The privately funded space company backed by Amazon.com Inc. founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos announced a historic coup by successfully landing a spent rocket back on Earth after an unmanned flight to the edge of space.

Blue Origin LLC said its reusable New Shepard vehicle flew a suborbital test mission to 333,000 feet on Monday—reaching nearly four times the speed of sound—and then both the unmanned capsule and its BE-3 liquid-fueled rocket separately landed safely back on earth.

According to a company release issued some 18 hours after the test flight, the rocket made a flawless return through stiff winds and touched down gently at the company's launch facility in West Texas. The single rocket engine reignited at an altitude of about 5,000 feet during the controlled return, according to the company, and it landed upright, 4 feet from where it started, traveling at a speed of 4.4 miles an hour.

The ability to reuse such a large rocket has been a long-standing goal of the global aerospace industry, and until now the efforts of Elon Musk's closely held Space Exploration Technology Corp. have garnered the most attention. The aim is to reduce costs and speed up the tempo of launches.

Write to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 24, 2015 09:05 ET (14:05 GMT)

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