A private space company, Blue Origin which is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, reported on Monday that it successfully launched and landed a rocket — something that Elon Musk’s SpaceX has failed to do. Or has it?
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Though no press was invited, it did provide a video (with strange animations in the middle of it).
WATCH: Blue Origin lands rocket vertically
Both SpaceX and Blue Origin are attempting to radically reduce the cost of getting into space by employing reusable rockets. In 2014, SpaceX publicly began attempting a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) following NASA launches to the International Space Station, which didn’t end well.
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So did Bezos beat SpaceX founder Elon Musk?
Well, Musk — known somewhat for his ego — took to Twitter to “educate” Bezos about the history of VTOL (Musk is the rocket king of Twitter, while Bezos has tweeted exactly once — about the launch and landing).
At first it seemed nice.
Then, not so much.
Musk is referring to the fact that the Blue Origin rocket, New Shepard, reached suborbital altitude versus orbital. Suborbital flights occur roughly 100 km in altitude, and because of that, rockets don’t need to go as fast. In order to reach an altitude of 100 km, you need a velocity of 950 metres per second (Mach 2.9).
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In order to get into orbit, you’d need a speed that is roughly eight times faster — about 7,780 metres per second.
And Musk’s Falcon 9 rocket needs to get its payload into orbit. And Musk wasn’t shy in pointing this out:
But SpaceX has been working on a VTOL since 2013, and has reached an altitude of 1,000 metres several times, which Musk was quick to note:
In 1963, the X-15 — a rocket plane — was launched from a B-52 plane, twice going to about 100 km in altitude and returning to Earth. Then there’s SpaceShipOne, the brainchild of Virgin Galactic‘s Richard Branson which also relies on a launch from air.
Yet there is no denying that Bezos’ achievement is an important step in reusable VTOL rocketry. Yes, SpaceX has been doing it since 2013, but so far nobody has been able to return an entire rocket back to Earth in one piece (the shuttle’s fuel tank was not reusable) after a vertical take-off. And Blue Origin isn’t exactly the new kid on the block: it has been attempting this feat for the past decade.
Say hello to the new space race, where ego can be far more fragile than the rockets heading to space.
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