You'd be forgiven for forgetting, but Elon Musk and Richard Branson aren't the only billionaire magnates at the helm of a spacecraft company, gunning to rule the future of privatized space flight. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has been flying under the radar—but at long last, the company yesterday launched its flagship suborbital spacecraft from its West Texas proving grounds in a developmental test flight.

Video released by the company shows the spacecraft, called New Shepard, blasting off to an altitude of 307,000 feet before its crew capsule separates from a propulsion module. Named after the first US astronaut in space, Alan Shepard, the craft is meant to take off and land vertically, utilizing a reusable first-stage booster—the same approach SpaceX is using in its Falcon 9 rocket.

Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, two years before SpaceX and four before Virgin Galactic. Now, all those companies are hot on the trail of reusable spacecraft, which would dramatically decrease the cost of space travel. If any of them can figure out how to land a rocket successfully back on the ground, each delivery—either of people or supplies, like SpaceX has been getting up to the International Space Station—will only cost the fuel it takes to power the rocket's ascent, instead of the cost of an entire spacecraft.

The crew capsule descends after separating from the craft's propulsion module. Blue Origin

This time, Blue Origin's craft successfully recovered its crew capsule, which separated from the rocket booster and drifted to the ground under three parachutes. "Any astronauts on board would have had a very nice journey into space and a smooth return," Bezos wrote in an announcement. After the separation of the capsule and rocket, the upper stage is meant to propel New Shepard higher into Earth’s orbit, while the first-stage booster descends back to Earth for a smooth landing.

But like Space X, the company was unable to recover the propulsion module—this was not a successful landing of the reusable rocket. (The Blue Origin page about the launch includes some potentially confusing wording, saying "Blue Origin Successfully Flies Reusable Spacecraft.") SpaceX has twice tried and failed to re-land their Falcon 9 booster back on Earth (well, not quite on Earth—on an autonomously-controlled barge in the middle of the ocean), and Blue Origin is no different.

"Unfortunately we didn't get to recover the propulsion module because we lost pressure in our hydraulic system on descent," wrote Bezos. (SpaceX's first unsuccessful landing was attributed to a hydraulic failure too, though that seemed to be the result of running out of hydraulic fluid.) Bezos says an improved hydraulic system is already in the works, and that two more rockets are already in production, though he didn't say when to expect Blue Origin's next launch. Notably, none of the footage released by the company shows the rocket coming to its likely-fiery end.

Blue Origin’s first test vehicle was Charon, which made its only test flight in March 2005, to a very modest altitude of 316 feet. Its successor, Goddard, flew up to 285 feet in November 2006. Bezos and the company have been relatively mum on what it has been up to since. Unlike SpaceX, which seems to prefer releasing grainy Vines of every sordid crash, Blue Origin hardly makes headlines, preferring a much more tight-lipped approach (the company’s existence wasn’t even publicly known until 2003).

Now that Blue Origin has re-emerged, though, maybe we'll be seeing more out of them. Between these competing companies, we'll keep on hoping for more clips—although Bezos seems to have a leg up in terms of production value, if the cheesy music is any indication.