Successful test flight for Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin completed on Wednesday (April 14) a successful test flight of its New Shepard NS-15 rocket.

This was the 15th launch of New Shepard. The previous fourteen were also successful.

The rocket flew to the edge of space where booster and crew capsule separated. The booster made a smooth vertical landing near the launch pad and the capsule came down in the west Texas desert with the aid of parachutes.

Blue Origin is the private spaceflight company started by Amazon founder Bezos, which faces stiff competition from Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Blue Origin has fallen far behind SpaceX on orbital transportation, and lost out to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (ULA) on billions of dollars' worth of U.S. national security launch contracts which begin in 2022.

Now, Blue Origin is battling to win a competition with SpaceX and Dynetics to develop a new lunar lander for NASA's potentially multibillion-dollar push to return humans to the moon in a few years.