Image copyright BLUE ORIGIN Image caption The capsule pushes itself up and away from the booster

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has furthered his ambition to launch people into space by practising a critical safety manoeuvre on his New Shepard vehicle.

The rocket and capsule system launched normally from its Van Horn, Texas, desert pad on Wednesday but then made an early separation during the ascent.

A motor in the capsule pushed it clear to parachute back to the ground.

The “abort” simulated what would happen if the booster were ever to develop a problem as it climbed into the sky.

Before Mr Bezos’ Blue Origin company starts putting people on the New Shepard system, there has to be confidence that lives can be saved in the event of an emergency.

New Shepard is a sub-orbital vehicle - that is, it delivers sufficient thrust to put its capsule only briefly into space.

Image copyright BLUE ORIGIN Image caption The New Shepard system is designed to be totally re-usable

What is remarkable about New Shepard is that it is totally re-usable - both the booster and the capsule.

Ordinarily, boosters are expendable. It is only recently that rocket vehicles have started to fly themselves back to Earth after a flight for a new mission.

The booster used in Wednesday’s outing was making its fifth flight. Before the test, Blue Origin said it was unlikely to survive the demonstration due to the instability that is introduced by a mid-flight escape of the capsule.

But the booster had no difficulty handling the disruption of the abort manoeuvre and brought itself down under control. It will now be put on show in a museum.

Mr Bezos plans to take fare-paying passengers who want to ride New Shepard on short hops above the atmosphere.

Scientists will also be given the opportunity to fly experiments in the capsule. These are studies that need to be run in a weightless environment, which the capsule will experience at the top of its arc.

The online retail entrepreneur also plans to build a much bigger rocket system that he will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The booster for this, called New Glenn after the famous American astronaut John Glenn, should make its maiden flight before the end of the decade, Mr Bezos says.

Image copyright BLUE ORIGIN Image caption The New Shepard booster lifts away from the Texas pad

Image copyright BLUE ORIGIN Image caption The capsule has flown six times now and will also be retired to a museum

Image copyright BLUE ORIGIN Image caption It made its return on three large parachutes

Image copyright BLUE ORIGIN Image caption The booster came back shortly afterwards

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos</s>MIAMI: Blue Origin, the aerospace company headed by Amazon.com chief Jeff Bezos, ran a successful test Wednesday of an emergency escape function, aimed at saving space travelers’ lives in case of catastrophe.

The New Shepard rocket blasted off from a Texas launchpad, then its unmanned capsule separated in mid-air about 45 seconds after liftoff, at a height of some 16,000 feet (4,900 meters).

Powered by an escape motor beneath the capsule, the gumdrop-shaped spacecraft tossed and tumbled a bit before floating back to Earth with the help of parachutes.

“All astronauts on board would have had a pretty exhilarating ride, but a safe ride,” said a commentator on Blue Origin’s live webcast.

Ahead of the launch, Bezos said the force of the capsule’s escape would likely spell the end for the booster, or the portion of the rocket that propels the capsule to space.

“The booster was never designed to survive an in-flight escape,” Bezos wrote in a blog post before the launch, noting that prior to Wednesday’s launch, the booster had already been flown four times.

“The capsule escape motor will slam the booster with 70,000 pounds of off-axis force delivered by searing hot exhaust.”

However, cheers erupted at mission control as the somewhat scorched and battered looking booster made its way back to Earth as if in reverse, its engines firing as it hovered over the ground and gradually set itself down, upright.

Both Blue Origin and its competitor, SpaceX, are capable of landing their rockets back on land, as part of a larger effort to make rocket parts reusable in the coming years.

Bezos said the company plans a retirement party for the booster, which was Blue Origin’s first to fly into space and return for an upright landing, before putting it on display in a museum.

The New Shepard rocket is designed to eventually carry space tourists to the edge of space — defined as the Karman line about 62 miles (100 km) above the Earth’s sea level — and back, perhaps as early as 2018.

The cost of a ticket has not yet been revealed. -AFP</s>Space tourism took another step closer this week when private company Blue Origin successfully tested an escape system for the crew capsule on their New Shepard booster rocket. The company, which is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, launched the test from its Texas base on Wednesday.

At 45 seconds into the flight, when the rocket had reached 16,000 feet, the emergency system was initiated. The prototype crew capsule, situated on top of the rocket, blasted itself using an emergency engine of its own. It then returned safely to Earth beneath three parachutes.

Surprisingly, the rocket also returned safely to the ground, making a stable upright landing on the launch pad. Although it was designed to do this, engineers had feared the thrust from the escape system would destabilise it. In that event, it was programmed to shut down and fall to Earth, where it would have been destroyed upon impact.

This would have been a pity, as the rocket has flown four previous missions and successfully landed each time. Now it has survived a fifth mission, Blue Origin plans to retire it from active use. It will probably find its way into a museum.

The New Shepard booster is designed to take the crew capsule to the edge of space, where six space tourists at a time can experience micro-gravity. They will also be able to look at our home planet through the largest windows ever flown in space.

On Wednesday’s flight, the windows were not installed, but Blue Origin plans to fly a full test flight of the crew capsule – complete with windows – next year.</s>Rocket company Blue Origin pulled off a double success on Wednesday, coming a step closer to launching people into space.

