The private space company owned by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has released another video of last month’s New Shepard rocket landing, but this particular footage is the coolest yet.
The team stuck a camera in the vent just below the booster’s ring fin to offer us an incredible point-of-view experience of the reusable rocket’s rapid descent and perfect touchdown.
You’ll be surprised at just how quickly it all happens. From when it begins to drop from up high to touching down at its facility in west Texas takes little more than a minute. See how New Shepard’s boosters fire up 3,6000 feet above the ground to ensure that perfectly gentle touchdown, and look out for the rocket’s shadow which comes into view seconds before landing.
The mission took place on April 2, though Blue Origin only released the video on Tuesday.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket should be ready in the next couple of years to start carrying a capsule with crew and space tourists to around 62 miles above the surface of the Earth.
While the rocket returns to Earth using the propulsive landing shown in the video, the capsule deploys parachutes to achieve a soft touchdown.
Jeff Bezos envisages space tourism trips could begin in 2018 with paying passengers requiring little pre-flight training.
“For the suborbital mission, training is going to be relatively simple,” the Blue Origin and Amazon boss told GeekWire recently. “One of the things that you have to do is emergency egress, so we’ll train people for that. One of the things you’ll have to be able to do is get out of your seat, and get back into your seat. We want people to be able to get out, float around, do somersaults, enjoy the microgravity, look out of those beautiful windows.”
The main ambition is to create a reliable, reusable launch system to help reduce the cost of future space missions, a goal also being pursued by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company and others.
