Elon Musk just pointed out a big problem with Jeff Bezos' historic rocket launch

Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin just successfully tested the world's first reusable rocket, but there's a huge catch, and rival rocket entrepreneur Elon Musk is making sure it doesn't go unnoticed.

As Musk pointed out on Twitter this morning, Bezos' rocket is only the world's first reusable suborbital rocket.

During the test flight on November 24, Blue Origin's Blue Shepard rocket reached about 62 miles over the Earth, going at a speed of Mach 3.72, which would be enough for a few minutes of weightlessness.

But, as Musk pointed out on Twitter, there's a big difference between "space" and "orbital." A suborbital rocket doesn't pack nearly enough punch to actually launch a spacecraft:

That means the Blue Origin rocket landing was much easier to pull off than all the so far unsuccessful attempts Musk's SpaceX company has made:

In other words, Bezos' rocket would need to be about 100 times more powerful to actually launch something into orbit.

So Bezos may have won the warm up round, but Musk's company could still pull off the world's first reusable orbital rocket.

After we originally posted this story, Blue Origin pointed out on Twitter that, actually, SpaceX's rocket efforts are also suborbital:

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket's first stage booster is what propels the second stage booster (and crew or cargo capsule) into low-Earth orbit. From there, the second-stage booster takes the capsule into what's called geostationary transfer orbit (or, as in Musk's tweet above, GTO), where it has officially reached "orbital" status.

Current SpaceX efforts have only been aimed at recovering the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, not the second stage.

The YouTube video below, uploaded by user rfairman, explains the difference between low-Earth orbit and geostationary orbit pretty well: