VAN HORN, TEXAS — Blue Origin space travel company conducted a historic test on Monday by successfully launching and landing from Van Horn in Texas a reusable rocket, Space.com reported. Blue Origin was set up by founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos. Despite costing millions of dollars, rockets can only be used once, as they normally sink to the bottom of the ocean upon landing. The New Shepard space vehicle, however, is able to gently land back on its launch pad, allowing it to be reused. The new rocket consists of a crew capsule for astronauts and a rocket booster powered by a single American-made BE-3 liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen engine, according to Blue Origin's website. The rocket used a BE-3 engine to deliver 110,000 pounds of thrust during its Monday launch. Once in space, the crew capsule separated from the booster and floated for several minutes, flying at 100 kilometers above Earth, before deploying parachutes and re-entering the atmosphere. The booster also descended under guided flight. Before landing, it re-ignited the BE-3 engine, which allowed a gentle vertical landing just 1.3 meters from the center of its launch pad. New Shephard descended the last 30 metres at 7 km/h to touch down on the launch pad. "I believe this is a new Golden Age of space exploration," Bezos was quoted by the Sydney Morning Herald as saying. "We are on the verge of a new Golden Age in rocketry. I believe one day all rockets will have landing gear." A reusable rocket could eventually be employed to allow paying passengers trips into space for a few minutes at a time. The rockets are not yet powerful enough to bring a spacecraft into orbit. For that purpose, SpaceX is designing a larger and more powerful reusable rocket that could be launched after December 2015.

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