The next big step in space exploration isn’t as flashy enough to be in the next Star Wars. But it’s vitally important to affordable, and therefore repeatable, space trips.
A private space company announced Tuesday that it had landed a rocket upright and gently enough to be used again, an important milestone in commercial aeronautics.
Reusing rockets, rather than discarding them, would be a huge step toward making space flight less expensive.
The achievement produced “the rarest of beasts: a used rocket,” Jeff Bezos, founder of the company Blue Origin, said in a statement. He is the CEO of Amazon.com Inc.
Another private company, SpaceX, has tried to land boosters upright on a barge in the ocean but so far has failed. It has recorded soft landings on the ground by rockets that flew less than a mile high, an altitude far lower than what the new test achieved.
Blue Origin said the unmanned flight took place Monday morning at its site in Van Horn in West Texas. The secretive company, based in Kent, Washington, did not invite reporters to attend. Its first test flight happened in April.
Its New Shepard vehicle consists of a capsule that is designed to take people into space for suborbital flights someday, and a booster. In Monday’s flight, the booster soared about 62 miles high and released the capsule, which parachuted to the ground.
After the separation, the booster began falling back to Earth. It slowed its descent by firing its engine, starting at about 4,900 feet above ground. It was descending at just 4.4 mph when it touched down at the launch site, still standing up, the company said.
“It’s really a major step forward toward reusability,” John M. Logsdon, professor emeritus at the George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, said in an interview. Although NASA space shuttles were also reusable after returning to Earth safely, they were far more expensive than rockets, he noted.
“The goal here is low-cost reusability,” Logsdon said.
The Associated Press contributed to this article
I saw the video recently, and it was an awesome accomplishment.
Well, I believe that any “big step” would have to have human space people involved. How long has it been since we last visited the moon? We, as Americans, are the only ones to do so. That was during President Kennedy’s administration. Now, it seems, we spend all of our money on welfare and wars against ISIS. There are measures in our present arsenal of weapons that could end that war very quickly but our leadership of today hasn’t the same “large ones” that Present Truman had. Where we are headed if Hillary becomes President is, to me, frightening!