The aerospace startup led by Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos tested the escape system of its space capsule on Wednesday in remote West Texas. Forty-five seconds into the flight, the capsule popped off as if it were a Champagne cork, propelled by an escape motor mounted underneath.

Not only did the empty capsule land safely under parachutes four minutes after liftoff, the rocket managed to fly back and land upright. This was the first inflight test of the emergency escape system, designed to save lives if something goes wrong with the rocket during liftoff, and the first test of its kind in the United States since the 1960s.

Blue Origin’s launch commentators called it an “epic flight” from beginning to end. Mr. Bezos had warned in advance that the booster rocket probably would end up crashing back to Earth, after being jolted by the 70,000 pounds of force exerted by the escape system. Instead, the booster made what looked to be a fine vertical touchdown seven minutes after liftoff, just a few kilometres from its launch pad.

“Wow. There it is. There you go, New Shepard. Look at her,” launch commentator Ariane Cornell exclaimed once the booster landed. “What an extraordinary test and a tremendous final flight for both craft.”

Mr. Bezos has said that by 2018, Blue Origin could start carrying paying passengers to more than 100 kilometres above Earth, high enough to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and see the planet against the blackness of space.

Blue Origin has not yet set a price for its space trips, but a competitor, Virgin Galactic, is selling tickets to fly on its six-passenger, two-pilot SpaceShipTwo for $250,000 (U.S.).

Blue Origin is working on a larger orbital rocket, called New Glenn, that will compete against Elon Musk’s SpaceX and other companies for commercial satellite launches and human space transportation services.

Unlike Mr. Musk, who wants to colonize Mars, Mr. Bezos’s vision is to shift energy-intensive, heavy industry into orbit and preserve Earth for human life.

Mr. Bezos said he has invested more than $500-million in Blue Origin and that he would continue to finance it “for as long as necessary.”

The rocket and capsule system tested are intended for suborbital flight and are called New Shepard after the first American in space, Alan Shepard. Mr. Bezos hopes to launch the first test flight with humans as early as next year, followed by tourists and other paying customers. The capsule could hold up to six people.

Blue Origin is aiming for reusability to lower launch costs. After the capsule darted away at about 640 kilometres an hour, the rocket kept going up, reaching more than 73 kilometres high, before descending to the desert floor.

This rocket has flown five times and is now bound for a museum along with the capsule. The capsule also had flown before, including a launch-pad escape test, minus a rocket, in 2012.

Based in Kent, Wash., Blue Origin has taken over a launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station for future orbital flights. That newly unveiled system, still in development, is called New Glenn for the first American to orbit Earth, John Glenn.

While SpaceX has landed some of its first-stage boosters at Cape Canaveral or just offshore on a floating platform – all of them used in orbital missions – it has yet to reuse any of these recovered rockets. It had hoped to do so by year’s end, but an explosion on the launch pad during testing on Sept. 1 has put everything on hold. Both the SpaceX Falcon rocket and its payload, an Israeli satellite, were destroyed.</s>Blue Origin, the private rocket company run by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, performed the first airborne test of its vehicle’s emergency escape system today over the Texas desert.

The spectacular in-flight test appeared to go perfectly and was immediately declared a success as the New Shepard rocket booster and capsule separated high in the sky and later touched down one after the other, undamaged.

The dramatic demonstration, which drew swift congratulations from Nasa, will go down as a milestone in the company’s plans to build reusable rockets that can take people into space for a fraction of the cost that space tourists pay today.

The New Shepard rocket launched shortly after 10.30am local time and climbed to an altitude of 16,000 feet before controllers sent a command that ordered the rocket to trigger the built-in escape system.



Cameras on the ground captured the moment the unmanned crew capsule blasted free of the rocket booster and streaked ahead on a pillar of fire. Moments later, it released its giant blue and red parachutes and floated back to Earth. The capsule landed at about 3mph and threw up a cloud of dust on impact.



The booster itself continued on its way to space before plummeting back to the ground on a pre-programmed trajectory. As the booster fell through the air, its engine fired up again, and eventually brought the somewhat singed rocket to a standstill on the desert floor.



Flight controllers cheered as the capsule separated and both parts of the vehicle touched down. “Beautiful!” exclaimed a Blue Origin commentator.



The emergency escape system is for use should a glitch ever endanger a future crew onboard the snub-nosed rocket. As soon as a life-threatening problem is detected, the capsule would ignite its own rocket engine and blast a safe distance away from the booster. The capsule would then release parachutes to stabilise and slow its descent.



Engineers were not convinced the booster would survive the violence of the separation, but in the test, the rocket appeared to be unharmed and continued on its course into space. When the capsule separated, its rocket engine will have roasted the booster with 70,000 pounds of thrust. 



Writing on his blog before the launch, Jeff Bezos called the flight “our toughest test yet” and said that if the booster survived the ordeal, they would reward it with a retirement party. “Our next flight is going to be dramatic, no matter how it ends,” he wrote. The in-flight test of the escape system follows a run of tests on the ground and on the launchpad.

Named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space, the New Shepard rocket and capsule are intended for suborbital flights into space. Bezos wants to start launching tourists in the years ahead and hopes to keep costs down by making the rockets reusable.
Aerospace manufacturer Blue Origin tests its New Shepard reusable launch system in Van Horn, Texas.