Ever thought rockets just weren't phallic enough already? Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder) thought so too. His company Blue Origin has just successfully flown its
New Shepard suborbital system to an altitude close to 100,000m (generally considered the boundary of space), successfully recovered the spacecraft and (almost) recovered the booster.
New Shepard not only looks alluring, it's quite a interesting system design. The spacecraft is a capsule designed to take tourists to space and back on a simple ballistic profile. The capsule also uses a "pusher" escape motor which simplifies the spacecraft design considerably. The booster, with guided main fins and deployable re-entry fins, is designed to land vertically under its own power and be re-usable. New Shepard might beat its competitors (Virgin Galactic, Xcor, Copenhagen and the likes) to the coveted prize of being first to delivering tourists to space.
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