Gadgetory

history has been made we're living in the age of the reusable space rocket I'm Bridget Carey this is your CNET update for the first time a rocket designed for human passengers has launched into space and landed back on earth gently in one piece the historic landing was completed by private spaceflight company Blue Origin it's funded and led by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos this is a game changer in making spaceflight more affordable because Rockets only get used once and then they're discarded the rocket named new Shepard launched from West Texas on Monday at 11:21 a.m. Central time it traveled at three point seventy two times the speed of sound with the crew capsule separating at the edge of the atmosphere Blue Origin created this animation to show the eventual goal of having tourists float weightless for a few minutes to see the planet below but of course there were no humans aboard this test flight the capsule then dropped back down to earth with parachutes breaking the fall that whole trip for the capsule it was just 11 minutes from takeoff to landing now as for the rocket as it descended it reignited at about 5,000 feet to slow down and began to stabilize about 50 feet from the ground landing at just under five miles an hour now this isn't the first attempt Blue Origin did have a test flight in April that failed to land Bezos said in an interview with CBS that the test will continue for the next couple of years and he does not know how much they're going to charge for a ride on the rocket but maybe they'll have a price a year from now Elon Musk and his company SpaceX are also working to build the reusable rocket but so far it has not been able to land successfully on a platform at sea although it's important to note that SpaceX is trying something much more difficult with its Falcon 9 booster it flies cargo shipments into space and back which requires much more energy and thrust Blue Origin suborbital flight is not as complicated now while Bezos celebrates the rocket landing questions are swirling over Amazon's password security Amazon has forced reset the passwords to an unknown number of counts it indicates that passwords may have been compromised this was discovered by our sister site ZDNet some readers reported getting emails from Amazon about their account passwords being reset and this is not a fake phishing message the notice was also found when they went on amazon.com Amazon is warning that passwords could have been exposed to an outside group but it has no reason to believe that anyone actually has stolen the passwords so Amazon is doing this out of caution Amazon has not answered any questions or made a public comment about it as of this report that's it for this tech news update and there's more at cnet.com from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey