On Saturday, April 2, Blue Origin successfully launched its reusable New Shepard vehicle on a brief jaunt to space for the third time from its launch site in West Texas, continuing to showcase the viability of its reusable rocket technology.Lord Bezos of Amazonia is behind this, but color me "meh".
Maybe this is taking it slow, but it seems to me that the idea of a space rocket is to deliver stuff to space, whether putting it in orbit or propelling it into deeper space. Maybe they can scale it up, but as SpaceX has found out, it's a hell of a lot more difficult to fly a rocket capable of throwing stuff into orbit back to Earth land land it safely. If you want to land it back where you took off, you're going to need to build a larger stage in order to bang a uey and fly back the way it came.
Or you have to land the thing in the middle of the ocean, which SpaceX has been trying. I kind of doubt that the FAA is going to look kindly on, say, launching something from Vandenberg and then landing the first stage somewhere in Nevada, Oregon or southern California. And the NIMBYistas would go batshit over that.
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