Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin Launches Its First Rocket

Posted by Soulskill on Friday May 1, 2015 @05:01AM from the delivering-books-via-rocketry dept.

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.

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Competition is key by l2718 · 2015-05-01 05:12 · Score: 5, Insightful

Can anyone explain why Jeff Bezos is doing the same thing that SpaceX is already doing ?
Why is GM doing the same thing that Ford is doing? As long as there is a market for space launches, competition will align the incentives better than other arrangements. We'll get to see more different approaches tried, and find out what's best. Costs will generally go down.
If competition takes root, then in 30 years a suborbital ticket would be affordable to many of us.