Blue Origin releases photos of New Shepard’s third launch and landing

Blue Origin, a private spaceflight company managed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, launched and landed its New Shepard vehicle successfully for the third time on Saturday (April 2). The event led to a superb column of fire, blasting out a rocket ship’s back, filling the cool blue sky with light over the West Texas desert.

The photos and video of the New Shepard launch released by Blue Origin are showing rocket going in the direction of sky, where it ultimately gets apart from the vacant crew capsule. The crew capsule returned to Earth using parachute; however, the rocket booster made an elegant vertical landing using its thrusters.

Blue Origin has tested this specific New Shepard vehicle for the third time, making the test flight sort of historic. The company is working with the motto of ‘Launch Land Repeat’ for the flights. It is looking forward to considerably reduce the cost of suborbital spaceflights by bringing its boosters in use, instead of discarding them, which has been done with almost every rocket in the past.

Blue Origin also had drones for this flight that were made to follow the rocket when it moved skyward, which provided some totally magnificent pictures of the craft accelerating through the vast open sky, the capsule returning to Earth with a parachute, and the booster making an unbelievable landing.

The crew capsule went up to a highest point of 339,178 feet. It was 64.2 miles merely above the 62-milealtitude called the boundary of space.

In a blog post yesterday, the company said, “We pushed the envelope on this flight, restarting the engine for the propulsive landing only 3,600 feet [1097 meters] above the ground, requiring the BE-3 engine to start fast and ramp to high thrust fast”.