Blue Origin launched its 10th flight of the New Shepard rocket on Wednesday, in a mission which sent eight NASA research and development experiments into space.
The booster and capsule system separated as planned on the ascent, with both elements then making a controlled descent to the desert floor.
Founded by Jeff Bezos and backed by his personal wealth, Blue Origin is developing reusable rockets with the goal of lowering the cost of access to space. This flight was the fourth for this particular New Shepard.
Lifting off from the company's facility in the desert of West Texas, the New Shepard rocket reached a top speed of 3,582km/h (2,226mph) and launched the capsule on top past an altitude of more than 106.92km (350,775ft)up.
The eight NASA experiments aboard the New Shepard capsule were demonstrating a range of new space applications - including electronics, environmental sensors and fuel-handling technologies. NASA pays commercial rocket companies under the agency's Flight Opportunities program to test and demonstrate technologies. Blue Origin has eight payloads on board for NASA programs and academic institutions.
One of the payloads that was crammed in for this brief visit to microgravity is an experiment from the University of Central Florida that intends to analyse the behaviour of dust particles in space. That experiment also flew last month on Virgin Galactic's rocket-powered space-plane. The vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, carried two test pilots up on Virgin's first crewed flight to dip its wings in space.
They would have experienced a few minutes of weightlessness around the top of New Shepard's climb into the sky. Researchers will have gained insights on the behaviour of their applications that would otherwise have been very difficult to simulate on the ground.
Blue Origin is nearing commercial operations in several of its businesses. Bezos' space company won a massive rocket engine deal for its propulsion business in September, completed a key flight test for New Shepard in July and won NASA support for its Blue Moon lunar lander program.
Bezos has called Blue Origin "the most important work I'm doing."Bezos also believes there will be more than 1 trillion humans living and working across the solar system one day. Wall Street has begun to pay attention to Bezos' extra-terrestrial efforts. Morgan Stanley told clients "to take notice" of Bezos investments in the space industry through Blue Origin, pointing to him as a "force" bringing financial muscle. Blue Origin is one of several space companies which Morgan Stanley says "will up the ante starting in 2019."