin is planning to create another, larger rocket designed to bring people and payloads to orbit all in the hopes of making Bezos' dream of "millions of people living and working in space" a reality. 

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