This just went up today, on the freshly-revamped site of spaceship startup Blue Origin.Blue Origin is run and financed by Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, and it's been maintaining media silence since its inception.
These pictures and videos from a test flight conducted on November 13 in West Texas leave no doubt about the seriousness of the company's plans to send commercial astronauts into space in a vertical takeoff/vertical landing rocket ship.
From the looks of the videos, the test vehicle could have easily won last year's Lunar Lander Challenge, for which Armadillo Aerospace competed and failed to win.
A Blue Origin media rep confirmed for me by email that the new material was posted today, but that no one at the company is doing interviews. Poor guy. Hope he has other clients to attend to.
--update on 1/4/07--
Robin Snelson points out on Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log that the test vehicle's probable hydrogen peroxide fuel would make it ineligible for competition in the Lunar Lander Challenge.
