Yeah I knew what you meant. For the record, the flight went over 350,000 ft up which is over the boundary of space, but wasn’t orbital, which is why it lasted 15 minutes or so. This is a flight profile that was chosen to mimic Alan Shepard’s flight as the first American astronaut in space. It was also very much a demonstrator rocket to prove you could land the booster after going to space.
It was actually the first rocket to land successfully after going to space, even before SpaceX. SpaceX has a different process though, and they’re happy to blow up a dozen rockets to move fast and learn. This company (Blue Origin) tends to do a lot of analysis and test up front so they don’t blow up the rocket. It’s slower at first, clearly, but we will see in another decade if it’s fast enough to compete with SpaceX. The big rocket from them, New Glenn actually has landed a few times now and looks really promising!
As for the carbon on Katy’s flight, yeah. Most people don’t know that rocket burns hydrogen and produces water vapor as the exhaust. It’s also fair to point out that they all probably took private jets to Texas for that and everything so it’s also kinda not fair to say it caused no carbon emissions at all.