Watch a resuable rocket touchdown on a pillar of flame. New Shepard flew again on April 2, 2016 reaching an apogee of 103 kilometers (i.e. “in space”). It was the third flight with the same hardware.

In the 1980s a Stanford laboratory I was part of ran a space shuttle mission (I wasn’t involved). The people I knew were scathing about the bureaucracy and inefficiency at NASA, complaining it was snarled in red-tape and that too many of the good people had left. They reckoned the future of space exploration was therefore with private industry. Looks like that is coming to pass. This rocket pictured above is run by Amazon, while the head of NASA has said Barack Obama told him to make “reaching out to the Muslim world” one of NASA’s top three priorities, along with inspiring children, and expanding international relationships. NASA no longer flies the Shuttle, has no replacement for it, and rents rides on Russian launchers.

hat-tip Matthew