Test Program Flight Lasts Two Minutes

It didn't last long... but that wasn't the point. Early Monday morning, the west Texas spaceport being built by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos witnessed its first rocket launch, a brief test flight presumbly connected to Bezos' Blue Origin commercial space venture.

"There was a launch, a one- or two-minute event," Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Roland Herwig said. He had no more details on the flight.

In fact, the level of secrecy before the launch -- and subsequent lack of hard information since then -- would do Area 51 proud. Even the exact type of rocket launched remains a mystery.

Based in Kent, WA -- just outside Seattle -- Blue Origin plans to launch passenger flights onboard its New Shepard Reusable Launch Vehicle by 2010.

Blue Origin aims to ultimately send the New Shepard --  modelled on the single-stage Delta Clipper Experimental and Delta Clipper Experimental Advanced (DC-XA) vehicles developed by the Department of Defense and NASA in the 1990s -- on commercial spaceflights to altitudes greater than 325,000 feet.

As Aero-News reported, Blue Origin outlined its plans for commercial space operations in July; the FAA signed off on an environmental impact study of those plans in September.

The company will start out with a series of low altitude tests... a lot of them, in fact. Blue Origin told the Associated Press there might be as many as 10 more suborbital flights this year.

FMI: www.blueorigin.com