Blue Origin Becomes First Company to Launch and Land the Same Rocket Twice

Once you're lucky, twice you're good.

Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin set a milestone this weekend, as they managed to launch and land the same rocket, the New Shepherd, twice in row. The billionaire's private space company is now the first group to launch and land the same rocket twice, with the New Shepherd going up and coming back down just 60 days after its first successful launch.

The rocket once again passed through the Karman Line, a distance 100 kilometers (or 62 miles) above the Earth that's used as shorthand for the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space. (For comparison, the International Space Station orbits about 400 kilometers, or 249 miles, above the Earth.)

The timing of the flight provides  a nice PR boost for Blue Origin, with Elon Musk's SpaceX suffering a setback last weekend when its Falcon booster once again failed to stick the landing on a floating drone barge and exploded after tipping over. Still, the Falcon also managed to put the Jason-3 satellite into orbit, and overall remains much more powerful than the sub-orbital New Shepherd. SpaceX managed to successfully land the Falcon on hard ground in late December, but has not repeated the feat.

Source: YouTube via  Aviation Week

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