Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin rocket company shot a capsule higher into space Wednesday than it\u2019s ever done before. The New Shepard rocket blasted off from West Texas on the company\u2019s latest test flight. Once the booster separated, the capsule\u2019s escape motor fired, lifting the spacecraft to an altitude of 389,846 feet. That\u2019s 74 miles or 119 kilometers. It\u2019s part of a safety system intended to save lives once space tourists and others climb aboard for suborbital hops. Wednesday\u2019s passenger was Mannequin Skywalker, an instrumented dummy in a blue flight suit that\u2019s flown before, plus science experiments. The booster and capsule, both repeat fliers, landed successfully. It was the ninth test flight and lasted 11 minutes. \u201cCrew Capsule looks great even after it was pushed hard by the escape test. Astronauts would have had an exhilarating ride and safe landing,\u201d Bezos said in a tweet. \u201cGreat engineering and the lucky boots worked again.\u201d Blue Origin has yet to announce when it will start selling tickets or how much flights will cost. Launch commentator Ariane Cornell promised it would be soon. \u201cIt\u2019s coming,\u201d she said. Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon, aims to send people and payloads into orbit from Cape Canaveral. Those missions will rely on the bigger, more powerful New Glenn rocket still under development. He\u2019s named his rockets after NASA\u2019s original Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin rocket company shot a capsule higher into space Wednesday than it\u2019s ever done before. The New Shepard rocket blasted off from West Texas on the company\u2019s latest test flight. Once the booster separated, the capsule\u2019s escape motor fired, lifting the spacecraft to an altitude of 389,846 feet. That\u2019s 74 miles or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67643,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67642"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67642\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}