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REAL LIFE NEWS: AMAZON TAKES TO THE SKIES

by Hazed

Speaking of space travel... one company working to produce an alternative way to get into space is Blue Origin, set up by the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. Back in November they successfully launched their first experimental craft on a test flight. It is a vertical take-off and landing vehicle called Goddard, part of the New Shepard project. They have now released pictures and a video showing the cone-shaped ship climbing to 285 feet and returning back to earth and landing safely.

Bezos says that the group's goal of affordable space flight would be realized slowly and methodically: "Our first objective is developing New Shepard, a vertical take-off, vertical-landing vehicle designed to take a small number of astronauts on a sub-orbital journey into space," he said.

Take a look on the Blue Origins site at http://public.blueorigin.com/index.html - scroll down a bit for the pictures, and the video which is somewhere about the middle of the page - or read a BBC news report at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6230245.stm.

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