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I saw this on wikipedia

On 23 November 2015, after reaching 100.5 km (62.4 mi) altitude (outer space), the suborbital New Shepard booster successfully performed a powered vertical soft landing, the first time a suborbital booster rocket had returned from space to make a successful vertical landing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Shepard

This was the first such successful rocket vertical landing on Earth after travelling higher than 3,140 m (10,300 ft) that the McDonnell Douglas DC-XA achieved in the 1990s, and first after sending something into space. Jeff Bezos was quoted as saying that Blue Origin planned to use the same architecture of New Shepard for the booster stage of their orbital vehicle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Shepard#First_vertical_soft_landing

Didn't the Falcon 9 first stage also softly land from that height after putting something into space? Why do they say that New Shepard is the first one to do so?

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Why do they say that New Shepard is the first one to do so?

Because December (first successful landing of a Falcon 9 booster) is after November (first successful landing of New Shepard).

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  • $\begingroup$ Ideally as a stand-alone Stack Exchange answer post this should have supporting links for each date, and mention a particular year, otherwise "Because December is after November" just sounds like a snarky comment posted in lieu of an answer. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Apr 17, 2021 at 23:53
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Even though New Shepard did not achieve orbit nor put anything in orbit (because it was not designed to do so) it did land after achieving a 100.5 km apogee suborbital trajectory which it makes it in fact the first rocket booster to do so.

The case for the first Falcon 9 landing is that it did manage to put something in orbit so if you want to make a distinction between them you could say Falcon 9 was the first orbital-class rocket booster to achieve a successful landing while New Shepard was the first sub-orbital class and still the first any-class booster to land.

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