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Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin Launches Its First Rocket
Zothecula writes: Billionaires who made their cash in dot-coms from the 1990s successfully launching commercial rockets is officially a trend, now that Jeff Bezos has followed in the footsteps of Elon Musk with Wednesday's successful test flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard space vehicle. "Our 110,000-lbf thrust liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen BE-3 engine worked flawlessly, powering New Shepard through Mach 3 to its planned test altitude of 307,000 feet. Guidance, navigation and control was nominal throughout max Q and all of ascent. The in-space separation of the crew capsule from the propulsion module was perfect. Any astronauts on board would have had a very nice journey into space and a smooth return." Here are the images and video.
A somewhat more expanded question would be, why are these companies developing suborbital rockets in the first place?
They are neat projects, and they have tourist potential, but it sounds like in general these are not designs that can be scaled up to orbital capabilities, and suborbital has fairly limited applications.
It kinda gives the feeling that these projects are 'rich people having fun' as opposed to something that has market or research value.