No contest
The Wright Brothers gave us powered flight.
Bezos can now give rich tourists a big thrill and a bigger bill.
Progress!
SpaceX has retired the first rocket it managed to land in one piece and erected the remains on Sunday outside the company's US headquarters. The 156-foot (47-meter) rocket is the first stage of SpaceX's Flight 20 launch, which touched down at Cape Canaveral last December. Since then, its innards have been removed and …
When I were a lad I built a rocket out of a washing up liquid bottle and loo roll tubes (fear not my old man was a miserable bastard so we never had the posh stuff so I didnt have to wait long) and I left in the driveway over night.
Next day it was gone because the bin men took it.
As long as he doesnt leave it too near the bins he should be ok.
Also, there cant be many pikeys round there. It'd take a brave man round here to leave that much scrap out.
When I was a lad, I used to pack match-heads into empty shell-casings and then crimp the opening partially shut. I learned that: The difference between a really good rocket and a pipe-bomb is vanishingly small. Got the hang of it, and didn't loose any fingers but in hindsight it probably wasn't something a 12 year old should be playing with.
FAA, don't think of it like a obstical planes could run into during foggy conditions because it is massively taller than everything else around the airport, think of it as a massively tall easy way to distinguish where the airfield when scanning the horizon for it.
Both are technically important milestones. Bezos showed it was technically feasible which is very important in its own right. But Musk showed that it is a viable for actually launching useful payloads which is even more important. True the time before the two events was very short but Bezos showed Musk's idea was reasonable if technically more difficult.
Credit should be given to Musk's team for solving the technical problems so quickly, a brilliant piece of work.
A parallel is most (Americans) think Lindbergh was the first to successful fly a plane non-stop across the Atlantic. This overlooks that Alcock and Brown did not about 8 years earlier. And a few months/weeks before Alcock and Brown the USN flew a seaplane across the Atlantic with a few hops. To me Bezos' did want the USN did while Musk jumped ahead to Lindbergh, skipping Alcock and Brown.
"Flight 20 wasn't the first rocket to successfully reach space and return, since Jeff Bezos' New Shepard rocket managed that a month before"
Nope... SpaceShipOne did it first. (From a non-governmental perspective)
Some may argue the Space Shuttle did it first.
Bezos achieved the first Earth bound powered landing, which is a different thing.