Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, has been fairly mysterious, but one thing it hasn't been coy about is its ambitions to compete from all sides with other firms in new space, whether its in space tourism or vehicle building. In a video posted to YouTube, it appears that they took one big step: the company launched a rocket to space, and successfully nailed a vertical landing.
Comparisons are inevitable to SpaceX's pursuit of a vertical landing from its orbital line of rockets. So here's the thing with those comparisons: the Blue Origins rocket is much smaller than what SpaceX is attempting, which is the landing of the first stage of a full-on orbital vehicle. The Falcon line of rockets has greater energy requirements to get to orbit rather than get to a suborbital arc, meaning it comes down much faster.
The SpaceX team has concentrated on a barge landing of these heavier lift rockets, though there have been discussions of a hard-ground landing at its launch complex in Vanderberg Air Force Base. There's also been a degree of transparency to SpaceX's process missing from Blue Origin's more secretive proceedings. There are thus numerous different signposts to success between the companies.
Still, SpaceX congratulated the upstart company on their feat, saying, "We congratulate Blue Origin on the progress they're making with vertical take-off and landing of their booster."
Jeff Bezos made his first Twitter post in the eight years he's been signed up for the service just to boast of his company's achievement:
In addition to the New Shepard rocket, Blue Origin is working on the booster stages of the ULA's Vulcan rocket, hoping to replace Russian rockets banned under current sanctions with that country. The New Shepard, named for astronaut Alan Shepard, will be Blue Origin's space tourism vehicle, launching passengers up on a parabolic arc before returning them to the ground after a short visit above the von Karman line.
This post has been edited to clarify differences in approaches between Blue Origin and SpaceX.
