Chalk up another win for Blue Origin in their ongoing reusable rocket competition with rival SpaceX, as the aerospace company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has re-launched the same booster that it had successfully launched and landed back in November.
The company announced the feat in a Friday blog post, revealing that the same New Shepard rocket that made it beyond the Karman line and landed vertically at its launch site last year had once again lifted off and reached an apogee of 333,582 feet (101.7 km) before it and its capsule completed another soft landing and were recovered for future use.
According to Gizmodo, New Shepard reached a maximum altitude of 329,839 feet (100.5 km) before landing vertically back at the Blue Origin test facility in Texas. In both cases, the rocket made it beyond the Karman line, which is the boundary that officially separates the atmosphere of Earth and space, before making a controlled, horizontal landing back on solid ground.
One month later, SpaceX successfully completed its own successful landing with its Falcon 9 rocket. Unlike Bezos, however, SpaceX head Elon Musk had no plans to reuse the booster and instead said that it was his intention to retire the rocket. That decision opened the door for Blue Origin to become the first to actually use the same booster a second time.
The ‘space race’ between Blue Origin, SpaceX is heating up
In his Friday blog post, Bezos said that data from the November mission had “matched our preflight predictions closely,” which made the company’s preparations for their latest flight “relatively straightforward.” Those preparations included the replacement of the crew capsule parachutes and the pyro igniters, as well as several upgrades to its booster’s software.
Among the software tweaks was one to its targeting systems. Instead of directing the rocket to touch down at the exact center of its landing pad, the program now tells it to initially target the center, but to set the booster down at “a position of convenience on the pad, prioritizing vehicle attitude ahead of precise lateral positioning.”
After stabilizing the crew capsule, the drogue parachutes extract the main parachutes for landing. (Credit: Blue Origin)
“It’s like a pilot lining up a plane with the centerline of the runway,” Bezos wrote. “If the plane is a few feet off center as you get close, you don’t swerve at the last minute to ensure hitting the exact mid-point. You just land a few feet left or right of the centerline. Our Monte Carlo sims of New Shepard landings show this new strategy increases margins, improving the vehicle’s ability to reject disturbances created by low-altitude winds.”
The new “space race” between Musk and Bezos shows no signs of slowing down, according to Gizmodo. Blue Origin has already announced plans to continue testing their BE-4 engine, while SpaceX continues to make progress in its efforts to land its Falcon 9 on a floating platform in the ocean. As the website suggests, it will be fascinating to see what the future holds for both firms.
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Feature Image: The same New Shepard booster that flew to space and then landed vertically in November 2015 has now flown and landed again. (Credit: Amazon)
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