The goal of reusing rocket stages \u2013 a major enabler for the reduction of costs associated with launches \u2013 landed another milestone this week when Blue Origin conducted the second successful test flight of its New Shepard rocket, rising to 330,000 feet, prior to nailing a propulsive landing of the booster which will allow for it to be reused.<\/p>\n
New Shepard Milestone:<\/p>\n
Several major space flight companies are pushing through various stages of embedding reusability into their rocket systems, throwing away the days of old where booster stages only had a watery grave to look forward to after launch.<\/p>\n
![\"2014-12-16](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/2014-12-16-21_34_17-L2-Level_-SpaceX-F9_FH_BFR_MCT-Renderings-350x223.jpg\")
Some of the plans being worked are more challenging than Blue Origin\u2019s goals, with Jeff Bezos\u2019 company working in the suborbital realm, while SpaceX and ULA are aiming to return stages and hardware after being tasked with the opening push for spacecraft destined to travel in Low Earth Orbit and beyond.<\/p>\n
Indeed, the notion of returning rockets back to base goes back many years.<\/p>\n
The latest drive is being led by SpaceX, with numerous successes with its test program and close attempts at landing a Falcon 9 core stage on to a landing pad stationed in the Atlantic. <\/p>\n
The next attempt will come next month during the ORBCOMM-2 mission, with returns to a pad on its coastal site scheduled for next year. It is also envisioned SpaceX will return three stages in one mission when Falcon Heavy begins her missions in 2016.<\/p>\n
However, every success is another step towards a future where rockets not only launch, but land in anticipation of being cleaned, refurbished and refueled for a future launch \u2013 massively reducing the cost when compared to building new first stages for every mission.<\/p>\n
![\"2015-11-24-181045\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-24-181045-350x232.jpg\")
New Shepard conducted its first test flight in April, enjoying a successful launch, but failed to conduct a landing of the booster.<\/p>\n
Spaceflight history books (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});<\/p>\n \u201cIf New Shepard had been a traditional expendable vehicle, this would have been a flawless first test flight,\u201d noted Mr. Bezos at the time. \u201cOf course one of our goals is reusability, and unfortunately we didn\u2019t get to recover the propulsion module because we lost pressure in our hydraulic system on descent.<\/p>\n \u201cFortunately, we\u2019ve already been in work for some time on an improved hydraulic system. Also, assembly of propulsion module serial numbers 2 and 3 is already underway \u2013 we\u2019ll be ready to fly again soon.\u201d<\/p>\n The video still provided key items of interest for hardcore rocket fans, as the rocket launched at 11:21 am Central Time on Monday from its West Texas launch site.<\/p>\n It successfully achieved an apogee of 329,839 feet (100.5 kilometers) for the crew capsule, racing uphill to a velocity of Mach 3.72, ahead of the capsule once again making a successful return to land.<\/p>\n *Grab your 2016 NASASpaceFlight.com Calendar!*<\/p>\n However, all eyes were on the booster, which began its controlled return to the surface.<\/p>\n The variable-thrust engine did well to control the stability of the descent, as seen in the video, as its plume danced around to keep the booster on track.<\/p>\n Increasing its thrust as it saw the ground, the controlled vertical landing of the booster was clocked at a comfortable 4.4 mph, as the stage landed upright on its deployed legs.<\/p>\n \u201cNow safely tucked away at our launch site in West Texas is the rarest of beasts \u2013 a used rocket,\u201d noted Mr. Bezos on Tuesday.<\/p>\n \u201cBlue Origin\u2019s reusable New Shepard space vehicle flew a flawless mission \u2013 soaring to 329,839 feet and then returning through 119-mph high-altitude crosswinds to make a gentle, controlled landing just four and a half feet from the center of the pad.<\/p>\n \u201cFull reuse is a game changer, and we can\u2019t wait to fuel up and fly again.\u201d<\/p>\n That rocket was shown via the agreement to take over the historic Launch Complex 36 (LC-36) at Cape Canaveral. Blue Origin will be creating over 300 jobs at its East Coast home base for production and launches.<\/p>\n Yet the long term ambitions of Mr. Bezos relates to launching a large amount of people into space, millions per his claim on CBS\u2019 Morning Show on Tuesday.<\/p>\n \u201cOur long term vision is millions of people living and working in space, helping explore the solar system. That\u2019s what we\u2019re working on and reusability is a game changer for that.\u201d<\/p>\n SpaceX, the leader in the reusability drive, also has plans to loft large numbers of people to space, although its long term plans is for colonization, specifically on Mars, via its Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT) system, which will also be heavily based on reusable technology via plans set to be announced next year.<\/p>\n (Images: Blue Origin and L2 \u2013 including renders from L2 artist Nathan Koga \u2013 The full gallery of Nathan\u2019s (SpaceX Dragon to MCT, SLS, Commercial Crew and more) L2 images can be *found here*)<\/p>\n (To join L2, click here: http:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/l2\/)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The goal of reusing rocket stages \u2013 a major enabler for the reduction of costs associated with launches \u2013 landed another milestone this week when Blue Origin conducted the second successful test flight of its New Shepard rocket, rising to 330,000 feet, prior to nailing a propulsive landing of the booster which will allow for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30006,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[509,1250,8141],"class_list":["post-39189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-blue-origin","tag-new-shepard","tag-resuable"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39189"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39189\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"2015-11-24-181117\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-24-181117-350x228.jpg\")
That second flight occurred on Monday, once again without any media notice \u2013 as is traditional for Blue Origin \u2013 prior to being confirmed nearly a day later via a heavily produced highlight video \u2013 likely due to its target audience, which is space tourism.<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-24-180937\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-24-180937-350x220.jpg\")
Blue Origin provided some data on the events, with re-ignition of booster\u2019s BE-3 engine occurring at 4,896 feet above ground level.<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-24-180831\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-24-180831-350x230.jpg\")
The rocket was greeted by overjoyed engineers, spraying champagne near the booster to celebrate the success. However, the booster won\u2019t be able to rest for long.<\/p>\n![\"2015-09-15-191917\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/2015-09-15-191917-350x318.jpg\")
While preparations are made for that reuse flight, Blue Origin has also begun designing New Shepard\u2019s sibling, her \u201cVery Big Brother\u201d \u2013 an orbital launch vehicle that is many times New Shepard\u2019s size and is powered by the 550,000-lbf thrust liquefied natural gas, liquid oxygen BE-4 engine.<\/p>\n