At 65 feet high and capable of getting just past the edge of space, some 60 miles up, the New Shepard rocket that Blue Origin has been launching and landing is a fairly modest thing.

In comparison, a towering, more powerful behemoth designed rocket to take people and commercial satellites to orbit that was announced by Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos’ space company as its new orbital rocket is huge and humongous.

By the end of the decade, the New Glenn rocket would come in two variants-a two stage and a three stage- would be ready to fly, wrote Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, in a blog post. The rocket would be powered by seven BE-4 engines which is claimed to have a total thrust of 3.85 million pounds at sea level. The mighty Apollo-era Saturn V that ferried the Apollo astronauts to the moon is the only comparable rocket in terms of height.

“Our vision is millions of people living and working in space, and New Glenn is a very important step,” Bezos wrote.

IN recent times, the commercial space industry has been aiming to reduce the cost of spaceflight and open it up to the masses and the announcement comes at this critical time. As Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic prepares to take paying customers into space, the company performed the first test flight of its new spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, last week.

And next month, a critical test flight of New She-pard is being planned to be flown by Blue Origin, which also promises to move into the space tourism market.

Last week, when SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket ignited while on a Cape Canaveral launch pad and blew up in a spectacular fireball, resulting in a catastrophe and had jolted the industry SpaceX is often referred to as the leader in the so-called New Space movement. As a result of the incident, a delay in the launch of its new massive rocket, the Falcon Heavy could happen as the company is grounded while investigators try to determine the cause of the explosion.

The New Glenn would be capable of flying back to the Earth for a soft landing after its first stage boosts its payload into space like the reusable New She-pard. A key step toward lowering the cost of space travel is being able to reuse rockets, instead of discarding them after each use as has traditionally been the case, Bezos has said. Several orbital-class first stages have already been landed on land or on ships at sea by SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk.

In what is a symbol from the fable the Tortoise and the Hare, the company’s mascot is a tortoise, Bezos wrote in the statement. That is being viewed as a tweak at Musk by many. He wrote that that the motto of his space company is “Gradatim Ferociter”- Latin for “step by step, ferociously.”

“We believe ‘slow is smooth and smooth is fast’ ,” Bezos wrote.

Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 36, which it is refurbishing, is the dock that the company plans to launch the New Glenn rocket from, Bezos said.

The naming for Blue Origin’s rockets is a nod for the ’60s-era Space Age.

(Adapted from Houston Chronicle)