TechBlue Origin

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Safely Completes a Fourth Landing

By Michal Addady
Key Speakers At The 32nd Space Symposium
Jeff Bezos, chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc. and founder of Blue Origin LLC, smiles during the 32nd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, U.S., on Tuesday, April 12, 2016. Commercial space exploration can advance at the fast pace of Internet commerce only if the cost is reduced through advances in reusable rockets, Bezos said. Photographer: Matthew Staver/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Photo by Matthew Staver—Bloomberg via Getty Images

Spaceflight company Blue Origin, founded by Amazon (AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos, got one step closer to making reusable rockets a reality.

In its first ever live broadcast, Blue Origin launched its New Shepard rocket out of a Texas test base on Sunday, The Verge reports. The launch was successful and marked the company’s fourth time safely landing the rocket, but this time with a twist—the company purposefully failed to deploy one of the capsule’s main parachutes to see if it could still make it back in one piece, and it did.

This accomplishment for Bezos’ Blue Origin comes just days after what Elon Musk described as possibly the “hardest impact to date” for SpaceX (SPACEX). The two companies are both working towards creating reusable spacecraft, which would help to drastically reduce the cost of space flight. However, as Fortune previously noted, they’re testing very different designs. New Shepard is a sub-orbital rocket; Falcon 9 delivers satellites into orbit, and therefore has to be faster, taller, and thinner, making it more difficult to land successfully.

Blue Origin declined to comment.