New Shepard: Bezos flight "demonstrates reuse"

BBC ^ | 01/23/2016 | Jonathan Amos

[BenLurkin]

November's outing marked the first time a rocket had launched a space mission vertically from the ground and then brought all elements - booster and capsule - softly and safely back to Earth.

Although all the flights so far undertaken by Mr Bezos have been unmanned, he does eventually plan to fly passengers.

...

"This time, New Shepard reached an apogee of 333,582ft (101.7km) before both capsule and booster gently returned to Earth for recovery and reuse."

One hundred kilometres is regarded as the official boundary of space. New Shepard does not achieve the velocities that would allow the system to make orbit and stay up, but Mr Bezos says his Blue Origin space company is working on a family of rockets that would make this possible.

...

Commentators had realised early in the week that another mission was imminent when the Federal Aviation Authority published a temporary flight restriction for a region of the sky north of Van Horn in Texas - the location of the Blue Origin test site.

From social media postings, it was evident that a launch had taken place early on Friday local time, but it was many hours before Mr Bezos and Blue Origin were prepared to comment.

[BenLurkin]

[AZLiberty]

New Shephard? I was hoping Bezos had launched the old Shephard, Shep Smith, into space — without a return ticket.

[hoagy62]

I like...but when Jeffy B and his crew can launch a payload into orbit and THEN return the booster & reuse it, thgen I’ll really be impressed.

(Yes...I know SpaceX has boosted a payload and landed the booster, but it hasn’t re-used that booster. They said they wouldn’t with this one. It’ll truly be ‘proof-of-concept’ when they do successfully re-use the booster after lofting a payload.)