Reusable rockets

SOMETIMES the dark horses are the ones to watch. On November 23rd Blue Origin, a publicity-shy rocketry firm owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, announced that it had achieved something spectacular. Not only did its New Shepard craft make it safely back to Earth after a brief sojourn in space—so, too, did the BE-3 rocket booster that launched New Shepard. After separating from the spacecraft, the rocket fell back to Earth. At around 1.5km from the ground, it reignited its engines, slowing its fall and making a controlled, gentle landing (pictured). To quote the firm’s triumphant press release: “Now safely tucked away at our launch site in West Texas is the rarest of beasts, a used rocket.”

At the moment, space rockets are one-shot machines. After boosting their payload to the required speed and altitude, they fall back to Earth—often breaking up in the atmosphere on the way. That is one reason why space flight is so eye-wateringly expensive. It is a bit like blowing up your car after every trip and having to buy a new one. Rocket scientists have been trying to make their rockets reusable for decades. The closest they have come, until now, was the Space Shuttle. But even this (besides being far more expensive than an ordinary rocket) was only partly reusable, with the giant external fuel tank being discarded after each launch.

Blue Origin’s machine is thus a technical triumph. Unlike the Shuttle’s solid-fuelled boosters, which relied on parachutes to splash down into the ocean (whence they had to be recovered by America’s navy), Blue Origin’s machine landed itself like the rockets of science fiction, by firing its engines and balancing on its exhaust until it had safely touched down.

The BE-3’s flight is a publicity coup. SpaceX, a more established (and less camera-shy) rocketry firm founded by Elon Musk, another internet billionaire, has also been working on reusable rockets. The most recent versions of its Falcon machines are designed to land themselves on uncrewed ocean-going platforms. SpaceX has come close to pulling that off several times, but so far all its efforts have failed; the most recent attempt, in April, ended in a fireball. Now Mr Bezos’s firm has beaten Mr Musk’s to the punch.

Of course, this comparison is not quite fair. Blue Origin’s focus, at least for now, is on space tourism. The idea is to take a handful of paying customers on a joyride to the edge of space, rather than to heave things all the way into orbit, as SpaceX’s rockets are designed to do—a task for which much higher speed is required. The New Shepard squeaked into space on a technicality. Its maximum altitude on this flight was 100.5km, a hair’s breadth above the 100km that (arbitrarily) is held to be where space begins.

Blue Origin’s competitor in that market is not SpaceX, but Virgin Galactic, another orbital-tourism firm, which suffered a serious setback last year when one of its spaceships crashed on a test flight, killing one of its two pilots. SpaceX, in contrast, is already flying all the way into orbit, and is doing so for real money. Its craft both deliver supplies to the International Space Station and launch satellites for paying customers.

None of this, though, detracts from Blue Origin’s achievement. Mr Musk has estimated that reusable rockets could cut the cost of a space launch by an order of magnitude or more. Flying rockets is notoriously difficult, and flying them backwards is even harder. But Blue Origin has made it look easy.