Race for Reusable Spacecraft Started to Heat-up

On 22 January, Blue Origin again launched New Shepard Rocket and brought it back to Earth. It is the same rocket which was launch and landed to test reusability in November for fist time. It is not just the same design, the same physical rocket and Blue Origin has become first to do two successive landing of rocket with reusable capability. Blue Origin has planned more landing tests of same rocket in future. Each successive landing will be another big step toward the future of reusable rockets.

Blue Origin’s accomplishment comes just a month after its competitor SpaceX successfully landed one of its own rockets, the Falcon 9, on a landing pad at Cape Canaveral and less than a week after it failed to land a second Falcon 9 on an autonomous floating platform in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Both companies are working on same technology, but there’s an important distinction between their feats: SpaceX landed its rocket from low Earth orbit, while both of Blue Origin’s landings came back from a lower apogee of about 100 km, the so-called Karman line that divides space from the Earth’s atmosphere.

SpaceX has said that it will likely never reuse the Falcon 9 that made its first landing—it’s somewhat of a historical artifact now but they have been testing the rocket to see how it might have fared during a re-launch. Both companies are working toward true reusability in a bid to make space launches and travel more affordable.

If you can reuse a rocket, each trip from Earth only costs you the fuel it takes to leave, not the tens of millions it takes to build a new ship. In the short term, that makes launches to places like the International Space Station much more economical. But Blue Origin states the long-term plan well at the end of their sizzle reel: “Our vision: millions of people living and working in space. You can’t get there by throwing the hardware away.”