Amazon's Jeff Bezos Debuts Spacecraft in First Flight Test
The Blue Origin spaceflight firm funded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos held a first test flight of its New Shepard space vehicle
The commercial spaceflight race continues to heat up as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced his Blue Origin spaceflight company’s first flight test of a new space vehicle this week. The New Shepard space vehicle marks Blue Origin’s attempt to create a fully reusable rocket system capable of both vertical takeoff and landing.
New Shepard consists of a propulsion “rocket” module and a crew capsule designed to carry as many as six people on a suborbital spaceflight. The space vehicle’s first flight test on 29 April succeeded in delivering the crew capsule to its planned test altitude of almost 94 kilometers. The crew capsule separation was “perfect” and allowed the capsule to eventually parachute safely to Earth. But the propulsion module suffered a malfunction during its own descent and crashed rather than pulling off a vertical upright landing.
“In fact, if New Shepard had been a traditional expendable vehicle, this would have been a flawless first test flight,” said Jeff Bezos in a statement on the Blue Origin website. “Of course one of our goals is reusability, and unfortunately we didn’t get to recover the propulsion module because we lost pressure in our hydraulic system on descent.”
Blue Origin’s emphasis on creating a reusable rocket system represents potential future competition for Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The latter spaceflight firm has been launching supplies to the International Space Station under a NASA contract and trying to achieve a reusable test landing of its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship at sea.
Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine will also power a next-generation rocket called Vulcan, which was recently announced by the United Launch Alliance (ULA) coalition between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. ULA hopes that Vulcan can compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 using a different reusability scheme based on a helicopter mid-air retrieval system.
Jeremy Hsu has been working as a science and technology journalist in New York City since 2008. He has written on subjects as diverse as supercomputing and wearable electronics for IEEE Spectrum. When he’s not trying to wrap his head around the latest quantum computing news for Spectrum, he also contributes to a variety of publications such as Scientific American, Discover, Popular Science, and others. He is a graduate of New York University’s Science, Health & Environmental Reporting Program.