Jeff Bezos’ Space Rocket Completes Successful Test Flight

Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos is also in the private space business, but at a smaller scale than Elon Musk.

Jeff Bezos revealed that his space venture, Blue Origin, performed a successful test of the New Shepard rocket yesterday. The rocket has a 10,000-lbf thrust liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen BE-3 engine that worked flawlessly, powering New Shepard through Mach 3 to its planned test altitude of 307,000 feet.

There was only one problem that Blue Origin could not recover the propulsion module because we lost pressure in our hydraulic system on descent. 

Blue Origin works on a larger version of the New Shepard that will be an orbital launch vehicle that is many times New Shepard’s size and is powered by our 550,000-lbf thrust liquefied natural gas, liquid oxygen BE-4 engine.

Blue Origin published videos of the test flight that have almost movie quality. Watch below.

Blue Origin is a private company developing vehicles and technologies to enable commercial human space transportation. Blue Origin has a long-term vision of greatly increasing the number of people that fly into space so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system.