Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin starts its year off right with beautiful rocket launch
Up, up, and away.
Blue Origin -- the previously secretive rocket company started by Amazon's Jeff Bezos -- just launched another successful flight and landing of its New Shepard rocket and capsule from its facility in Texas.
The test flight, which took place on Sunday at around 1:07 p.m. ET, will pave the way for people to actually fly to suborbital space aboard the Blue Origin rocket sometime in the coming years.
The rocket reached a maximum altitude of 350,000 feet during the test flight, which took roughly 10 minutes from liftoff to the rocket and capsule touchdowns.
This test marks the first test flight of the New Shepard system in 2018. The launch of the capsule and rocket was the eighth overall test flight of New Shepard, and the second time this rocket and capsule have flown to suborbital space together.
The capsule also carried "Mannequin Skywalker," the test dummy outfitted with sensors used by Blue Origin to give flight engineers a sense of what a person might experience during a flight to space aboard the New Shepard.
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Eventually, Bezos hopes that New Shepard will take paying customers up about 100 kilometers into the air, where they will experience weightlessness and be able to see the Earth against the blackness of space before the capsule falls back to the ground under parachutes.
But Bezos' ambition stretches far beyond sending tourists to suborbital space.
Blue Origin also has plans to build larger rockets that will be able to send big payloads and crews of people to orbit and beyond.
Bezos' ultimate goal is to help craft a world in which millions of people are living and working in space.
To that end, Blue Origin plans to launch the first flight of its New Glenn rocket -- a huge rocket designed to bring large payloads to orbit -- sometime in 2020.
Blue Origin's rockets and capsules are also designed to be reusable, much like SpaceX's, in order to reduce the cost of launching people and payloads to space.
By launching, landing, and repeating, the company should be able to reuse hardware that would otherwise be wasted in order to drive the cost of spaceflight down, making it more accessible.
Topics Amazon
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
